I am sixty-five.
Eight of those years I was a monk. I buried a wife who was twenty-nine. I raised two children on my own and taught them at home for eighteen years. I have published more than thirty books and sold tens of thousands of them in the street. At sixty, in the pandemic, I ended up living in a van.
Somewhere along the way I picked up a habit: I don’t take anyone’s word for it. I go and look, and I write it down. I have been doing that for forty-five years.
Every day I send you one of those notes. A death, a boss you can’t stand, money that doesn’t reach the end of the month — and what an ancient text answers. With the verse and the edition, so you can go and look.
You don’t have to believe in anything. Read it and judge for yourself.
If you are looking for a nice phrase to start the day, this is not for you. Here I always say where a thing comes from, and sometimes it turns out that what we all repeated for thirty years was not where we thought it was.
Juan Manuel Ferrera (Jagannatha Mishra Dasa)