Most sadhakas need firm footing early on. Therefore, they may believe that they’re like pilgrims who are on a journey to the Self. Practices, they believe, are the means by which they purify and empty out self and thus on account of which they realize the Self.

The above, again early on, may be good upaya inasmuch as it generates the motivational oomph to get the sadhaka going.

However, any good perennial nondual teaching will need to pull the rug out from under this one, for what must be dropped is the very idea that there is a practicing self that, through his or her efforts alone, is going to attain something new: namely, the Self. The erroneous assumptions, here, are legion and many.

Consider, to undercut all these assumptions in one fell swoop, the following analogy: the Self, in fact, is like a boundless, bottomless pit. Indeed, the Self, in this thought experiment, has also lain countless traps in the forms of unseen trapped doors. At “any moment,” one might just fall through this trap and thus be entirely absorbed in the boundless, bottomless Self.

What, then, is practice, so understood? Simply this: radical, wide openness–without expectation or anticipation–to the boundless. At any “given moment,” one is at “the borderline” (Nisargadatta) between I Am and Non-being (the Self). One remains right at the edge–on the one hand patiently and reverently while on the other hand earnestly, almost but not quite hungrily. After all, one may “fall through a trap” at any moment. (NB: Enlightenment, not being an event in time, nonetheless requires some fudging when it comes to teaching: so we may, as a fudge and if need be, say that it’s like falling through a trap “at any moment.”)

Truly, there’s “no step” that “one can take” where the Self is not.