Advaita Vedanta, the nondualist school associated above all with the eighth century teacher Shankara, holds that the plurality a person ordinarily perceives, separate objects, a separate perceiving self standing among them, is not the final truth of what exists but an appearance superimposed on a single undivided reality, Brahman, by avidya, ignorance of that reality's true nature. Shankara's commentaries describe this superimposition, adhyasa, with the analogy of mistaking a coiled rope for a snake in dim light: the snake has no independent existence of its own, yet the mistake is not therefore nothing, since it produces real fear and real consequence until the light improves and the rope is seen for what it is. On this model liberation, moksha, is not the achievement of some new state but the recognition, jnana, that the self, atman, was never in fact distinct from Brahman, a recognition that dissolves the apparent plurality the way accurate sight dissolves the illusion of the snake. The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies situates this doctrine as the load bearing claim of the entire Advaita system, since nearly every other distinctive position the school holds follows from treating the ordinary world of difference as real only in a qualified and ultimately superseded sense.