 According to Śaṅkara, because the individual is nondual brahman in reality, they already are what they seek to be—unlimited, whole, and complete. The difficulty, however, is that one’s felt sense of finite identity contradicts nonduality and engenders a seeming distance between the person and brahman. Mokṣa thus appears to be a future attainment rather than a recognition of present reality. This false premise entices one into action with the intent to gain or become brahman, but one cannot attain anew what is already attained. Action is superfluous to accomplish an already accomplished fact. In fact, the more one attempts to gain, reach, or experience liberation while mistakenly presupposing its distance, the further it recedes like the horizon. This quagmire of action is not intractable though because both bondage and liberation are just figurative—no change occurs in reality. The solution is purely self-knowledge, a radical epistemic shift in perspective by which one simultaneously sheds limited self-identities and recognizes their existence as nondual consciousness. Only this direct immediate recognition of nonduality defeats the error of superimposition. One becomes brahman simply by knowing brahman (MuU 3.2.9). Śaṅkara illustrates this concept of accomplishing the accomplished with the “tenth man story” (TaiUBh 2.1.1). Ten children cross a river and then regroup to count each other. Each child counts only nine, and they sorrowfully conclude that the missing tenth child must have drowned. A passerby sees their plight and states, “you are the tenth!” They then realize they simply forgot to count themselves. The tenth child was never truly lost or gained. (See Comans 2000; Suthren Hirst 2005; and Rambachan 1991 for further discussions of Śaṅkara’s method).