And we are back with another daily reflection on the timeless wisdom that is Vedanta. Vedanta, which means end of the Vedas, or end of knowledge. The Vedas being a Sanskrit word for knowledge, these four textbooks that sit at the seat, the source of nearly all Eastern philosophy going back thousands and thousands of years. And the topic for today's reflection is more ancient than anything uttered by humans, and that is death.
Socrates said that all philosophy is a preparation for death, preparing for death. What does he mean by that? Well, death is, that's the one constant for everything that's ever lived. It is all around us, from squashing a bug to finding a dead squirrel in your backyard like we did yesterday.
Death is a constant, but it's one of those constants that we refuse to acknowledge or talk about. Within the Vedantic lens, I'll tell you here in a second on what is said, it happens after we die. But I also want to tell you a story, something that I heard from one of my teachers, Joseph, who I co-host, yoga for your intellect, the other conversational podcast with, he was saying about a year ago that he was at a lunch with the person that leads the largest hospital in the Houston metro area. And that person said, 80% of your healthcare expenses, 80% of them accrue the last two weeks of your life.
People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get a few more extra days in this existence. 80% of healthcare spent in the last two weeks of your life avoiding the inevitable. And for many in that scenario, it's the most inevitable that inevitable might seem when you're on your deathbed. And yet we still spend every dollar we can to try to not acknowledge that inevitability.
In the Western world, we're told that there is a heaven or hell for you to go to, or you're an atheist and there's just nothing. The Vedantic view, which sounds can sound really ridiculous to many of us in the Western view of reincarnation, especially when you attack on a cartoonish version of it, which we love doing in the West is having cartoonish versions, a characterization of a foreign philosophical concept. You might come back as an animal, as a bunny, because you killed a bunny, and you can get lost in all of these what ifs, if that's an option. But that's not what reincarnation means.
Reincarnation, more simply put, is just a continuation of experience. And the idea that you come back and it's in some linear time, while that presupposes that time exists outside of your experience. When the Vedantic view, and we have an episode on the illusion, it says that time is part of this illusion. It's within this experience.
It's within the superimposition on what's actually happening, not something that's outside of us that we're just strung along or riding along like a roller coaster on tracks. We don't know what happens after death. Vedanta does not put forth anything prescriptive. But it does say there is a continuation of experience.
This right now, what you're listening to is an experience. And Vedanta just says, until we wake up, until we wake up to who we really are, we will continue to have an illusory experience, an experience like this or an experience like a dreamer in the dream, where there is no linear time. There weren't even preceding events, but they find themselves, you find yourself in the middle of a dream, in the middle of a room. And it all makes sense.
Well, you're in this room because as soon as you think about it, because you were just over there, you walked in here, this all makes perfect sense. And we're told, then Vedanta we're told that this experience, the waking experience is just an elevated version of that. There is no time. There's just now.
And in the same way you're projecting what's in front of you. And that is part of that superimposition that blinds us from what's real. And that illusion, this illusion that you're partaking in is not real. Similarly, the second you think about how you got there, how you got here, how you started to listen to this.
That's just more projection. It's like the wake of a boat, where you look back a hundred feet and you see those waves parting, you say, oh, that was caused from a hundred feet ago and it wasn't. This is an analogy that Alan Watts will use quite often to say, no, that parting, that current wave you're looking at a hundred feet back that's caused by right now, that past that you project the events that you select to create that past or how you got to this very moment. That is the now.
You are choosing those moments right now. And Vedanta goes so far as to say, you're projecting those moments. There was no past. You're projecting a belief that they happened to make sense of where you are right now, just like the dream or in a dream.
So what happens after death? Well, if you imply there's an end to experience, Vedanta says there is no end to the experience. This is endless until we wake up in the same way it's beginningless, like a dream. It's not even philosophy.
It's being ignorant of speaking Spanish. When did that ignorance begin? If you don't know how to speak Spanish, your ignorant of speaking Spanish, it was beginningless. This experience wherein is beginningless and it will continue to be endless until we wake up according to this philosophy.
And if that sounds strange to you, let me hypothesize an alternative. You pop into this world from outside of it. You pop in. You've got 80 years to make the most of it.
And if you fail in this test, those 80 years will lead to an eternity of hell. Of a hot tub so hot, you never get used to it. That's an alternative that we humans have come up with or you pass the test, pass away at 80 and you go into a cloud of bliss. You got a mansion made of all the bricks of good deeds you did for eternity, not 10 trillion years, not 100 trillion trillion years.
That's still nothing compared to eternity. 100 trillion years. If that is compared to infinity, that's nothing. 100 trillion divided by infinity is mathematically that's zero.
That is nothing much less 80 years to decide your fate for eternity. That's another option or the atheistic option where you came into this experience from no where it will end. And soon there will be nothing just like there was nothing before. But something we can all agree, something came out of nothing.
That's another far-fetched option on the table. And then we have the Vedantic lens. This third option, right now you're having an experience. And this experience as a birth of this moment, a maintenance preservation of this moment, a death of this moment, and the next experience of birth, a life, a death, a birth, a life, a death, each day, a birth, of the day, the life of the day, a death, each rotation around the sun, each year, birth of a new year, the life of the year, preservation of that year and then the death, each tiny moment, and each massive era, having the same cycle of birth, life, and death, an endless and beginningless series of beginnings and ends, beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, until you're ready to wake up.
It's simultaneously the most far-fetched and speaking for myself, the most reasonable of all of them. Because it pretends nothing in the past, it predicts nothing in the future. All that requires is a reason, rationale, and observation of right now. There's no pulling at threads on something different than what's happening right now happening in the future.
There's no superstition, just observation, observation of what's already happening and the proposition that it will continue to happen until we wake up. Death is always near, it's always happening, death of a moment, death of an era in life, death of a career, death of a loved one, the Vedantic lens time itself implies death, but so does life, and conversely death implies life, but just like every moment, every era, every shift or pivot in a career or life or relationship, the end implies the beginning, end, lead the beginnings, beginnings lead to ends. So what happens after we quote unquote die in this life? Vedanta does not say you'd go to this place, you see this light, you hear these trumpets, it simply says, like the break of dawn today, the end will lead to the beginning, the end leads to the beginning, and it will go on and on, endless beginnings until we decide to wake up.
And that is today's reflection on the daily Vedantic. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the daily Vedantic. This reflection is part of a free repeating two-year course in Ifite at Vedanta.
Rooted in the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads, arguably the oldest philosophical text on Earth, you can begin with episode one, which gives the 15 minute overview of the whole philosophy of Adanta, or you can join the journey with any episode at any point. But the critical aspect of this course of understanding and mastering anything is to study and reflect even for 10 to 15 minutes on the timeless each day, preferably at the start of your day. As is said in this philosophy, reflection is 100,000 times as powerful as listening. So listen, journal, sit with, discuss these concepts or ask questions at the daily Vedantic.com with our AI powered chatbot informed by about 700 episodes here, as regularly as one can, if you want to see clarity and peace, almost effortlessly unfold in your daily life.
And if it doesn't result in a near immediate increase in clarity and peace, then toss aside and feel free to never listen again. One of the things that you might notice is after seven or eight days in a row, this doesn't feel like a discipline. This feels like a visit with a best friend to dive into the timeless with daily reflection. Within a few days, it becomes one of your favorite parts of the day.
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