For a while, I was in a familiar in-between — suspended between projects. Some were promising, others passion-led. All of them were shaped by a recurring impulse: to create something meaningful.
That search took many forms over many years. Ventures with social intent. Educational experiments. Frameworks for empowering the self. At one point, even a deeply engaged project called Thinking Matters — rooted in metacognition, neuroscience, and the workings of human decision-making. It all felt worthwhile.
And yet, something wasn’t settling.
The restlessness wasn’t about outcomes. It wasn’t even about success or failure. It was subtler — a growing sense that even the frameworks of meaning I was constructing were built around something unsteady: the self as I had come to assume it.
This is where Vedanta entered — or rather, re-entered — the picture.
Not through a dramatic revelation, but more like a quiet dislodging. A realization, over time, that the one thing common to all these efforts — all these pivots — was the body-mind-ego complex at the center of it.
The seeker of fulfillment was also the obstruction.
Vedanta doesn’t begin with transcendence. It begins with diagnosis.
Its first move is often a negation: You are not the body. Not the mind. Not even the sense of ‘I’ that appears in the mind.
And this isn’t posed as dogma — it invites reflection. Validation. Direct insight.
Almost every major text — from the Upaniṣads to the Bhagavad Gita, from the opening verse of Nirvāṇa Śatakam to the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā — begins here: the limitation of identifying with the finite, and the impossibility of finding lasting fulfillment in what is impermanent and dependent.
This landed. Quietly, but unmistakably.
Not through one verse alone, but as a convergence of insights I’d been circling for a while.
The model of meaning-making I was relying on — however sophisticated — was still self-centric.
And this self, as Vedanta repeatedly shows, is not ultimately real. It’s provisional. Apparent. A role mistaken for the real.
Sometimes, clarity doesn’t arrive with fireworks. It shows up as a loosening of something long gripped.
And the larger shift wasn’t about abandoning all projects or ideas — it was about seeing them differently.
The work wasn’t the problem. It never was.
The issue was mistaking the work for the self.
And so, the transition wasn’t from doing to not doing. It was from clinging to the doer-identity to choosing what felt aligned, clear, and light — without needing it to define me.
That’s how Simply Vedanta came to be.
Not as a new project to fix or build a self, but as a natural expression of inquiry itself.
A space where the work is the practice.
Where śravaṇa, manana, and perhaps early echoes of nidhidhyāsana unfold — not in a cave, but in a shared, reflective life.
I’ll end with a verse that captures this early and essential pointer — the disidentification from what we are not — from Śaṅkarācārya’s Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam:
manobuddhyahaṅkāra cittāni nāham
na ca śrotra jihve na ca ghraṇa netre
na ca vyoma bhūmir na tejo na vāyuḥ
cidānanda rūpaḥ śivo’ham śivo’ham
“I am not the mind, intellect, ego, or memory,
Nor the ears, tongue, nose, or eyes.
I am not space, earth, fire, or wind.
I am the form of consciousness and bliss —
I am Śiva, I am Śiva.”
Simply Vedanta 