I'm not sure that you will see this reply but you've given me a few things to think about.

I already fell into it all without a teacher and lost myself along the way but I found myself again and I have no issues with identifying truth, none. My thoughts are not my own, to blindly follow them would be quite foolish. I think we believe similar things when all is said and done but I find your faith in external Tathagata to determine truth concerning - there is no need for anything outside oneself, if there were there would be no prophets. You are plenty capable of discerning truth for oneself. This is bc although there is only one truth it is itself is only a limited truth - we can know the true nature of reality from within reality but we cannot know what reality is wholly until we are outside of it, this is an obvious truth - as it works everywhere that it can be applied without exceptions.

To know something one must be able to see all of it, fairly basic but impossible for us to achieve - hence some of my favorite teachings like the analogy of the sweeping of the floor or language like, "Have you found the beginning bc the end is the beginning" so it very important to realize that this is why there multiple religions able offer their own way out.

We need only a working model of reality as we cannot have a functional correct model of reality, simply an understanding that encapsulates certain truths and presents them in a way that allows for individuals and a society to arrive shared understandings and behaviors that incorporate those truths.

True followers of Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or others are very similar people in the way they act and their core beliefs are the same - that this is a created thing, that we were before and will be after, that death is not the end and that there is an assessment of how we lived that transpires at some point.

Today I can essentially create a working model of reality that utilizes science and things like the Internet and games - this working model incorporates all the core and necessary truths needed to provide a way/path out but is in a language I can naturally understand - this is what I meant by the Buddha made everything up. I have, in a sense just made up my "religion" but it's built on all that which have come before it to be a functional working model of reality, which is all I believe it needs to be. That's all the prophets have ever done - say the truth, as can be heard, in their time and place. I've just done that for me.

The Buddha didn't imagine his loneliness - nor do we need to as we are privy to the human condition and of course we now live in a time and place where all I need to say is "human condition" for us to get what he was going on about. People are smarter over time. You are inherently more capable of understanding these things than anyone in the Buddhas time bc you literally know more than any one and all of them.

I'm not attempting to mislead you or steer you astray, I understand your warnings. I've merely noticed throughout our conversation your deflection/utilization of external things that I don't believe you need, you are plenty capable of discerning truth for oneself and knowing right from wrong and what to do or not to do - this is all internal stuff. You may make misjudgements at times, you will learn from those and with time you will have faith in oneself, not a Tathagata, not a sutra, You.

I'm a bit of an eccentric tho, so I suggest taking all this with a grain of salt - run it by the ole feelings first and foremost. I rarely speak of such things, even rarer in such settings.

It's been fun tho