Mukti in Sikh teaching is release from the cycle of birth and death and from the self-centredness that drives it. Sikh scripture works within the framework of karma and transmigration it inherited from its environment, and repositions the goal within that framework in a specific and consequential way.
The distinguishing emphasis is jivan-mukti, liberation while still living. The Guru Granth Sahib describes the liberated person as one who lives in the world, works, marries and raises a family while remaining unattached, as the lotus remains unstained in the water, and as the duck swims without its feathers becoming wet. Liberation is therefore not primarily a condition after death, and it is not obtained by leaving society. The tradition's rejection of renunciation is emphatic and repeated, and it is one of the clearest markers separating Sikh teaching from the ascetic movements around it.
The means are the Name, the Guru and grace, rather than ritual, austerity or pilgrimage, all of which Sikh scripture criticises sharply when they are treated as effective in themselves. The condition described is one in which haumai has been dissolved and the person lives within hukam: the gurmukh, oriented to the Guru, as against the manmukh, oriented to the self.
The final state is described in images of merger, the drop returning to the ocean, light blending with Light, and as sach khand, the realm of truth, the last of the five stages set out in Japji Sahib. What that merger involves has been discussed within the tradition, and whether individuality is dissolved or preserved in union is not settled; Sikh commentators have generally resisted pressing the scripture's metaphors into a technical metaphysical position, holding that the language here describes experience rather than defining a state.
Sikh teaching also declines to make liberation the property of one community. The scripture's repeated insistence that God's court judges by deeds and not by labels, and that whoever remembers the Name is accepted, is read within the tradition as ruling out the position that only Sikhs are liberated.