Hindus affirm moksha, release from the cycle of birth and death, as the highest goal of human life. It is freedom from samsara and from the ignorance (avidya) and desire that bind the soul to it, and its attainment is described very differently across the major Vedanta schools. Shankara's Advaita Vedanta holds it to be the realization that the individual self (atman) is not merely close to but strictly identical with the ultimate reality (Brahman), a knowledge that dissolves, rather than fulfills, the sense of being a separate person. Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, rejects that full identity, holding that the liberated soul remains eternally distinct even while existing in the closest possible loving relation to God. Madhva's Dvaita goes further still, teaching a strict and permanent duality in which soul and God are never identical even in liberation, only ever united in devoted relationship. These are rival philosophical positions within Hindu tradition, not variant popular customs, and Vedanta commentators have argued the differences with real intellectual seriousness across many centuries.
A further distinction, common to several schools, separates jivanmukti, liberation attained while still embodied and alive, from videhamukti, final liberation only at the moment of bodily death, with sages said to be jivanmukta continuing to act in the world while no longer bound by the karma their actions would otherwise generate.