Previous cards on First Hand

Children

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

You’ve got your daughter’s report card in front of you and it isn’t what you expected. You tell her she’s capable of much more. She doesn’t look up from her phone.

You press. She says maybe she doesn’t care about grades. And you start saying that her future depends on this, and you don’t finish, because she cuts in:

“My future, or yours?”

That’s the end of the conversation, and you both know it.

How to reach your goals

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In 2011 I was organising a music and yoga festival for the summer, and the first thing we did wasn’t a list. It was sitting down and imagining it already built.

The stage. The camping area. People arriving from different places. The performances, the toilets, the industrial kitchen. Seeing it running before any of it existed.

That isn’t self-help visualisation. It’s that without that picture you have nothing to pull on. Once you have it, you have two points: where you are now and where you want to end up. And the head, which is bad at storing things, is superb at filling gaps. Give it both ends and it starts on its own.

Brothers

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

You never had a fight with your brother. That’s the strange part.

There was no slammed door, no unforgivable sentence. There were calls you didn’t return, birthdays that went past, things that needed saying and never at the right moment. And one day it had been two years and neither of you could say exactly when it started.

Underneath it there’s nearly always the same thing: a comparison that began when you were children and that nobody ever withdrew. One was the responsible one and the other the creative one. One was going to make it and the other was the worry. The parts were handed out when you were six and nine, and at fifty you’re still playing them.

Capturing your tasks

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In April 2011 I wrote that I’d bought myself a voice recorder. I’d been through the iPod, the notepad and the pencil, and none of them worked for me. With the recorder every note became a spoken note, and at night they went into the computer.

Fifteen years on I’m still doing the same. The devices changed and nothing else did.

In fact this that you’re reading is made that way. The cards where I tell you something I lived through aren’t written from memory in front of a screen: I tell them out loud for half an hour and then they get written up. They come out better, because telling and drafting aren’t the same operation, and doing both at once ruins them both.

The Boss

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Your boss doesn’t shout. He doesn’t humiliate you in front of anyone. He does nothing you could repeat afterwards that would sound bad.

There is simply no way to please him.

You hand in a piece of work and get half a smile and a list of what could be better. You propose something and he takes it apart, not because it’s bad, but because he can always find the flaw, the risk, the reason to wait.

A sustainable trade proposal

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In May 2011 the public squares of Spain were full of people. I wrote a proposal then and sent it to the 15-M movement: that we should make the LETS system known — trading goods and services without money in the middle — which was already working in other countries.

I explained it with a story, because it was quicker.

There were some lads who played football with a leather ball. The problem was the boy who owned it: every time anything had to be decided he threatened to take it home if they didn’t do as he said. This was years ago, when a leather ball was a luxury.

The astrology consultations

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I had studied astrology since I was very young, so at a certain point I decided to make a living from it. I bought the tables for calculating sidereal positions and worked mostly from one book, El hombre y su estrella.

People gave me their date, their hour and their place of birth, and I drew up the chart. First you calculate how the sky stood on the day that person was born. There’s no mystery in that: it’s arithmetic, and what comes out comes out.

We need leaders, not administrators

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In Vrindavan, India, there’s a branch of the Canara Bank. They had a list on the wall about what separates a leader from an administrator. In a bank. I copied it down.

It went something like this:

A leader innovates; an administrator administers. A leader develops; an administrator maintains. A leader focuses on people; an administrator focuses on systems. A leader inspires trust; an administrator relies on control. A leader asks what and why; an administrator asks how and when.

Jail

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In the early eighties I was a brahmacari, a celibate monk, and my job was selling books on the street.

One afternoon I was in a square in Murcia with a companion. I stopped a woman to offer her a book, the way we stopped hundreds every day. She went on her way. A while later a crowd gathered, they grabbed me by the arms and called the police.

The woman had ten thousand pesetas in her bag. She spoke to me, got home, and they were gone. She put the two things together. I never opened her bag or touched it, but by then it made no difference. Ten thousand pesetas was serious money back then.

Ambition

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

You wanted one particular thing. You got it. And within a few days you were already thinking about the next one.

That isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s how the mechanism is built, and it’s worth watching it work before you judge yourself.

I sold a hundred and thirty thousand copies of a cookbook in under two years. That one was done at a printing house. What I remember about it isn’t the joy. I remember that the figure stopped meaning anything very quickly, and that the only thing on my mind was the next book.

I'm kapha and that explains a fair bit

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

By the ayurvedic classification I’m kapha. Translated: heavy body, slow metabolism, I put on weight easily, it costs me to get going and once going I keep going a long time.

You can take it as ancient medicine or as a fairly accurate description of a type of person. It’s the second that’s useful to me.

There are three types, and you need the other two or this is no use to you at all.

The temple years

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I met the Hare Krishnas when I was thirteen or fourteen, and I practised at home as best I could. At nineteen I went to live in a temple.

I didn’t experience it as a sacrifice. It was a calling, and it was what filled me. In a temple, back then, you could forget about everything else and simply practise. A strict spiritual programme in the morning, devotional service the rest of the day, and more programme scattered through the evening and night.

The temple fitted in an entrance hall

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

From Tiana town the temple moved to Barcelona city, to an attic flat on Princesa street. Fourth or fifth floor, no lift.

It was very small. So small that the class was given in the entrance hall, and the entrance hall was small too. That was the temple, and that’s where we sat to listen. Five or six people lived there, maybe seven or eight, a family with two children among them.

The tarot

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The office I rented when I was fourteen had a table and two chairs. People came up there.

One afternoon a woman of about forty came up. She’d come for the cards. She sat down, put her bag on the floor and didn’t let go of the strap for the whole hour. She asked whether her husband was coming back.

I dealt them. What came out was what always comes out: a card that can mean one thing and its opposite. I told her the separation wasn’t entirely closed, but that she had already started organising things on her own. She burst into tears. Not at the first part. At the second.

When your own people throw you out

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I built a temple from nothing in the Canaries. I put it up, I filled it, I held it up.

And they threw me out. The people inside. Over politics, and for having said too much about things that were known and not said.

It’s a far more common situation than it looks, and you don’t need a temple: it happens in companies, in families and anywhere there’s a group. What marks it out isn’t the injustice. It’s that it comes from the people you shared what mattered most with.

The book

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I went to see the head of my sons’ school and told him they weren’t going to take homework home.

He looked at me. “But all the children have homework. It’s part of the curriculum.”

I told him I understood. That they could do all the work in class. That once they walked out of the school, their time was theirs.

He agreed. I think he thought I was mad.

The packet of cigarettes

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

When my sons were old enough to start smoking secretly, I left a packet of cigarettes on a piece of furniture, within their reach. There were still a few inside.

I told them: this is here for whoever wants to smoke.

Months went by and the packet was still full. I asked them whether they didn’t want to try. They looked at me the way you look at one who has just said something stupid. “Dad, are you all right in the head?”

File 7. The first Hare Krishna temple in Spain

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The first Hare Krishna temple in Spain was a house with a garden in Tiana, twenty kilometres from Mataró, where I lived. The year was 1975.

The devotees who opened it had come from France, and back to France they went. Only one stayed, a brahmachari, a monk, whose name was Padambhuja. He was the first devotee of Krishna I ever saw.

The room was large, with straw mats on the floor, and there were few people. Some hippies with instruments. What struck me was that on coming in they bowed and touched the floor with their heads. Then I ate there, listened to the philosophy and chanted.

This one I can't check

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

A verse I can check. I open the 1972 edition, I find the page, and either it says what they say it says or it doesn’t. That’s where the argument ends.

Eighteen years of teaching my sons at home can’t be checked that way.

There’s no original edition to collate against. There’s no control group. I had two sons and one life, and that can’t be run again to see whether it comes out the same.

File 6. Lobsang Rampa

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

My first contact with any of this was a book: The Third Eye, by Lobsang Rampa.

It tells his life from the time he entered a Tibetan monastery as a child. They studied extrasensory perception, and there was a ceremony to open the third eye, which is supposed to be the pineal gland, between and little above the eyebrows. Once it was opened he began to see people’s auras. A ring of energy you can’t see with the naked eye, and which animals and plants have too. When a monk got angry, he saw it red. And if some part of the body came out darkened, there was an illness there.

You expected something else

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

You did what had to be done and it didn’t turn out the way it had to turn out.

You worked well and somebody else got the promotion. You raised them well and your son doesn’t call. You were loyal for thirty years and they pushed you aside. You looked after your health and fell ill anyway.

That distance between what you put in and what you got back is where nearly all the avoidable suffering of a life lives.

File 5. The Ouija board

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The name comes from OUI, yes in French and JA, yes in German. In case you’ve never seen one, here’s how it goes. A round table. Several people. Cards with big letters laid around it, and a glass upside down in the middle. Each person puts an index finger on top of the glass, and you ask a question.

You’re supposed to be calling spirits. People who died. To make it easier there are two more cards, one for yes and one for no, and you start with the simple one: are you there? Then the glass moves. It stops at letters, and the letters make words.

The money doesn't reach

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Past sixty I ended up living in a van.

It all fell at once with the pandemic: the lectures, the seminars, the book selling. No income, and at that age you don’t get back up fast.

Those months I learned something about money that I hadn’t learned in forty years of voluntary renunciation: having nothing because you left it is not the same as having nothing because it was taken from you. The first is a decision. The second is fear, all day, in your stomach.

File 4. Past-life regressions

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

We got in touch with a psychologist who was already doing regressions. More of a hypnotist than a psychologist, to be honest. He came to our group, to our little place, and he put my friend under.

I’ll tell it the way it went. My friend was sitting in one of those single armchairs. He hypnotised him and started taking him backwards through this life: as a boy, as a baby, back to when he was in his mother’s womb. And from there he moved him to the previous life.

What my blood work says

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Today it’s the body’s turn. And I start with mine, which is the only one I can talk about with paperwork in hand.

Fatty liver. High blood sugar. Grade one obesity. Sixty-five years old, one metre sixty-five and 83 kilos.

I put it in writing because I’m sick of people handing out advice about life from a flattering photograph.

And there’s a direct relation between that and everything else I do, which is why I’m telling you here: with your sugar high you can’t study. It isn’t a metaphor. You eat badly at midday and by five in the afternoon you can’t hold a difficult paragraph.

File 3. The haunted houses

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

We went to houses where somebody had reported paranormal activity: objects moving on their own, noises, that sort of thing. We would turn up there and take our measurements.

We went as investigators for the I.P.U., Parapsychological and UFO Research. We were kids, but the name was meant seriously and so was the method.

One house I remember well. We’d been told there was a cross in it that moved constantly. It hung on the wall, small, some twenty or thirty centimetres. According to them it never stayed still.

The fear that turns up at four in the morning

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Not fear of anything in particular. The other one. The one that arrives without being called and without your being able to point at what exactly.

I’ve had spells like that. The worst wasn’t when my wife died, because that was grief, and grief has a shape and a bottom. It was during the year of living in the van, when I didn’t know what was going to happen and it didn’t depend on me.

File 2. The afternoon with Juanjo Benítez

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

We had a small rented place where we studied parapsicology, occult sciences and, above all, UFOs. It was 1975: no internet or anything like it, but somehow we had put together a fairly complete file of newspaper clippings, news and information on the subject. We were deep into it back then.

And Juanjo Benítez was famous. Juan José Benítez, the writer of The Trojan Horse, the book that sold enormously about these matters: UFOs, ancient civilisations. He’s from Pamplona, Navarra. Imagine our surprise when he showed up at our group, at our little place: he took the trouble to come visit us and we talked with him for a while.

Your boss

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

You work for somebody who decides about your life and isn’t up to it.

He decides badly, he takes the credit for what you do, and on top of that you have to smile at him because whether you get paid at the end of the month depends on him.

I know what I’m talking about from the other side too: I was president of a temple for two years, and I’m sure somebody under me was thinking exactly this about me.

File 1. The witch

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

In our parapsychology research group we had an impressive range of activities. We got into the occult, and that included witchcraft, white magic and black magic. And it turns out that in our town, Mataró, we met a very old lady from Brazil. Well, she was Catalan, but she had lived many years in Brazil. And she was a witch.

My friend and I used to go to her house. And curiously we went at night, to top it all off. She was a white witch, but she looked exactly the part: a rather wrinkled lady, with big, turquoise-green eyes. And of course that was her subject. So we went to her house.

Somebody dies on you

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Yukari was diagnosed with cancer at twenty-eight years old. We went to Australia looking for a school for the children and another chance for her. She died there. Twenty-nine.

I was left with two kids of five and three in a country that wasn’t mine.

Of what people said to me in those weeks I don’t remember a single sentence. They were all true and none of them was any use. “She’s in a better place.” “Time heals.” “She was a very good person.”

The child who leaves

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I taught them at home for eighteen years. No school, no teaching qualification and no one’s permission. Me, two children and a library.

And one day they leave, which is exactly what had to happen and what I worked for the whole of that time.

Nobody warns you what it feels like when you pull it off.

There’s a trap in there I’ve seen in a lot of parents, and in myself: confusing having raised them with their belonging to you. It disguises itself very well. It goes by the name of concern, advice, “I only want what’s best for you”.

Where the card file comes from

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

For forty years I read every day. Whole books, many times over, underlining and going back.

And one day I realised I couldn’t find anything. I knew I had read something on a subject, I knew almost which book it was in, and I’d spend half an hour leafing through. Or I’d quote it from memory, which is the worst habit there is.

Forty years of reading and no system. What I called studying was reading a lot.

An hour of japa on the treadmill

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I get up at six. Water, eight breaths, shower.

At half past six I get on the treadmill with my prayer beads and I stay there an hour, walking slowly and chanting.

This scandalises two kinds of people at once.

Devotees find it irreverent to mix meditation with exercise. The gym people find it an hour wasted at walking pace.

My reason is simple and I learned it by failing: I had two things to do every day without exception, and one of the two always fell through. Never the same one. And I’ve known for forty-five years that what gets done on some days doesn’t get done.

The quote nobody checks

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

There is an enormous number of sentences going around, attributed to teachers, that nobody has ever verified.

They get said in class. They get put on images. They get used to settle arguments. And they pass from mouth to mouth losing a word along the way, until they end up saying something else.

My rule, and I don’t break it: a quote does not exist until I have the exact source in front of me.

Being on your own

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I live on my own. My wife died many years ago, my children are living their own lives, my brothers are busy with theirs, and the community where I spent forty years pushed me aside a long time back.

I don’t say it as a complaint. I say it because it’s the similar situation a lot of people who read me are in, and almost nobody names it.

There’s a big difference between being on your own and feeling alone, and most advice goes after the first one. Sign up for something. Call someone. Get out more.

I'm engraving sixteen million words into metal

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The whole body of work I use, more than twenty thousand printed book pages —six thousand if you count the text alone—, laser-engraved on a ten-centimetre nickel disc.

This isn’t fantasy: it’s the technology the Arch Mission says it sent a library to the Moon in 2019. Los Alamos tested it at 570 degrees with no degradation. Ten thousand years, no electricity and no maintenance.

Before getting there I tried the obvious thing, the one the Greeks and the Romans did: engrave on plate. I ran the numbers. A single Bhagavad gītā comes to four hundred titanium sheets of thirty by forty centimetres, plus the granite boxes to protect them. One tonne eight hundred kilos. For one copy. I left it there and looked for something else.

Who this isn't for

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

Let’s save us both some time.

If you’re after a nice line to start the day with, this isn’t for you. There are hundreds of accounts that hand those out, and they’re free too.

If you want your own opinions confirmed back to you, not here either. I’ve had to change my mind plenty of times after going to check the source, and what comes out of that is what I send you, whether I like it or not.

Why I always tell you where it comes from

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I don’t tell you anything I haven’t checked. That’s the only rule this has.

If I tell you something about the body, I tell you which study it comes from. If I talk about money, where I got the figure. If I quote an old text, the verse and the chapter.

It isn’t so you’ll trust me. It’s so you don’t have to, and can go and look for yourself.

What this is and what you're going to get

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I’ve spent forty-five years writing down what I check.

It started with cardboard cards and a box, when I found out that after forty years of reading every day I couldn’t find a single thing I had read. Now it’s an enormous card file, and every morning from half past seven to half past eight I’m still putting things into it.

There’s a bit of everything in there, because I’ve lived a bit of everything. Verses checked against their original edition. Editions compared line by line. What I learned selling books on the street for thirty-nine years. Eighteen years teaching my children at home. My own blood work and what I do about it at sixty-five. How you organise work when you have no boss and no appetite for it.

I left home with a toothbrush

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

I was nineteen and it was all I had.

My mother had died the year before. Forty-nine years old, four children, a whole life fighting since the postwar years. She faded away in a few months.

My father was left a widower, my younger brother was a kid and I was holding the house together. I told him I was leaving for a temple. He gave me his permission.

After a few months he married again. No one is indispensable.

At fourteen I rented an office to investigate ghosts

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0200

A small office, a real one, rented with what a few schoolkids had between them. We gave it initials: I.P.U., Investigación en Parapsicología y Ufología — Research in Parapsychology and Ufology. Santiago Jubany and me.

It had started in 1973, with a teacher who did something nobody did back then: he let us choose the subject of our project. In Franco’s Spain that was close to subversive. I chose Tibet.