He who remains established in Brahman knows nothing: neither saṃsāra nor liberation, nor desire; he relies on nothing.

The triad —saṃsāra, vimokṣa, tṛṣṇā— covers the entire spectrum of the conditioned state. Saṃsāra is the appearance of imprisonment; vimokṣa is the appearance of escape; tṛṣṇā is the engine that fuels both appearances. The liberated one knows none of the three, because all of them presuppose duality, and duality has ceased.

“Naiva saṃśrayet” —“he does not rely on anything”— is the description of the āśraya-rahita, the refuge-less one. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the bodhisattva does not seek nirvāṇa nor remain in saṃsāra; he “does not cling to either extreme.” So it is with the jīvanmukta: he does not rely on liberation as a goal nor on saṃsāra as a reality. It is not that he has no position; it is that he needs no position because there is nothing to position.

The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (III.14) states: “Where there is the universe and its disappearance, where there is desire and its satisfaction—for me there is only Brahman.” It is not that the universe disappears; it is that the desire for it to disappear disappears. Vimokṣa was itself a desire—the desire to escape—and all desire is tṛṣṇā. When tṛṣṇā ceases, neither saṃsāra nor vimokṣa have any meaning. What remains is only what always was: Brahman, not as an object of knowledge but as the very nature of the knower.