Ashtavakra Gita

The absolute isolation of the self is this: to know that nothing whatsoever, not even liberation, was ever truly needed or gained

Even liberation itself gets included among the things this radical solitude doesn't need, which is a sharper claim than simply having achieved liberation.

Kaivalya, usually translated as absolute isolation or aloneness, is the classical term for the self's final, unmixed state once every association with anything else has fallen away — and chapter twenty pushes the concept to its logical limit. It isn't enough, in this verse, to say the self is free of the body, the world, or ordinary bondage; even the category of liberation itself is described as never having been truly needed or gained, because gaining liberation would still imply a self that had once lacked it. This is a deliberately vertiginous claim, closing off any remaining subtle attachment to spiritual attainment as an accomplishment. What's left isn't a self that has liberation, but a self for which the entire liberation/bondage pair never actually applied.

Kaivalya as a technical term predates the Ashtavakra Gita by centuries, most famously anchoring the closing chapter of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, though the two texts use it toward different ends.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about freedom

  Kaivalya, absolute aloneness, is pushed to its limit: nothing was ever needed or gained, liberation included. That is a sharper statement than claiming to have achieved it.