Ashtavakra Gita

A liberated man performs the acts life presents to him, exactly like other men, but knows all the while that no one is truly the doer

The paradox at the heart of jivanmukti, liberation while still alive, is stated directly: full participation in ordinary life sits comfortably alongside the total absence of a felt doer.

Chapter eighteen repeatedly circles back to this same practical question — if there's no doer, does the liberated person still work, eat, and respond to the world like everyone else? The answer given is yes, entirely: from the outside, a jivanmukta's actions look indistinguishable from anyone else's. What differs is invisible to observers — the constant, felt certainty that no separate self is actually generating the action, that life is simply happening through a body-mind rather than being authored by an "I" behind it. This is what separates the Ashtavakra Gita's radical non-dualism from renunciate traditions that equate freedom with withdrawing from ordinary activity.

Jivanmukti — liberation attained and lived out while still in the body — is the load-bearing doctrine of this whole chapter, and later Vedanta commentators debated it against the rival view that liberation could only be confirmed at death.

Ashtavakra Gita