The Daily Vedantic

280+ episodes in. It is time to actually announce it.

Time to finally write a short essay on why I started this podcast project — one daily 5-10 minute episode on the world’s oldest philosophy, Vedanta.

A fun side note: Vedanta, which means ‘end of the Vedas’, is another name for the Upanishads or is also sometimes called Samkhya or Gnana Yoga, or sometimes called Sanatana Dharma (meaning ‘eternal principles’ in Sanskrit; a language that often as 12 words that all mean the same thing).

This philosophy (and the Vedas) sit at the source of nearly all Eastern philosophy (and arguably Western philosophy as well; about 6,000 years into India philosophizing, the Greeks began asking similar questions and coming up with similar answers, specifically with Socrates around 450 BC). For example, his allegory of the cave is almost point for point the revelation of the Vedas thousands of years before (and his idol, Pythagoras is speculated by many to have spent several years, up to 20 years in some accounts, in India before returning to Greece).

The philosophy focuses on *the biggest of questions*: who we are, how to realize who we are, what is the purpose of our existence, and ultimately… etc. And the systematic clarity and simplicity of the articulations of these questions absolutely gobsmacked me a decade ago when I first came across these concepts after exploring Eastern philosophy for several years during my 20s. And after telling myself that it was time to spend a year going ‘a mile deep’ in the philosophy that captivated my heroes like Thoreau, Emerson, Jung, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ram Dass, and more (instead of going ‘a mile wide and only an inch deep’ in various traditions)… here we are, nearly a decade later, and still scratching the surface on the profundity of a philosophy that can be explained n 15 minutes. And as a ‘startup investor’ thinking about the future much of the day, I am convinced it is on its way to becoming the philosophy of the future. Why? Because the philosophy of the future must be an umbrella that can fit the best of science, the best of religion, and the best of philosophy within it. And this philosophy does that.

Want that 15-minute summary of the entire philosophy? Check out episode 1 above to see if the the first 2-minutes of the episode speaks to you.

And if it does, you can head to TheDailyVedantic.com for a weekly email covering the daily episodes, reflections, and principles — as well as a nice lil VedantaGPT AI chatbot created to accommodate any questions you might have 24/7 about this philosophy. The daily practices of this philosophy after all are: Question everything. Don’t take anything for granted. And study/reflect daily.