Liberation is the highest goal of human life through which everything is accomplished. This liberation also called nirvana, kaivalya, mukti, moksha, can be brought about only through Self knowledge.
All life is an experience to provide us with Self knowledge. To see ourselves in all beings and all beings in ourselves is the essence of life, hence from the highest standpoint, there is no birth and no death, no one who is born and no one who dies, there is only the unborn, perfect and infinite Self nature, beyond all limitations and possessed of all powers of Self manifestations.
Liberation is beyond all states of body and mind and not limited by them. It is everything and nothing, everyone and no one. A liberated soul possesses divine qualities such as purity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and is beyond limitations. Moksha is attained when the individual becomes liberated from the cycle of birth and death.
To reach this emancipation beyond all joy and sorrow, all difference and decay, the soul must remove, in order, the three fetters: karma, which is "the power of cause and effect, action and reaction;" maya, which is "the power of manifestation" sometimes called illusion; and anava, "the power of egoity or misapprehended duality." Once freed by God's grace from these bonds-which do not cease to exist, but no longer have the power to bind-the soul experiences nirvikalpa samadhi. This is the realization of the Self, atattva Parabrahman-timeless, formless, spaceless-a oneness beyond all change or diversity. Self Realization is man's natural state, which each soul eventually comes to. While the ultimate goal of earthly life is the experience of Self Realization, the by-product of that realization is moksha.
Moksha, from the root mooch or moksh, has many connotations: to loose, to free, release, let loose, let go and thus also to spare, to let live, to allow to depart, to dispatch, to dismiss and even to relax, to spend, bestow, give away and open. Thus it means "release from worldly existence or transmigration; final or eternal emancipation."
Moksha is not a state of extinction of the soul, nor of nonexistence, nor of nonconsciousness. It is perfect freedom, an indescribable state of nondifferentiation, a proximity to the Divine within.
While some sects in Hinduism teach that liberation comes only upon death, most embrace the state of jivanmukti, liberation in which the advanced soul unfolds its inherent perfection while alive. It is said of such a great one that "He died before he died," indicating the totally real, not merely symbolic, demise of the ego.
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