At the age of fourteen, after reading a fragment of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, I set out to refute numerous materialist teachers who preferred nihilism over exploring the meaning of life, the world, and death.
In May 2011, I found myself cloistered in a solitary tower in Chennai, India. It was then that, after traversing continents, philosophies, professions, arts, and languages, I concluded that the mysteries of the universe were unfathomable. Ancient questions like "Where do we come from?" "Where are we going?" and "Why do we exist?" would be abandoned in my quest after twenty-seven years of study.
The next day, as I walked in my room, facing an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I experienced an invisible force that touched my forehead, the region of the third eye according to ancient Indian writings. I felt intense pain and anguish in my chest, followed by profound joy and sublime love.
This phenomenon repeated for almost two hours, during which I intuited, through abductive reasoning, the architecture of our immortality and the universe. In terms of pragmatic philosophy, I received the knowledge I had long sought, in an epiphany akin to those described by William James in his work "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

"One day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such sweetness, that the mere memory, of it in after times made him shed abundant tears."

Many of the intuitions obtained at that moment have been translated into this book, accompanied by writings I have been publishing since 2001 in specialized journals in Europe and America. "The Definition of God," which was already a central theme in my novel "New Manhattan Soirées," was written at the request of the philosopher Martin Cohen for the "Foundations of Ethics and Philosophy" encyclopaedia, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
The writings contained in this book, far from being exceptional revelations, are part of the philosophical tradition of both the East and the West. Readers will find references to great philosophers as well as religious writings from Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions. The validity of these writings is supported by wisdom tested by hundreds of generations no less sceptical than our own, and, like all certainty, ultimately depends on our personal convictions.
From Van Gogh, I learned that, in the end, we can only let our works speak for us. Pursued for my frankness, despised for my beliefs, and vindicated by the goddess of Fortune, I leave to new generations these pages forged in my representation of the truth.

Hugo Noël Santander Ferreira

Bucaramanga, November 3, 2023