Emanuele

Born into a family of ancient Norman nobility, whose memory has been preserved and handed down from generation to generation since the Middle Ages, he grew up in an intellectually rich and stimulating environment.

For centuries, the history of his family was intertwined with events and transformations that helped shape modern Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, following conflicts and intrigues of power, the family lost its wealth and possessions and fell into poverty. Yet it did not lose its profound connection with culture, inner research and esotericism.

From childhood he thus came into contact with psychology, physics, mathematics, philosophy and esoteric traditions: different territories of knowledge, all traversed by the same search into the nature of the human being and of reality.

Since then, his research has revolved around one essential question:

What is the human being truly, and what does a human being become capable of when body, energy, consciousness and will are reintegrated?

He has chosen to live a simple life and to entrust his livelihood entirely to the voluntary donations of those who recognise value in his teaching.

He has lived in Greece for twenty-five years and now resides on Crete, an island at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the East: a harsh and luminous land crossed by ancient mysteries, lost civilisations, myths, labyrinths, mountains and open sea.

Crete is not merely the place where he lives: it is the outer landscape that most faithfully reflects his inner nature.

After completing a classical education, he moved to Berlin during his university years, where he specialised at Humboldt University in applied mathematics and the optimisation of nonlinear NP-complete problems. Returning to Italy, he graduated with honours in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome. He worked in operations research — complex systems, optimisation, pattern recognition and problems in which a multitude of possibilities must be reduced to an intelligible structure — spoke at international conferences on applied mathematics and was admitted to a doctoral programme in Applied Statistics. He chose, however, to decline it. During those years, he was already working as a consultant and project leader for the American multinational Hewlett-Packard International on information-security projects for the Italian Government and telecommunications companies.

He has a prestigious career ahead of him and a future that seems already mapped out. He earns an enormous amount, lives in luxury and takes an intense part in Roman nightlife, among clubs, nightclubs and parties. He is then engaged to a charming young woman from a very wealthy family and lives with her in a nineteenth-century villa owned by her family, in the hills outside Rome. He enjoys an enviable social position and can also count on the affection and support of his own family.

But after three years, he left everyone and everything behind and set out once more.

He departed alone, carrying a bag on his shoulders, on an initiatory journey that he had planned would take him to Mount Athos, then along the Camino de Santiago, back to Berlin and finally to Arizona, among the Native peoples of America. Instead, he first reached Samothrace, at the sanctuary of the Great Gods, and then Patmos, the island of the Apocalypse. This journey marked a rupture: the possibility of dismantling the identity he had built until then and allowing something more essential to emerge. Destiny, however, did not agree with his original plans and soon led him to Athens, where he lived for several years and where strange adventures brought him face to face with human and spiritual realities beyond the ordinary.

He returned to university to study Psychology and soon earned a second degree, with a thesis on the neurobiological phenomena of entrainment and the use of computerised techniques in hypnosis.

He later resumed collaborations with scientific research institutes in Italy and Greece, worked as a consultant for a technology start-up connected with the University of Heraklion and published studies in recognised journals and academic venues. He worked as a visiting researcher at FORTH, in collaboration with the University of Heraklion on Crete, within a project combining virtual reality, psychology and neuroscience. At an American university he also pursued further studies in counselling, cognitive psychology and psychopathology; in parallel, he studied Psychosynthesis in Rome for twenty years. In 2013 he founded and became president of the Greek International Centre for Bio-Psychosynthesis.

Ten years ago, he left all of this behind once again and devoted himself entirely to inner research, with the aim of creating a method of spiritual development suited to the modern age.

For alongside this visible story, from childhood onward he had pursued another apprenticeship: invisible, secret, far older and more silent. Accepted as a “special” pupil by traditional teachers, often connected with reserved traditions, he practised meditation, martial arts and disciplines concerned with the perception and transformation of subtle energies, Chi or Prana. For decades he passed through different schools, secret societies, esoteric orders, methods and lineages, never binding himself permanently to any orthodoxy and severing every bond when it became a limitation. He remained free and independent, a “Warrior of the Spirit”. He himself became a teacher at a young age and, first in Athens and later on Crete, transmitted some of these arts and esoteric traditions. He received public and private recognition, but also attracted the hostility and envy of people and entities that felt threatened, in their “ego”, by the philanthropic nature of his work.

Alongside the visible and documentable stages of his biography lies a more private story: a succession of incredible adventures, mortal trials, encounters and inner transformations. A story that, in essence, is not very different from the events narrated in certain esoteric books. To recount these experiences in a few lines would make them seem implausible; some of them can be shared only with those who have developed the inner instruments needed to recognise them.