Hello, John Castagnini here
• Brooklyn-Bred Badass • Technology Investor
• Body/Mind Wellness Consultant & Innovator
• Visionary Entrepreneur
Hello, John Castagnini here
• Brooklyn-Bred Badass • Technology Investor
• Body/Mind Wellness Consultant & Innovator
• Visionary Entrepreneur
How I Acquired My Insatiable
Need To Explore, Understand, And Share
The Invisible Strings
Connecting Everything
Brooklyn-Bred Badass.
I was sixteen when I first sensed it. Something shifted inside me and I felt at one with all of creation. Now this feeling was friggin’ confusing since I lived in the notorious Canarsie part of Brooklyn. Remember the movie Goodfellas? Goodfellas takes place in Canarsie. And on Sundays at Holy Family, you’d rub shoulders with mobsters at mass.
Growing up in Canarsie, I had frequent run-ins with the gangs that roamed the streets. These kids were mobster wannabes – they let you know their families were “connected.” My family was not “connected.” My dorky dad taught high school math. To handle the streets, I became a martial-arts and muscle-building maniac.
One night, I was “partying” after an intense workout 
(running thirteen miles and bench-pressing three times my body weight) when a weird feeling came over me. At first, it tingled all through my body. Then I felt it outside my body. The next thing I knew, I had a pencil in my hand. I can’t exactly say I was writing, it was more like something was writing through me since what came out was far deeper and more insightful than anything I could write or even think of. But what impressed me most was the overwhelming feeling of interconnectedness with everyone and everything.
Sure, I was high on oxygen, adrenalin, and some illegal “paraphanalia.” But there was something else going on. I sensed that beyond life’s seemingly disconnected fragments, there existed a vast, hidden reality. But what was it? Whatever it was, I was going to find out.
Shortly after this experience, I read Dr. Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing. Two points blew me away. The first was that the quadrillions of atoms that comprise everything, including us, are 99.9% empty space. Empty Space! I tried putting one hand through the other since they’re both “empty space.” Well, it didn’t work. The second point was a mind-bending account of a person who’d received a heart transplant and then started experiencing memories that were someone else’s. The origins of the memories was later verified by the heart donor’s family.
“So,” I thought, “heart cells hold memories that can be transplanted! That’s serious interconnectedness!” In the 99.9% empty space that made up my brain, I heard a voice saying, “Go there!“
But WHERE was “there”?
Around that time, my martial arts and body-building led me to a chiropractor’s office. I went from walking in like the Hunchback of Notre Dame to walking out like Chuck Norris.
And that’s when it hit me:
“Chiropractic equals body/mind healing! Is chiropractic the “there” I’m looking for?”
The thought of me being the first doctor in my family was like having to climb Mt. Everest. Chiropractic school required the completion of a three-year, full-time, pre-med program. But I was an “I-want-it-yesterday” kind of guy. So I attended two pre-med programs (neither knowing about the other) and completed my prerequisite in a year and a half instead of three. How I got through Organic Chemistry Two before completing Organic Chemistry One had several of my colleagues scratching their heads.
Fast forward to me, 3000 miles away, in L. A dissecting a corpse. Turns out that memorizing every muscle, nerve, bone, and organ, first anatomically, then under a microscope, was what I experienced in chiropractic school. Sure, I got a great medical education (and can cut through a lot of today’s medical headlines), but chiropractic had lost its connection to our innate animating spirit. It wasn’t the “there” I was seeking. So I looked elsewhere.
I studied Raja Yoga with an Indian monk, Chi Healing with Master John Bacey, Martial Arts with Sensei Steve Picone, Tantra with Charles Muir; at school, I’d walk Into labs with my headset on, listening to Dr. Wayne Dyer’s OM Is The Sound of Creation.
A kaleidescope of cosmologies! It was like a window had opened up in my brain!
I’d just completed my second year when I attended a guest-speaker event. The room was overfilled and in walks this ultra-skinny, goofy-looking dude wearing an expensive-ass, Armani suit. I figured this doc would be another bore telling us how to make money.
But within minutes, Dr. John Demartini invoked the name of Gottfried Leibnitz, the co-creator of calculus. Except Demartini was talking about metaphysics, Leibnitz’s belief in a “divine perfection and order in the universe.” Both Leibnitz and Newton, Dr. Demartini explained, were attempting to define the undefinable. My math-teacher father taught me calculus, but he never told me that.
Dr. Demartini then shared that as a child he’d been diagnosed as “dyslexic.” His response was to go on to eventually read over 30,600 books – the equivalent of approximately 299 Ph.D.’s.
Being a walking encyclopedia, Dr. Demartini took us on a magical mystery tour of all knowledge – from east to west, from philosophy and religion to physics and poetry. From Buddha to the Z-Boson to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. A kaleidoscope of cosmologies! It was like a window had opened up in my brain!
Sure, we were firehosed with facts and data, but it all added up. It all coalesced. All my life, I’d had intuitive glimpses of an underlying oneness. Now I saw it in the idea that there exists a universal principle. And that principle can be distilled into a single word: Equilibrium.
Friggin’ equilibrium!
It’s all around us. It underlies all laws of physics. It’s the “homeostasis” that regulates all organs and cells.
And it applies to how we live our lives. Suddenly, the Middle Way of Buddhism had new meaning. Ditto, the Yin and the Yang. Also the words, “A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap; a time to kill, and a time to heal.”
Now, at the time of Dr. Demartini’s lecture, I was about to begin my clinical residency – in nine months, I’d be a doctor. But I was just presented with a universal principle that gave me a deep sense of connection – and blew my mind. I’d also just heard the smartest person I’d ever met in my life. Yet, outside a few, albeit elite, circles, few people knew who Dr. Demartini was. Well, I was gonna change that!
I’d already worked as a telemarketer selling all kinds of stuff, including seminars. I am, as you’ll soon learn, a born entrepreneur. I have a way of creating businesses around things that inspire me.
I dropped out of chiropractic school to promote and host Dr. Demartini’s seminars, and to be his traveling partner and protegee.
From 1995 to 2005, I worked with Dr. Demartini, hosting events and traveling with him throughout North America. We held these events at four and five-star hotels — with after-parties in presidential suites or on pool rooftops like rockstars!
But getting back to equilibrium — as we traveled, I learned that that it not only extended into quantum mechanics andit became apparent to me that Dr. Demartini’s theory linking quantum theory and consciousness was destined to reform mental health.
The entire universe consists of two classes of particles, fermions, and bosons.
Electrons, protons, and neutrons — the particles I learned about in high school — are all of the fermion class. Fermions all have opposite or anti-particle versions of themselves. And no two fermions can exist in the same place at the same time.
Bosons, the other class of particles, do not have opposites the way fermions do. And here’s the important point: an infinite number of bosons can exist in the same space at once.
Friggin’ equilibrium is EVERYWHERE!
Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar, Steven Covey, Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson, Les Brown, Larry Thompson – this was the 1990’s and “personal transformation” was quite the “thing.” And it was obsessed with “positive thinking.”
That’s where Demartini was an outlier. As a business builder and promoter, I saw in us the potential disrupter an industry. We were NOT into “positive thinking.” We were proponents of balanced thinking.
Today, you’ll see tons of media on “make friends with your dark side,” “appreciate your failures,” “make friends with depression,” and so forth. But we were, I believe, the first to say it. And in the 1990’s, if you were promoting transformation, balanced thinking was heresy.