When, seeing Being-Consciousness, there is nothing else, what desire for liberation could there be there? What bondage could be considered?

The verse performs a logical reduction of the entire soteriological problem. If liberation (mukti) is defined as freedom from bondage (bandha), and bondage consists in ignorance of the Self, then at the moment of Self-knowledge, neither bondage nor any need for liberation remains. It is not that the liberated one “stops desiring liberation”; it is that the very notion of liberation as a goal dissolves because it no longer has any referent.

This is the difference between sādhana and siddhi, between practice and realization. During practice, liberation is an ideal that orients one’s effort. In realization, that ideal is recognized as part of the play of ignorance—a necessary and even beautiful play, but a play nonetheless. Like a child who stops chasing its own shadow upon discovering where the light comes from.

The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (III.9-10) is particularly incisive here: “One who has renounced duality perceives no distinction between the pleasant and the unpleasant.” Non-duality is not a state of emotional indifference but an absence of projective discrimination. The jīvanmukta still experiences the pleasant and the unpleasant—he is a living body, not a statue—but he does not superimpose upon those experiences the notion that one leads to happiness and the other to suffering. Both are movements of prakṛti; he is puruṣa, the unmoving witness.

The verse performs a logical reduction of the entire soteriological problem. If liberation (mukti) is defined as freedom from bondage (bandha), and bondage consists of ignorance of the Self, then at the moment of Self-knowledge, neither bondage nor any need for liberation remains. It is not that the liberated one “stops desiring liberation”; it is that the very notion of liberation as a goal dissolves because it no longer has any referent.

This is the difference between sādhana and siddhi, between practice and realization. During practice, liberation is an ideal that orients one’s effort. In realization, that ideal is recognized as part of the play of ignorance—a necessary and even beautiful play, but a play nonetheless. It is like the child who stops chasing his own shadow when he discovers where the light is coming from.

The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (III.9-10) is particularly incisive here: “One who has renounced duality perceives no distinction between the pleasant and the unpleasant.” Non-duality is not a state of emotional indifference but of an absence of projective discrimination. The jīvanmukta still experiences the pleasant and the unpleasant—he is a living body, not a statue—but he does not superimpose upon those experiences the notion that one leads to happiness and the other to suffering. Both are movements of prakṛti; he is puruṣa, the unmoving witness.