Yoga Vasistha presents liberation as a radical shift in understanding rather than a journey to a distant goal. Moksha is described as the clear recognition that one’s true nature is pure consciousness, in which the individual self, the world, and even the notion of a separate God appear as transient projections. From this standpoint, bondage and liberation are not external conditions but modes of the mind, rooted in misperception and ignorance. The text repeatedly emphasizes that this realization is available here and now, not postponed to a future life or a post-mortem state. Liberation is thus the cessation of suffering born of ignorance, through seeing that what one truly is has never been bound.

The primary means to this realization is knowledge (jnana), cultivated through sustained self-inquiry and discrimination (viveka). Yoga Vasistha urges a deep examination of the mind and its movements, revealing how thoughts, memories, and latent tendencies (vasanas) project an illusory world, much like a dream. Through detachment (vairagya), introspection, and the abandonment of egoic identification, the mind gradually becomes transparent to its own ground. The famous teaching that “mind alone is bondage, mind alone is liberation” encapsulates this approach: when the mind is entangled in its projections, there is bondage; when it is understood and stilled in wisdom, there is freedom.

At the heart of this vision lies a non-dual understanding of reality. The text consistently points to the oneness of individual and universal consciousness, affirming that there is only one awareness appearing as the many. From the highest standpoint, no real bondage ever existed; nothing is truly created, and no separate entity is ultimately liberated. What is realized is the ever-present Self, which remains untouched while the play of appearances comes and goes. Liberation is thus not the acquisition of a new state, but the recognition of an already accomplished fact that was obscured by ignorance.

This realization is not merely theoretical; Yoga Vasistha holds that one can live it as jivanmukti, liberation while still embodied. The liberated person abides effortlessly in the natural state (sahaja), established as the witness consciousness beyond mental modifications. Such a one moves through the world with equanimity in pleasure and pain, free from the sense of doership, and yet capable of spontaneous, compassionate engagement. Like an actor who never forgets the underlying reality of the stage, the sage participates in life without inner bondage, knowing all phenomena to be appearances in the one, undivided consciousness.