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Ever since some doctor said on a podcast that muses could be aliens, I can no longer stop imagining them as gray, with oval faces, bulging eyes, and no spacesuits whatsoever. And the worst part is that I can even hear them speaking in their language, while I am the one who has to do the translating.

In any case, over the past year I have decided to listen to these tiny beings — who, as I said, are gray and not green, because they are not Martians — and I have devoted countless hours… in fact, I think I have done nothing else, to telling all the stories they place in my mind.

At least once a week, a new character appears.

All of a sudden, I see a man or a woman, I hear a name — because they introduce themselves — and then I catch a glimpse of the story of their life. Where were they born? What did they dream of? Whom did they love? Did they fail, or did they live happy lives? … They tell me everything, although there are secrets they reveal only to me, and those are the parts of their stories that never make it onto the page. The rest, what they allow me to tell my readers, are my novels.

Am I merely an instrument? Could it be that these beings truly exist, dictating stories to me from another dimension, or from space, from some asteroid beyond Pluto?

Or is it just me? Could it be that in my brain — fairly ordinary, I imagine — some very strange connection has occurred, one that now makes me spend more time thinking about that imaginary world than this one, the real one? I do not know. And deep down, I do not care. Wherever the stories come from, I receive them.

I only promise to continue, until my last breath — hopefully, at least fifty years from now — recounting, as the sole witness from this side of the mirror, the loves, heartbreaks, pain, happiness, laziness… of each and every one of my characters, both those who have already been "born" in one of my books and the many others who, I am certain — because I can see the line in the distance — are still waiting to come.

Mauricio Chaves-Mesén

Last night I had an urgent meeting with the muses. I realized it was important when I saw them forming committees.

"Looks like there's going to be a round table," I told myself, "although with that many of them it will probably be an auditorium. A long night awaits me… but I'm going to enjoy it."

"We need to get to work," the first one told me, coordinator of the three muses on the left.

"But I haven't stopped," I protested.

"That was last year, and this is already 2021. There are five novels left, and we have to write them."

"But we already have seven! In the last year and a half I wrote three! I thought we were stopping there, and I even mentioned it somewhere."

Once I said that to them, I realized we were speaking in verse, and that I was looking for meter in everything… It was nerves, I think, and the expectation of knowing.

"It has always been twelve; you've known that for a long time," another group leader told me, speaking to me informally. Apparently, they have become comfortable with me.

"With how hard it was to write seven!" I protested.

"But there are twelve, and that's that. There's no time to waste."

As I settled into my chair and turned on the computer, I thought that twelve made sense: the number is important to the plot. Each novel is divided into twelve parts, subdivided into twelve smaller chapters, and in the first scene I wrote many years ago, a clock struck twelve… and this is 2021, which has a reversed twelve in it. They had left me clues; I just never caught them…

I closed my eyes, opened my mind, and pounded the keyboard furiously. It was two hours of notes, until I had to stop. My back hurt a lot, and I had to go… for a walk.

"Is there a union for writers exploited by muses that I could join?" I thought while I… walked. There wasn't one. I googled it.

"They're just loose ideas, without a guiding thread," was the first thing I thought. But then I reread them, and I found a basic outline for novels eight, nine, and ten… Of the eleventh there was a glimpse, only a clue, nothing more, but of the twelfth they said nothing…

"We're keeping that one to ourselves," they claimed mysteriously. "It will come in its own time."

I think they still have no idea what they're going to spring on me; I imagine that's what the committees are for… Anyway, no more spoilers. Now I know that every little detail I thought was part of the "decoration"… has meaning, has a reason for being.

One more thing. Plato's anima mundi is a sphere with 120 identical triangles, dividing the earth into twelve faces.

I'm off. They're calling me. I think they want to dictate. Will they be general ideas? Or a particular scene? I hope it's several pages…

(Published on Facebook in 2021. The five novels have now been dictated and published, and the reference to Plato resulted in 3.14: The Riddle of Plato, published in August 2025… And I swear that, at the time, I did not know!)

Everything is possible for the one who believes.

Believe that you are capable of greatness, and one day you will achieve it.

Believe that you are capable of being happy, and you will be.

Believe that you are capable of reaching your dreams, and you will reach them.

Because everything is possible for the one who believes.

But this also works in the negative…

If you believe that things will go from bad to worse, that is how they will go…

If you believe you cannot, that achievement is impossible for you, then so it will be…

Because everything is possible — or impossible — for the one who believes it to be so.

Remember…

You are the Observer referred to in quantum physics; the one who decides whether waves or particles are formed, how they are formed, where…

Everything is possible for the one who believes.

Therefore, I recommend believing in good things, beautiful things. Believe that you are capable of the best and that you can improve in every aspect and at every level; believe that your work will bear fruit, that you will get the promotion, that from now on things will be easier and will flow…

Everything is possible for the one who believes.

Believe, and in doing so you will create your reality.

Mauricio Chaves-Mesén

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Let Go of the Past

Stop stirring up the past with your thoughts; stop looking back and shaking up that dust full of bacteria and problems as if you wanted to bring it back to life.

Forget it. As painful as it may be, forget it. In fact, the more painful it is, the greater your effort to forget it should be.

The only truth is that you are now here, ahead, facing today. So look forward and enjoy what lies before you. Receive it with joy, be grateful for everything, and with a positive attitude devote yourself to imagining your best future.

Magic begins with a very simple formula: "What you imagine will be."

I AM THE NEO OF MY MATRIX
I BELIEVE IN WHAT I IMAGINE
AND THUS I MAKE IT REAL

(Published December 2023)

I began meditating on the solstice, in the early hours of the 22nd, and organically, without planning it, I joined it with the last full moon of the year, in the early hours of today.

When I woke up, I went to the beach and gave thanks to life for a beautiful year, full of blessings.

Ha! I know how all of this sounds.

First he was playing magnate, then writer, and now he wants to become a guru!

I say no, but one never knows, ha! Today I opened my arms and told life to send me whatever it had for me, even if it was not exactly what I had asked for.

So far, even the times when it has not given me what I wanted, or when things went wrong, the times when it hurt and hurt terribly; when I felt desperate or felt like crying, life always had my best interest in mind, and gave me what made me grow the most.

It has also given me so many joys!

Many of them, perhaps, I did not know how to enjoy or appreciate at the time.

I was not there, I was not present, lost in futures or pasts, and not in the only one, in today, which was real.

That is why now I no longer ask for so much.

I ask for harmony, I ask for peace, happiness.

And although it may seem that I am asking for a lot, for those three things I need nothing more than meditation.

This is what I do. It works for me, it helps me grow and mature.

First I give thanks to life for what it gives me, for the good, for the bad, and for the ordinary. Everything left something behind, a little seed, a lesson, something to improve.

I open my arms, receive the rays, and offer everything that lives within me. I ask the star of light for help, to transmute the bad into good, and the good into better.

Those thoughts, now filled with dreams, energy, confidence, and love, I receive once again into my mind and into my heart.

With that same light invading my body, I bless and cleanse any trace of pain.

I search my face, I search my neck, I undo knots, little lumps, stuck places, every bad moment or memory that causes tension.

Freed from that, with my hands I expel those particles, so they may be transmuted.

With this meditation I gave thanks for the year that is ending, and prepared myself for the new one.

Spectacular things are coming!

I am grateful for them already, I give thanks to Creation.

Mauricio Chaves-Mesén

(Published February 14, 2024)

The story of why I wrote Círculo de Poder is a novel in itself.

In 1993, freshly graduated as a lawyer, I was sent to a three-month course at the International Development Law Institute — IDLI —, a grandiose name that looked incredible on my résumé.

It turns out that a girl my age, 23 years old, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, used to go there. I set my eyes on her and tried to impress her, attempting to steal a little of her attention. After two days, I invited her for coffee.

The IDLI was located in Piazza di Spagna, one of the most romantic places in Rome. A coffee there, with that sunset, on the Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti — she with this big Latin guy from Costa Rica, a country that was already cool back then, and me with that doll, who, on top of everything, turned out to be a countess — well, what can I tell you? By seven in the evening, we were madly in love!

The course ended in May, and in August Priscilla and I were walking at sunset in Conchal and Flamingo, because she had come to visit me in Paradise, Costa Rica. La Fortuna de San Carlos, the Arenal Volcano, Monteverde — where didn't we go! When the budget began to falter, I took her to my father's farm in Grifo Alto de Puriscal, where there was a little house, very simple! The woman was fascinated! I was enduring discomfort; she, in her mind, was living an extreme experience in a cabin in a tropical jungle — there was a little patch of woods behind the house, so jungle, jungle, jungle, I don't know… anyway.

I did everything I could to return to Italy to be with the Countess, and by February 1994, I was back at the IDLI for another course — the one for which I was supposedly learning French. Oui oui.

Then something strange happened. An Italian friend, Vittorio Giusti, called me.

"Look, I want to take some wines from Verona to Costa Rica. I'd like you to get to know Hacienda Masi, and maybe we can become partners." And at that age, one wants to get into every business people propose, so I went to Verona.

And this is where those wheels of destiny come in, the ones you do not understand, but that change absolutely everything.

Hacienda Masi lodged me at the Foresteria of Count Serego Alighieri, a famous wine producer from the region and a direct descendant of the poet Dante Alighieri.

It was February 14, the most important night of the Venice Carnival.

There were no other guests at the place, Priscilla was outside Italy that week, so Count Pieralvise and his wife offered me conversation. Extremely charming people. After a while of teaching them to say Pura Vida and the other habits of us Ticos, they liked me and said:

"Get ready, Mauricio, put on a suit, and come with us to a dinner."

So, of course, I went!

The Serego Alighieris took me to the Club de l'Unione di Venezia, at the time — I do not know if it still is — an extremely exclusive place. An intimate dinner, long table, thirty people, like in the movies, all Italian nobles, except for a Spanish marquis whose name I do not remember, and me, the undersigned Chaves, a plebeian from La Uruca, San José, Costa Rica.

If all of this sounds extremely strange to you, imagine me at 24 years old!

That very night, thirty years ago today, when I returned to the Foresteria, a palace built by the son of Dante Alighieri, where the prophet himself stayed many times, a novel began to write itself in my mind: Círculo de Poder.

Those who have read it will recognize many of the elements described, mixed with geopolitics and a generous portion of conspiracy.

In July, I finished the first version and met Priscilla in Washington, where she was doing an internship as an epidemiologist while making use of her mother's apartment. It was full of amazing books on Nostradamus, and while she went to clinical trials, I read prophecies — I even began to believe that everything would end in 1999, but that is a story for another day.

Four prophecies fit my novel perfectly. They were my novel. Very strange.

That is how Nostradamus dove headfirst into my books.

What was meant to be a novel born from extraordinary life events became a series of seven novels about prophecies, apocalypse, immortals, pyramids, counts and countesses, of course, and now also a new series of six novels about the origin of everything: Atlantis.

Not long ago, I visited Pieralvise in Verona. I thanked him for having invited me to that dinner thirty years ago. He had no reason to do so; he did not know me. He was important; being a descendant of Dante carries great weight in Italy, and yet both he and his wife were very simple, very kind people.

No one could have imagined that dinner would change my destiny.

And all because I liked a girl in Rome and found the courage to invite her for coffee.

Sometimes life asks us to take the first step.

Mauricio Chaves-Mesén

Some confusion has arisen, and a few rumors have started spreading after my last post — and since I already explained it to several people who asked — I would rather publish this clarifying note, telling the second part of the story of Countess Priscilla and this plebeian male.

After writing Círculo de Poder, Washington, the prophecies, and so on, I went to Italy to visit her. It was almost cheaper than the phone, which in those days cost one dollar per minute for an international call, and the woman could talk!

At the beginning of 1995, we decided we were going to move to Paris together.

I calculated that if I sold my car and took advantage of the Labor Mobility program, I would have enough capital to spend some time as a bohemian in Paris. We would not have to pay rent, an enormous advantage, since her family had an apartment there.

Oh no, I was almost ready!

There was one problem. I did not feel in love. And for me, that was so important!

I mean, Priscilla had all the requirements, all of them. We were good friends, we liked each other, we understood each other, but there was no spark, no passion. And we were very young. And at twenty-five, one still believes in Hollywood and in the romances of novels, in perfect couples, better halves, soulmates we are desperately supposed to seek. I did not feel she was the one, nor was I sure I was the one for her. Besides, I did not know whether being a bohemian was really what I wanted.

Part of me did want it. But the no won. What also happened is that human beings are ambitious, and always balancing their dreams against their realities; and having studied law, an MBA, the courses in Rome, having spent a whole life in classrooms had required too much effort for me to become a hippie and leave to write.

Besides, one is somewhat neurotic in one's twenties. One wants to do so much, devour the world, find one's place, earn respect… One feels so self-sufficient, so invincible, so wise, because one has just taken a course at university and read the latest book on a subject, and now believes one knows more than the experts who have been doing it their whole lives… that one does not stop to observe, to plan, to sniff the surroundings, and to decide in which direction the favorable winds are blowing: often it is not the direction in which the herd is moving.

Life tempted me with a job offer from the World Bank, which was opening an office in Costa Rica. The position gave me prestige within the herd and validation, something I had desperately sought in life, because back then I believed the important thing in life was to become known and have prestige. And money.

I accepted the position and did not allow myself, did not accept, denied myself the opportunity to become a count — not really, because she could not pass a title on to me, I would still have been a plebeian, ha!

What I did deny myself was the opportunity to do what I came into the world to do: write books. For the next twelve years I wrote nothing, chasing the chimera of money.

We broke up, but remained friends for many years.

When I got married five years later, we spent our honeymoon in Italy, and since we were passing through Bologna for a day, we visited her. Her husband was not very happy to see me, and I do not think my wife was very happy to see her either — yes, yes, I know, with every reason. Awkward moment, ha!

She was married to a marquis and had two little marquises.

Perhaps, in retrospect, I was not her best option.

That is the story of how I DID NOT MARRY THE COUNTESS.

So please, stop spreading stories, ha!

Mauricio Chaves-Mesén