The First Encounters
With The Unexplainable

Chapter 2 of The Journey Begins Within opens with a confession, not an argument. Santiago Vitagliano admits, with disarming candor, that what he is about to share will sound implausible. He says so himself, on the page, before the reader has a chance to. The effect is structural: by naming the resistance ahead of time, the chapter clears the room of the usual defenses and asks only that the reader keep reading.

What follows is not a treatise. It is testimony. Three episodes from childhood and early adulthood, written with the same calm tone the rest of the book carries, none offered as proof, each offered as the source from which a lifelong contemplative path begins. They are the soil. Everything later in the book grows out of them.

The chapter sets the contract for the entire memoir: the metaphysical is treated with the same seriousness as the ordinary. Neither is exaggerated. Neither is softened. Both are simply described.

The first encounter arrives on a gloomy winter day in Buenos Aires. Santiago is six years old, gazing out the window of his fourth-floor bedroom in Belgrano. The apartment is quiet. His mother is somewhere far away in the kitchen. And then, without warning, he hears a voice.

It is not the constant interior monologue everyone carries. It is something else. The chapter describes it as ethereal, as stillness with a presence inside it, as though originating from a deeper realm of which the boy is not yet aware. It sounds like an older man, which is strange for a six-year-old to register. He is certain of one thing only: the voice is not his.

What it says is brief, and it remains with him for the rest of his life. "I will leave you alone now, but you will find me again." He looks around the empty room, regains his composure, and asks the only question a child can ask in that moment: who are you? In response he feels what he can only describe as a loving presence and a sense of infinite comfort. A telepathic exchange follows. The presence asks him what he wants from this life. In the innocence of his Catholic upbringing, he answers that he wants to know and follow Jesus Christ. The presence assents. Then it departs.

Decades later, he writes, he still does not know what it was, what to call it, or what the exchange implied. He only knows that it happened, and that everything in his life since has unfolded inside the shape of that quiet promise: you will find me again.

The second encounter takes place a few years later, on the family country estate, a hundred-and-twenty-five-acre weekend property that had been in the family for three generations. Santiago describes a childhood of harmony with nature there, communion with horses and dogs and the over-forty-five-year-old trees his great-grandfather Manuel had planted with the dream of building a private country club. He also describes the harder edges: severe bullying at school, his parents' strict disciplinary methods, and a heightened internal turmoil he carried as a sensitive child.

It is during these summers that he develops a severe case of warts on the left side of his foot and on his right hand. They grow large enough to cause pain when he walks. A surgical removal is attempted. The procedure goes as planned. The warts come back, in the same spots, with greater intensity.

Stumped, the family decides on a psychosomatic approach. They tell him a story: rub a small piece of pig fat on each wart on a full moon night, then bury that piece in a red ant mound. When the ants finish consuming the fat, the warts will be gone. In the chapter, Santiago describes the moment with a child's full conviction. He performed the ritual. He monitored the warts. Within days, overnight, he woke up and they had vanished.

The chapter does not present the event as folk magic. It presents it as an early confrontation with what later researchers and contemporary teachers such as Dr. Joe Dispenza describe as the still-uncharted territory of mind, perception, and self-healing. Belief, in the chapter's framing, is not credulity. It is participation.

The third encounter takes place in his second year of engineering school in Buenos Aires, where Santiago is studying Newtonian physics, the very subject that promises to describe the world by laws. He has his physics book open. He has just finished a Coke. The can is sitting on the glass-topped desk beside him. The room is sealed: windows shut, doors closed, no central air conditioning, ceiling fan off because it is autumn. There are no air currents.

What he witnesses, he writes, he witnessed plainly. The Coke can flipped onto its side. It rolled across the level glass surface. It fell off the left edge of the desk. His first instinct was the rational one: he must have bumped it. He gets up, looks for the can on the floor, and finds nothing. He spends two hours dismantling his bedroom looking for it. The can is never found. It has, by all available evidence, simply left the three-dimensional plane in which it was sitting moments earlier.

The chapter does not insist on what the moment was. It only notes the timing: it occurred during the precise semester when Santiago was being taught that the universe is governed by the equations of Newton. The book gently observes that the only laws governing this dimension are the laws written by what he calls our Father in Heaven, and that those laws can, at His will, be set aside in a single afternoon, in a single sealed room, with a single can.

Chapter 2 is the gate. Everything that follows in The Journey Begins Within, the encounters in adulthood, the apparitions, the spiritual lessons drawn from years of metaphysical experience, the gleaned insights woven through the memoir, rests on the contract this chapter establishes.

The book is asking the reader to accept a single premise: that what is encountered in stillness, or in the unguarded edges of childhood, or in the moments when physical reality momentarily declines to behave, is not less real than the rest of life. It is, in some sense, the part of life the rest is built on.

The Spirit's promise from the opening encounter, you will find me again, is what the remaining chapters of the book fulfill. Chapter 2 is where it is made. The reader is invited to read the rest as the unfolding of that promise.