The attempt to "save" ourselves -- to rescue and release the troubled "me" -- without first understanding just who and what this nature is that would save itself from its suffering, is the first real threshold over which the sincere aspirant must pass... since the presumption on the part of the seeker here is that he or she knows what's wrong with their life.
But, as billions of attempts through millions of failed experiments has proven -- no one understands their actual situation. It is from this fact that follows an axiom we have all heard, but few realize is an actual instruction for those who would be made new: "Know the Truth and the Truth will set you free."
Until we can see our life... as a whole, we see all of its events only through a single, but constantly shifting "I" within us. These fragments of self take each experience as being the whole of our existence because each imagines -- for the duration of its temporary little life -- that it is the whole.
Here, in this virtually unceasing state of unconscious identification, lies our sorrow, frustration, and the source of all useless suffering.
This knowledge -- along with the awakened higher awareness that gives birth to it -- is the threshold of true self-wholeness. Only you can step over it... and enter into the holiness that waits on the other side.
Take the step now.