I’ve sometimes heard spiritual practitioners say that they must “fake it till you make it.” By which they mean that they don’t really believe in Waking Up or that they don’t believe that they can really Wake Up, but they need to act as if they did.

It could be shown, however, that such an adage has no part to play in the nondual teaching. My suspicion is that its attractiveness stems from our post-European Enlightenment heritage according to which faith is total (and superstitious) while reason is the guiding light. To try to overcome the skepticism arising out of the hegemony of reason, we use instrumental reason in order to “place a pragmatic bet”: if I make-believe that X–that is, Buddha-nature or Parabrahman–is true, what benefit shall I receive? 

Needless to say, the teaching does not say this. In fact, it couldn’t because jnana yoga is the path of knowledge, not that of make-believe or ego-negotiating trickery.

Let me, therefore, try to mount a defense of what the teaching is actually saying. I’ll do so by way of an analogy.

Suppose you found slowly or quickly that you were coming to a deep–a surprising deep–interest in music. Before, you couldn’t care less but now–again, out of the blue–it seems as if you’re quite intrigued by music of this or that kind. Suppose, furthermore, that your dear friend hears of your budding, increasingly intense interest and one day decides to give you a gift. He offers you a saxophone and says, “Here, take it and play. See what you can make of it. I want you to have it.”

What are you going to say? That you don’t know how to play the saxophone? That, demurring and out of fear, you might pretend that you’d rather try your hand at the viola? 

No, none of these. You’re going to accept the gift with all your heart. This is analogous to the “minimal viable trust” that I think is necessary for a sadhaka to have. And the surprising interest in music is analogous to the longing for Liberation, or moksha.

And then what? Well, because you’ve accepted this beautiful gift, you’re now in a position to see what can happen as you learn how to play it. What’s possible? Where might you go with it? What kind of music might spring forth? You want to see, as it were, what’s at the end of the musical road. 

By analogy, we can say that we accept into our hearts the gift of the practice (and more generally the myriad gifts offered on the path) and then we treat that gift, that practice with reverence and keen interest. What will happen if we inquire into who we are? If we hold onto what Nisargadatta terms “I Am”? Let your curiosity take over. Be keen–Nisargadatta, of course, would say earnest–to find out. That is all.

In short, you let your genuine interest in the teaching ripen until it leads you to the very end of the inquiry. In this way, there is no room–indeed, no need–for faking anything. And, of course, there’s nobody to make it anyway.