 The epistemic failure of mutual superimposition is caused by ignorance (avidyā). Śaṅkara identifies avidyā as the root cause of all existential suffering. It produces a baseline of fear and anxiety due to assuming one’s self as a limited being subject to sorrow, sickness, and death. Based on this error, individuals seek wholeness, happiness, and limitlessness through known ends like material gains, social status, hedonic pleasures, or reaching heavenly worlds; however, such endeavors are perpetually bound to fail because results of finite actions are limited, transient, and dependent. They may provide temporary reprieves or happy mental states, but do not provide the limitless wholeness of liberation. Only the direct understanding of one’s self as nondual brahman negates the error of superimposition, and frees one from the beginningless karmic cycle of death, rebirth, and suffering. One’s cluster of mistaken self-identities and the whole psychological scaffolding that perpetuates suffering collapses only by removing the kingpin of ignorance. Then only nondual consciousness remains standing. Upon recognizing this reality, the mind rests in its own intrinsic being with absolute fullness, peacefulness, and tranquility. Śaṅkara’s soteriological project is thus primarily epistemological with several positive psychological repercussions.