First Hand

What I've lived and what I went and checked. One email a day, Monday to Friday.

JUAN MANUEL FERRERA

28.07.2026

I left home with a toothbrush

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.

March 1981. Eight years a monk.

Then came all the rest. I married. I opened a centre in Tenerife. My first wife left me after six years. I met Yukari and we had two children. The leadership threw me out of the temple I had built from scratch. Yukari was diagnosed with cancer and we went to Australia. She died there, twenty-nine years old.

I came back to Spain and raised my children alone. I taught them at home for eighteen years. I published more than thirty books. And past sixty I ended up living in a van.

In every one of those situations I went looking for what the text said. Not out of devotion: out of need. When your wife dies at twenty-nine you don’t want comfort, you want to know what is happening.

And there was always something. Written five thousand years ago, by people who had already been through it.

I wrote all of it down. That’s what’s in the card file.

Tomorrow I’ll explain exactly what you’re going to get.

All the cards