Toward Ecosophy

The way I was taught, the attunement is a way of speeding up the process of developing your connection with the healing energy. It's not actually necessary -- you can achieve Essene master status by simply persevering with the practices -- but the attunement helps "tune" you to the energy so that you can reach higher levels of achievement with it much sooner. You certainly need to keep doing the work -- the attunement won't do that for you. It simply makes the path smoother and your progress on it swifter.