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 weekday, one short note. Two minutes.
What an old text answers about what happens to all of us, always with the exact source. The body. Money and work. The machines. What institutions do when nobody is looking.
Forty-five years of going to look for myself. Including what I got wrong.
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)