Brahman shines here as this universe; nothing else shines. Seeing that very thing, one becomes liberated in that very instant.

The equation brahman = viśva is not metaphysical but phenomenological: it does not assert that the world ‘is’ Brahman in a literal sense, but rather that there exists no mode of accessing the world save through the luminosity of consciousness, and that luminosity is Brahman. The ‘instant’ (tatkṣaṇa) of liberation constitutes the eternal now of Zen: not a moment along the temporal continuum, but the irruption of the timeless into time. The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā declares that liberation is immediate for whoever listens attentively; herein, Vāsiṣṭha appends that such immediacy is no exception, but rather the concealed norm of all experience.