once upon a time...
like all stories
my story begins like this
as well!
It all began one day, at 10.30 a.m.
Il 10 novembre del 1970 entrai ufficialmente a far parte di quella che oggi chiamiamo “Vita” su questo meraviglioso Pianeta che chiamiamo “Terra”.
Mio Padre, Armando, e mia madre, Graziella, erano super felici di accogliermi. A quel tempo non si sapeva se io fossi stato un maschietto o una femminuccia, avevo già una sorella maggiore, Marzia, e la gioia fu grande quando scoprirono che ero un bambino.
Mi raccontano, che fin dai primi giorni di vita il mio carattere era “vispo e sorridente” ma la peculiarità di quel periodo erano gli occhi: grandi, neri e profondi…My father, Armando, and my mother, Graziella, were super happy to welcome me. At that time they did not know whether I was a boy or a girl, I already had an older sister, Marzia, and the joy was great when they found out I was a boy.
They told me that from the very first days of my life my personality was ‘bright and smiling’, but the peculiarity of that time was my eyes: big, black and deep…
Misfortune and luck in the early years of my childhood
At 18 months old, while we were on vacation in the mountains, as guests of the Carraro family, unfortunately the unthinkable happened. My mother Graziella began to suffer from a severe headache and a very high fever, and was immediately admitted to the emergency room with a diagnosis of meningitis. At that time medicine was still unfamiliar with the targeted use of antibiotics usually used today to treat this disease. As a result, my mother had three cardiac arrests in just one week and during the last heart attack, lasting over three minutes, she lost all her cortical activity.
For all of us, an ordeal of hope and tragedy began. My father took my mother wherever there was the smallest glimmer of a chance to restore the brain cells that were no longer functioning, but every attempt turned out to be a failure.
Years passed and with them came resignation.
Graziella, my mother, was housed at the ‘Cottolengo’ institute in Padua and every week, for about fifteen years, we went to visit her every weekend, a vegetable waiting for the inexorable passing of time.
It wasn’t just sadness, many came closer to our family and, let’s face it, our house was always a sort of ‘sea port’. Everyday people came and went, family friends, acquaintances … first to help, then out of friendship and finally to be healed by the pranotherapy practised by my father…
From there I began to understand that life was not only what I was seeing around me …
For many months, and perhaps for over a year, my dad Armando stayed at my mother’s bedside, especially during the first few days, the first few months. He stayed awake practically all the time in the hope that mum would give signs of recovery. Coffee and many other stimulants to keep him alert and not fall asleep had become part of his daily diet, and it was then that he suddenly began to experience ‘electric shocks’ that from the occipital, the back of his head, descended rapidly to his feet. At first, these were very rare episodes, but as the months and years went by, they became more and more frequent.
Devoted to St. Anthony, he looked for explanations in faith and Father Campello, an exorcist of the Franciscan Friars of Padua, one day explained to him that, as a result of his great effort with my mother, his body, his machine, had begun to produce an excess of ‘Energy’ and that he could give it to others through his own hands.
It was the 1970s and imagine my father’s reaction. Etheric energy … donating to others … It sounds like an extraterrestrial language.
However, as a football fan and a founding member of the sports association in our village, he began to massage footballers who were rapidly regaining their strength and energy, and then to some of the athletes’ parents who were suffering from some ailment due to age, and so it was that, towards the end of the 1970s, Dad became a very capable prano-therapist and I began to have confirmation that what I felt in my heart had a kernel of truth: reality was not only what I was seeing, hearing and touching … there was much more!
… at school it was all about studying … but also great discoveries that oriented my entire life.
Today I teach a photographic reading technique, a method of study, which allows you to prepare a typical university exam in no more than three days … and everyone tells me: who knows what results you must have had at school!
Well, the truth is that, for example, in primary school, in the 4th year of elementary school, I still hardly knew how to read or write. I was good at maths, I liked to solve problems and be the fastest one, but otherwise … with the excuse that I was motherless, I was allowed almost anything, even not to learn.
At a certain point my life radically changed its course
Since my first breath I have always sought to understand and delve into what I used to call ‘the Truth’ at the time. I looked for it in heaven, I looked for it on earth, I struggled a lot to find it and spent a lot of money to acquire it by searching for it in courses, training paths and so on, but at some point I can say that I finally found it, or at least I found what is for me still today ‘the Truth’.
It all happened when I met another one of my Masters of life or, as I like to call him, I met ‘My Master’, a charismatic, fascinating, enigmatic man, he likes to call himself an educator. This is a man I followed for a good 14 years.
From him, I learnt practically everything I know, and, I might add, I owe much of who I am to him.
…and that was how I became a Man
For a good 14 years I followed the teachings of the one who knew how to help me go deep into things, to observe Life for what it really is and not for how I used to interpret it. I have been led, guided and I studied all kinds of insights into the meaning of Life, developing in me the gift of curiosity, openness to change, respect for the experience of others, a propensity for harmony and beauty, and the ability to always choose what is Useful.
As my heart and mind opened up to the Truth, I studied Neuro Linguistic Programming, Mental Dynamics, learnt the most modern hypnosis techniques, studied naturopathy, delved into the workings of ‘subtle energy’, and obtained certificates in special Masters such as the S.D.P. Method and the I.N.A. System, devised by Patrizio himself, a method and system that I then taught; I studied all the main religions, discovering that the teaching of every great Master and Prophet, always refers to a single and universal teaching, which differs from the others only in the era in which it was handed down and the language appropriate to those who received it. I have learnt to use, sometimes at my own expense, the different types of energy of the form.
As time passed by, my knowledge had become a global and increasingly objective knowledge, and thanks to the experiences I had been lucky enough to be able to live, I had developed a huge self-confidence, a great and deep-rooted delirium of omnipotence, the need to show my qualities to be seen at all times, the need to prevail, to be the best, to be ‘the first one’… Until I discovered how much these claims concealed completely false values and became aware of how profound and total my ignorance was in the face of the magic of Real Life…
As this awareness grew, in the midst of so many mistakes, there gradually emerged in me the most respectful silence, the discipline of listening, a new vision of myself, the joy of patience and with it a growing degree of humbleness.
BTM: a Project for a new philanthropic economy
After holding a training experience in Banca Mediolanum as didactics manager and lecturer in the field of communication within the ‘Rainbow Project’, a wonderful Project realised by In-formazione, a company I was employed by in the 1990s, the desire, and then the conviction, to be able to find an alternative method of financial management to the private system existing at that time was born in me.
I then met Mirco Amonini, who soon became a dear friend, and with him we developed the BTM: Business for the Third Millennium project on behalf of SSC Consulting, a company under American law and with an operational office in Switzerland. I did not understand much about finance and was involved in the project as a consultant in the area of communication.
It was an alternative money circuit, based on creative financial management, but with an extremely ethical connotation and component. In short, companies and private individuals could invest their own money using the insurance vehicle (at the time it could be done, now it is not possible anymore), and a large part of the profits would go to ‘nourish’ a social fund that would make venture capital investments in ethically motivated enterprises.
Everything looked perfect, all that was missing was the funds to launch the project and so, after five years of work to develop the idea and turn it into a Project, we started looking for potential investors.
Filippo Rossi – BTM Project
It was at this point that the worst happened
We found an investor who gave us his word to finance the start-up of the BTM Project. It was a major venture capital fund, still operating today at European level, which asked us to certify the Business Plan before it could be financed (this was not a misplaced request, but a necessary requirement!). The funds and help from private investors, friends and acquaintances had run out, and the SSC was not giving us any more money to proceed, so we asked for help from those who had become aware of the project in the meantime, and more money arrived from ‘friends’ who shared the vision and mission of the project, putting their trust in my enthusiasm and words of hope. We certified the project with the collaboration of distinguished professors from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, but in the meantime the fund changed the destination of its investments and we were left stranded! With no money left and having personal loans at the banks, facing over our repayment capacity, with friends who had believed in us and had invested their savings without being able to reap anything from their financial efforts, Mirco and I immediately became liars, hypocrites, and swindlers in their eyes. Some of these friends became furious, turned into ‘enemies’, and so complaints and injunctions came against us.
I was devastated, but not without a good reserve of strength. On the other hand, Mirco and I had risen again and again, since such a project, described by eminent and distinguished professors of economics as a ‘financial killer application’, had never found an easy way to realise it. But bad luck was on the way. In fact, my dear friend and travelling companion first had an accident that cost him five days in a coma, and from then on he was never the same. About a year later he even had a second accident, this time fatal, unfortunately leaving three children, a wife, a friend and who knows how many other people in debt.
I was broken… alone… abandoned even by my beloved Master who considered everything I had done an action against the rules of his teaching…
A deep breath and… a new life began!
It took quite some time for me to recover, as after a serious accident, especially to give my body the time to regenerate, as at that time was suffering a bit of gastritis, tension in the neck and a strong headache every other day, not to mention a few problems with my colon and lumbar vertebrae … just to name a few of the various ailments I was suffering from!). Moreover, my emotions, mind and spirit needed to regenerate and start again as well.
In the meantime, the inner Silence and Peace, which I felt growing stronger and stronger within me, assiduous prayer to my Lord, to the Master of Masters, Jesus, and especially Forgiveness, not so much directed towards those who had abandoned me (for just or undeserved recriminations it matters little: In the face of what had happened, there was nothing I could do at that moment), but above all towards myself, towards that ‘me’ who had tried, deliriously, to do more than he could, to ‘be’ more than he was … the Forgiveness that I felt was being born within made me freer and freer day by day: I was discovering the Freedom of Forgiveness!
Calmly I had to get up again: with no money, with so many debts, not only my debts, but also those left by Mirco … I had two small children and a wife, a saintly woman who never abandoned me and who, even though she did not approve of everything I tried to do, especially the circumstance that had led me to incur too many debts, she always supported me …
I went back to doing my usual job, the business consultant; I started again with ‘Project Strategy’, a work programme to help SMEs in particular to prepare what they never do, namely a concrete business strategy. I was immediately called on by several clients and, little by little, I managed to ‘heal my bones,’ but above all, something new happened, a new need arose within me from which the direction that my life has taken today originated:
I had received a lot from life, from my Masters, and I realised that the time had come to give a lot, to teach others what I had learnt from my mistakes.
The called ones came and the adventure began!
Therefore I perfected the ‘Three-Dimensional Reading‘ technique to the point to make it not only a training course for learning an extremely effective study method, but above all a ‘path of awareness in three days’. I began to organise courses on “Knowing your body and what it communicates”; I held courses on “Relational Communication” with a much deeper approach to communication than any other communication course on the market; I began to propose evenings of sharing to make a “change” to start giving a new direction to one’s life … and soon they began to arrive: young people of all ages, full of questions, eager to seek ‘the Truth’, little men ‘on the road’, sometimes desperate, looking for the shortcut that can never be found …
…I realised I was on the right path: to offer young people the opportunity to improve themselves in order to be better men tomorrow and to contribute to creating a new awareness… a responsibility that today I feel is 100% mine and which allows me to fall asleep and wake up without ever abandoning the goal for a single instant: the cultural Association “Le Sei Direzioni” was born, a centre, a physical place, ready to welcome anyone who then wished and still wishes to stop for a moment to understand who they are, where they are and where they are going.
In the meantime, while all this was happening, he arrived: Maurizio Sarlo.
…from the COEMM & CLEMM experience to ‘The Bridge Educational Centre’”
A few days after Mirco’s ‘departure’, the first injunctions began to arrive from those old friends who had felt betrayed by my words and actions. I did not back down and little by little I extinguished every debt, material, that I had contracted at the time … At the same time many new acquaintances arrived and among them new friends, one in particular: Maurizio Sarlo.
A little short man, with a hooked nose (when he reads this part he will get a little angry!), someone who thinks he knows how to speak in public, but who in truth is not capable of doing so; a man, however, who has a heart that speaks even when he is silent…
…one day he arrived at my home and it was immediately mutual affection. He had a global ethical and altruistic project ‘for a Better World’, I had been working for a long time on a similar idea (the ‘BTM Project’), and so it was that we decided to unite and try to do what few had attempted before: to offer a direction for possible change with energy and determination. It was a matter of going ‘against’ the devastating and enslaving status quo in a way, to bring the balance between costs and benefits back into equilibrium … in other words, it was a matter of accepting to be a little David, with all that entails, against a giant Goliath like few.
The path was set: we swore mutual honesty, sincerity, firmness… and a true friendship was born…
Creating “a Bridge” to unite the forces of those who believe in the New Man
Ever since I started proposing the Three-Dimensional Reading technique, I was immediately surrounded by a multitude of young people, many indeed… and it was then that I began to ask myself: what does Life want to tell me?
In order to answer this question, I tried to observe my path and the analyses led me to these considerations:
- I have always been an educator, my experience has always been directed towards the other;
- I have always worked with young people and have grown a lot thanks to them;
- I was a promoter of the Patrizio Paoletti Foundation, which works on outlining the criteria for a New Pedagogy for the Third Millennium, an activity carried out mostly at an experimental level;
- I have great esteem and admiration for all those who teach because they have an incredible responsibility not only for what they explain in the classroom, but because through their work, they build the future of Humanity;
- such teachers are told what they have to teach but none of them are told ‘how’ to do it.
So, the “how” to do is what could “make the difference” and I had a know-how that no one knew yet. Furthermore, many colleagues around the world have the know-how that no one knows, so I decided that I needed to create a tool, a means that could transfer to all teachers around the world all the possible and imaginable know-how: The Bridge Educational Center Project was born, an island of Example for a Better World where to bring the most effective professionals of “how to teach” in contact with all teachers who want to join the project.
From now on I will have 2 simple priorities in my life
1. solve the moral debts with those who have believed in me in the past: it has to be done!
2. unite all the professionals who have developed methods, techniques, and educational models for the School and organise and put their discoveries and talents at the service of all teachers of all grades.