There is a strain of contemporary spirituality that mistakes insight for arrival. A retreat, a book, a vision, and the work is supposed to be done. The contemplatives know better. They built monastic orders, prayer rules, sesshin schedules, dervish circles, daily zazen because they had observed, across centuries, that whatever is glimpsed is also lost, and that the only durable response to losing it is the practice of showing up again.
Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna is the universal version. Act, but not for the fruits of action. Do the practice for the practice. The moment you do it for what it will give you, the small self has reattached itself, and the practice has become another grasping. Empty hands, every time, fresh.
What the practices have in common, across traditions, is that they wear away the part of the practitioner that wants something out of them. The Beatitudes describe the result, not the method: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek. These are not virtues to acquire; they are descriptions of who is left after a long-enough practice.
If the veil is the small self in motion, the practice is what slows the small self down until it can see what it is doing. Sit. Pray. Walk. Breathe. The traditions disagree about the form; they do not disagree about the necessity.