There is much controversy over the religious goal of life among the several schools, both among schools accepting Vedic culture (liberation vs. heaven, individual dissolution into the Absolute Brahman, blissful yogic “isolation,” kaivalya, enjoyment of God’s presence) and among outsider schools (Buddhist nirvāṇa or becoming a bodhi-sattva or a Jaina arhat as well as Cārvāka’s entire rejection of soteriology). But from a distance, we can see common conceptions linking at least many of the Indian views. One is to draw a distinction between everyday and spiritual knowledge and to theorize about their relationship. A prominent position is that thinking about the world is an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment. Another is that proper understanding of the world helps one disengage and to know oneself as separate from material things, and so is an aid to transcendence. The most distinctive form of skepticism in classical Indian thought is that so-called worldly knowledge is not knowledge at all but is a perversion or deformation of consciousness. Who seems a philosophical skeptic is really a saint helping us achieve our truly greatest good of world-transcendence by helping us see paradoxes and other failures of theory.