This teaching was given to me freely.
My teacher took years of her life to walk me through it. She answered my questions late into the evening, week after week. Behind her stood her own teacher, and behind him a lineage of teachers stretching back over 2000 years — every one of them giving away what they had received, asking only that the next person do the same.
I am not a swami. I am not a scholar. I am a student who was changed by this teaching, and who has been told, by the woman who taught me, that I now have a responsibility to pass it on.
* * *
She said something to me once that I have not forgotten. Teaching is the best way to learn.
I resisted it at first. I told her I was not ready. She had heard that excuse many times, and also turned out to be right. Five years into teaching small groups of students, I understand things now that ten years of private study would not have given me. A student's question — sharp, unexpected, undefended — can do in five seconds what a hundred hours of reading cannot. It exposes the places where my understanding is still vague.
So I teach for two reasons. To pay forward what was given to me. And because teaching is, for me, the deepest form of learning that remains.
* * *
A few principles have shaped how I teach.
The first is that this teaching does not require religion. You do not need to be Hindu, Indian, or religious in any conventional sense. Vedanta is not a faith you adopt; it is a body of inquiry that examines what is true about your experience, your nature, and the world. Many of my students hold their existing faith and find that this teaching does not conflict with it. It addresses a different layer.
The second is that it does not contradict science, and does not depend on it. Vedanta is asking different questions, and pointing at something prior to the categories science works with. The teaching is supra-logical — beyond the reach of ordinary logic in some places — but it is never illogical. It may sometimes ask you to follow reason further than you are accustomed to.
The third, and the one I most want to drive home, is that this is not about belief. It is about understanding. Vedanta is not asking you to believe anything on faith. It is asking you to look — at your own experience, your own awareness, your own assumptions — and to test what you find. The teaching survives inquiry. It welcomes it. A student who takes the time to question deeply is often a better student than one who nods along.
The fourth is that Sanskrit is not the gatekeeper. The tradition has a vast technical vocabulary, and for someone meeting this teaching for the first time, that vocabulary is a wall, not a door. Although I have spent several years studying Sanskrit and have read several of the scriptures in the original, I can tell you that doing so is not necessary. Where a Sanskrit term is genuinely useful, I introduce it once and then mostly use plain English. The teaching does not become more profound because it is wrapped in unfamiliar words.
* * *
My aim with this teaching is to cull out the essence — the heart of what these scriptures actually say — and to remove the tremendous amount of scaffolding that has been built around it over the centuries. The teaching itself is small, direct, and simple. That simplicity is what has allowed it to be handed from one person to another across over 2000 years. It is also what makes it possible for me to share it with you here, in plain language, on a small screen.
If you are willing to look honestly at your own experience and follow the inquiry where it leads, you have everything you need.
Let us begin.