For my 60th birthday some years ago, my wife bought a steam function for my shower. She didn’t know it would provide me with an ideal metaphor for explaining kaivalya, the state of ego dissolution that is the goal of Shankarite monistic Advaita philosophy.

“Shankarite” refers to the teachings of the 8th-century philosopher Adi Shankara, who taught Advaita philosophy, which proposes that personhood is a-dvaita, not two, meaning the individual self (atma) and the ultimate reality (brahman), the totality of all energy in creation, are, at the deepest level, identical, with liberation equating to the achievement of this oneness. “Monistic” means when one gets there, when yogis reach the ultimate perfection of their practice, egos fall away, and they become formless, featureless, and “one” with God.

Here’s where the steam shower comes in. When the steam fills the shower space, outlines soften. The walls and glass door seem to disappear. Even the sense of where one’s body ends and the space begins blurs. There is a peculiar relief in this loss of definition. The sharp edges of ordinary life, the roles, anxieties, unfinished business, loosen their grip. For a moment, you are no longer someone. You are simply warmth, breath, sensation.

That experience is wonderful and can feel genuinely liberating. No more sorrow rooted in personal history. No more tragedy born of attachment, loss, or conflict. The burden of being a distinct self with all its aches and cares dissolves.

The Bhagavad Gita offers a different diagnosis of what liberation ultimately means. According to the Gita, the nonmaterial self does not truly dissolve or disappear upon awakening. It is immortal and does not merge into brahman like a drop into the sea. A drop may no longer be visible, but it never becomes a whole sea. The self remains eternal, conscious, and irreducibly individual. What changes after liberation is not the loss of identity, but the emergence of true identity: personhood freed from the egotism of the material world.

The freedom of kaivalya, the Gita suggests, is genuine but incomplete. It is a state of release, an absence of pain rather than the presence of fulfillment. The burdens of embodied life fall away, but so do the possibilities of relationship, creativity, and love. And because consciousness is by nature active and relational, that stillness does not satisfy forever. In time, the self seeks something more than relief. It seeks positive, meaningful joy, found not in erasure, but in loving exchange.

Next time you visit, you’re welcome to try the steam shower for yourself. Then we’ll get lunch.