Life Cycles-The First Lesson

This is a different post. I'm not featuring any famous or well-publicised people as teaching devices. No, this is a time for reflection on my previous eleven posts. Oh and of course it is a time to tell an unknown story.....my own! You know the vast majority of Revolution Year events happen in seemingly less significant ways. But that's only because our lives aren't written about much. It doesn't mean that my life isn't interesting as is yours. All lives are interesting! All Revolutions touch the person concerned in a fundamental way.

OK, so what happened to me when I was 36? Was I a bit like Napoleon? You don't think so? Read on. Leading up to this birthday I had been a management consultant employed by an international firm with a well-known pedigree. I had started to take a real interest in the largely unknown field of outplacement. Unknown at the time in Australia that is. Back then there were only two providers one in each of our two biggest cities. I put forward a business plan for our firm to get into it, including pinching a dissatisfied member of the rival firm's team. But I had a major problem in organisation life. I was too much of a 'one-outer', not a good 'brown noser' and my director told me "no" and said:- "that's like retreading old tyres". Then to my horror I saw a newly arrived older consultant, lunching this same director and announcing:- "I'm going to set up outplacement complete with an overseas study tour and a budget".

Well I was furious and discussed it at home. My wife said:- "Why don't you just go into business yourself". And very soon after with little preparation I did. I felt pretty let down by the whole thing. It was my "Trafalgar" moment. There I was doing bits and pieces of work when a colleague from another firm, who had gone into business at the same time told me of a colleague of his, in executive search, who was a friend of the principal of the leading UK outplacement company. Talk about six degrees of separation! I was put in contact with this person, who it turned out wanted to establish an Australian franchise. Well I had to dig deep and put my house on the line, but guess what I did and the rest as they say is history.

It was to be the start of my major career as I built the business from nothing to be a major player in this emerging market. And yes bigger than my old employer's operation. Such a moment has not happened before or since in my life. I answered the call and I won my own personal "Battle of Austerlitz". When I was in the middle of it, it didn't feel comfortable and it was definitely fateful. I wasn't in control. Now don't tell me any other theory can adequately explain this. It simply can't.

So what is the first lesson? Think about it carefully. It's in twelve parts (one for each post). Not a wasted word. In fact the whole blog symbolises the theory. Don't worry I'll teach you how later.

OK. The Year of Revolution is something you get every twelve years. It starts with birth (the greatest revolution of all) and happens again at 12,24,36,48.60 etc. Often the important mid-life age of 36 features strongly and sometimes 24 and 48, but and listen closely:- " all Revolutions are equal". They all involve important change ushered in through upheaval. At this time fateful events occur and we are not fully in control. They are symbolically equivalent to re-birth. You do not have to die to come to the next incarnation. You get a version of it when you're alive.

I know this is new and different and that people generally like the stories but are not sure of the whole theory. Well I didn't come across this to hide it under a bushel. No I came to share it with you all. This is not "the wisdom of the ancients". You are receiving it right now in your lifetime, from one of your peers.

My next post commences the next cycle, which will be full of interesting stories and lives of celebrities in meltdown and of course your next icon. Stay tuned and until then:- "may the cycles always bring you good fortune".

Napoleon-The Ultimate Revolution

We're going back in time and I want you to experience the whole thing. Put on an overcoat, line up some toy soldiers, put your hand inside your shirt, play some military music and turn your baseball cap sideways. Now look at yourself in the mirror. Yes, you are Napoleon! I want you to feel what he felt. He is the embodiment of Life Cycles. Once you know his story you will forever know the theory.

It's 1805 and Napoleon turned 36 on 15th August. So we're concerned with events taking place from then till 15th August 1806. Now who knows their history? If I was to have talked with Napoleon on 20th October 1805 he would have told me of his grand plan to break the British naval blockade and then to mount a huge invasion across the English Channel and so capture the island nation and rule the seas. He was in fact so confident of victory he had commemorative medallions struck beforehand. His combined French and Spanish fleet under Admiral Pierre Villeneuve was numerically superior. It would take a bold move by the British to put it under pressure.

But this is no ordinary year for him. No, he is in his major mid-life year of Revolution and upheavals and surprises are the order of the day. What happened next was extraordinary. At 11.00am on 21st October Admiral Nelson ordered his ships drawn up in two parallel columns, which was an unorthodox manoeuvre. Outnumbered and outgunned 30,000 men to 17,000 and with six less ships, they produced the greatest British naval victory ever at the Battle of Trafalgar. The French-Spanish fleet lost 22 ships without a single British ship lost.

Napoleon would never rule Britannia or the seas. He wasn't aware however that his enemies Russia and Austria were preparing an assault on France, if he had taken his army across the Channel. This defeat now left him the chance to adjust his strategy and turn on Britain's allies instead. A lesser man would have been crushed, but Napoleon was a military genius.

Can you not see how 'out of control' of events he was even though he quickly saw an opportunity. This is the Revolutionary upheaval par excellence. What happened next was even more extraordinary than Trafalgar.

Now we flash forward to Dec. 2nd 1805, and Napoleon and his grand armee are facing the combined forces of the Austrian and Russian Emperors at Austerlitz in modern day Czech Republic. Days before he had given the impression his army was weak and that he desired a negotiated peace. He deliberately weakened his right flank to encourage an attack. Meanwhile he ordered troops march 110 kms (70 miles) from Vienna in 48hrs. for support, which proved crucial. The Allies marched right into his trap. As soon as they left the Pratzen Heights, Napoleon ordered his troops waiting in the valley below under cover of a thick fog to advance. As he passed by, his troops waved their hats at the ends of their bayonets and their shouts of "Vive L'Empereur" gave the signal for the battle to begin. Suddenly the sun burst through the fog at 8.00 am to reveal Napoleon's troops on top of the enemy. This was the famous "Sun of Austerlitz". Books have been written just about this. Check it out some time.

It was to be Napoleon's greatest moment. What followed next was something very rare in military history :- a complete and total defeat of one army by another in one day. It would scare many a foe from ever taking the field against him. It effectively handed control of Europe over to him with the surrender of the Austrian Emperor and the flight of the Russian Emperor. Never a more career-defining moment than this!

Now consider this. With Life Cycles I don't require you to believe in what I'm saying. It's a well-established fact. It all happened at age 36 in his important year of Revolution. I have the theory based on other case histories, but I substantiate it against well proven historical and sometimes recent facts.

Why do I write of Napoleon? "What has this got to do with me?" I hear you ask. "Nothing - that's what! I didn't conquer Europe, I wasn't defeated by Admiral Nelson! I live in the real world for God's sake." Well I'm here to tell you're wrong! You better believe it. Every life has a 'Sun of Austerlitz' and a 'Trafalgar' moment in it. We all triumph from the ashes in our own way. I wouldn't say it if I couldn't find supporting evidence from a confidential survey of my friends and associates given in Chapter Ten. Their stories are your stories if you know what I mean. I'll share my story with you next month. Yes true as you are reading this I say that you will be "swept away" twice in a symbolic sense in your Year of Revolution. I say it clearly:- "You are Napoleon and he is you!"

And this wasn't because Napoleon was a bombastic Leo with this and that angle in the heavens. It wasn't because he had a life path number of 1 or because he manifested the outcome in a 'Law of Attraction' manner. They all require you to accept the unprovable. Do constellations affect our personality? Are numbers really magic? Can you simply wish it or will it so? You'll never get any proof!

I am a voice from the wilderness. I am new and I am different. I only exist because I offer you proof. OK, so if we examined Napoleon's previous year of Revolution at age 24 would we find evidence of a related kind:- namely a superior strategic military victory? You bet I can! And not only was it similar but it happened around the same time in that year as it did in his 36th year. If you ask me I'll do a separate blog on this.

No-one and I repeat no-one has ever analysed life this way before. Keep tuned in to the blog that will one day change the course of history. Next month I'm going to draw this together and may even talk about myself a bit. Until then:- "May the cycles always bring you good fortune."

Will civilization 'as we know it' end on Dec. 21, 2012?

If I type in '2012 blogs' to Google, it brings up a staggering 261,000,000 items. Now they may not all be individual blogs, but it would be safe to say if you hadn't heard about all the gloom and doom merchants you're probably 'living under a rock!' So the big question is:- "Will it happen?" I've got to say straight up that I don't know anymore than anyone else. It may all happen Dec. 21, 2012, or it may happen May 6, 2010, or Jan. 4, 2025 or April 12, 2130. But the odds on it or any other 'end of world' scenario being correct are infinitesimally small.

So let's examine the main claim together:- that of the Mayan calendar. Wikipedia has an exhaustive article on the Mayan calendar, that falls in the 'too much information' basket, but it does say and I quote :- " Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. Dec. 21st is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun. But that is not the end of the Long Count, because the 14th through 20th b'ak'tuns are still to come. Sandra Noble, executive director of Mesoamerican research...considers the portrayal of Dec 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic shift event to be 'a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in'. " Elsewhere I read that the modern day Mayans consider this claim to be laughable and ridiculous and just an example of Western society hijacking their history.

So mathematically speaking there is no basis at all to speculate on the odds of this because the data is incorrect. But that doesn't stop people speculating. Remember when those planes were going to fall out of the sky when all the computers failed on Jan. 1, 2000? Or the myriad previous end of world scenarios. The only part of this that is correct is that on Dec. 22, 2012 those blogs will either disappear or produce some new date.

OK, now what has all this got to do with Life Cycles? Why do I care? The answer is I only care because my carefully assembled research means the complete reverse to the 2012 theories. Namely the possibility of my case histories happening by chance alone is equally infinitesimally small!

Read all my blog entries for 2009. I welcome you to check and double check what I say (because that's exactly what I do before I write). Now if I say to you that for many people (but obviously not for all) there is a very significant Revolution Year when they are 36, then I must be able to point to examples (and sometimes examples of age 24 and age 48 revolutions).Read Chapter Three of Life Cycles as I take famous historical figures and produce evidence. Look for yourselves at Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Winston Churchill, Hitler and JFK. I didn't comb through a list of dozens or hundreds to get these I just read one summary after another. That's right every single case I studied is in there. Think about it. Do you think it a mere coincidence that Alan Alda began the MASH series at 36 or Jerry Seinfeld began The Seinfeld Show or Edward Woodward began Callan? Or David Frost who was at a major crossroads as shown in Frost/Nixon or Jerry Lewis who filmed his number one movie "The Nutty Professor" or Frank Sinatra whose career got resurrected from the ashes and I could go on and on and on.

Come on:- "you do the maths!" What chance do I have of being correct? Is it 1 year out of 70 (the biblical allotment)? Or 1 out of 30 (an average number of adult productive years)? Or is it simply 1 out of 12 (because I say every 12 years there is a revolution in your life)?

I don't care what you pick because I've just listed 15 consecutive examples and the chances of me getting it right by guesswork would be 12 to power of 15 or 1 in 1,540,702,160,000,000. Now the chance of getting dealt a Royal Flush in spades in a 5 card game of poker is 1 in 2,598,960. A lot smaller but still pretty big (as a poker player I've never been dealt one). What do you want to put your money on? :- Dec 21, 2012 (with immeasurably small odds) or something that is 592,814,880 times more certain than the possibility of getting dealt a Royal Flush?

I rant like this because I care that you should not be led by the nose. I'm the first person to say exactly this, but just because I'm a small voice doesn't mean you shouldn't listen. I'll be back next month with arguably the mightiest single Revolution Year of all. Don't miss it and until then:-"May the cycles always bring you good fortune".

Half Man, Half Tree- But One Incredible Revolution

Dede Koswara the Indonesian "tree man" has been written about and filmed extensively over the last couple of years. For those who don't know his story you can check it out on You Tube. He suffers from an extremely rare disease, whereby his body can't prevent the continual spreading of the common wart virus, which manifests in ugly tree-like growths on his hands and feet and warts over much of his body.

It had reduced him to the only job he could get, in a circus 'freak show'. He couldn't work as a fisherman or look after his two children and his wife left him. If things could be worse you would have a hard time thinking of how. His plight was captured on film for the Discovery Channel and an American dermatologist Dr. Anthony Gaspari saw it one night and became fascinated. The documentary team took him to Indonesia to meet Dede and he sent samples back for testing in the lab. He said:- "I've never seen anything like it in my life".

I also became fascinated by his case, but not for medical reasons. I saw a TV show "My Shocking Story" and the opening line got me in:- "36 year old fisherman Dede...". This whole unfolding episode 'Part 2 Tree Man, The Cure' was about what happened in this one man's important year of revolution. Remember there are two elements to the revoltuion. The first is that it is an upheval and the commencement of a new 12 year cycle and often this age 36 cycle coming as it does in mid-life, brings the most important changes. Secondly and this is equally important:-"as we experience it we are not fully in control of the outcomes". Fateful events can occur. The wheel is in spin and you are that roulette ball for 12 months. Life Cycles is brand new, totally different and has the most dramatic and statistically significant case history evidence supporting it. Don't think Dede's life isn't the same as your life, if you know what I mean.

Anyway back to the story. Dr. Gaspari wants to try a drug regime with a Vitamin A base. However the Indonesian Government did not like him sending samples to the US and wouldn't allow Dede to be taken there for treatment either. There is a clash of national pride here with the President of Indonesia personally involved. He orders Dede to be taken to hospital and that local doctors operate to get rid of the warts.

Now there is a constant media scrum at the hospital with every move reported. Dede feels alone and scared. Dr. Gaspari wants to join the Indonesian doctors and get involved but there is resistance. He knows surgery alone won't work. Then there is an about-face and Dr. Gaspari gets invited over and discusses a new treatment option involving chemotherapy. The local doctors want to do a skin graft, but Gaspari convinces them to hold off till he gets the chemotherapy drugs.

The wheel is spinning so hard it's difficult to keep pace. Unfortuneatly this is not Hollywood and Gaspari can't get the drugs in time and the difficult and dangerous skin graft goes ahead, with results looking bad. Now another twist and the chemo drugs arrive post-op and it looks like the combination will work. Dede is presented to the world as 90% cured of this terrible disease. He even gets a female admirer who contacts him and he says he wants to marry her.

I don't want to leave a stone unturned so I combed the net to find out what has happened since. The best I can come up with is that Dede's warts have grown back somewhat and a further operation happened at the beginning of the year. So it's not a complete fairytale, but I'm sure you can agree it's one incredible year in this man's life that turned the world media spotlight on and involved a President and a leading US medical expert.

Don't worry I'll be back next month with a complete change of pace and the most dramatic evidence yet of what it's like to live in a Year of Revolution. Till then :-"may the cycles always bring you good fortune".

The Revolution that almost changed the course of History.

Some of you may be familiar with the movie "Valkyrie" starring Tom Cruise. For those who haven't seen it, I recommend you watch one of the You Tube promos and even if you have seen it a while back, it's good to refresh your memory with sight and sound. You see the most important element of this movie is that it's a true story. I saw it last year on a long haul flight to the US and then immediately afterwards watched a historical re-enactment, complete with interviews of survivors, on the Discovery Channel. This confirmed for me just how accurate the movie version was.

"Valkyrie" depicts the 20 July 1944 plot by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler, take control of the country and surrender to allied forces. The chief proponent of this idea was Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg, who remembered an emergency plan known as Operation Valkyrie. After killing Hitler this would see the Reserve Army used to arrest the SS and Party elite.

It is Von Stauffenberg who has the bomb at Hitler's Eastern front headquarters, known as the Wolf's Lair. On July 15 he is there, but is ordered to go ahead too late because Himmler isn't present. So again on July 20 Von Stauffenberg is at the Wolf's Lair with two bombs and a pencil detonator. He has to feign a need to change his shirt to do the detonation, but since he only has one arm he just gets time to complete a single bomb. He carefully leans it against the main table support close to where Hitler is sitting. Why all this detail?

Well if so many things had just gone right then Hitler would have been killed. Probably on July 15; certainly if two bombs were detonated and again had his briefcase not accidentally fallen over and been moved to a location further from Hitler, then it would have worked. Why was this so important? Why ultimately should we care so much?

Well the answer is that Hitler lived, the July 20 plotters were arrested and shot and WW2 in Europe dragged on until June 6th, 1945. Now it is a fact of history that in the last year of the war there were more deaths and casualties, military and civilian, than in the entire preceeding period. Around 600 cities and towns were wholly or partly destroyed by bombing. Millions would have lived! It would have drastically changed the course of history. Unfortuneately the German people were associated with Hitler to the end and not with the decent Von Stauffenberg and the generals who were with him. No wonder Von Stauffenberg is taught in German schools and hailed a hero.

Why did I write all this? What has this got to do with "Life Cycles"? Well it has everything to do with Life Cycles. How old do you think Von Stauffenberg was when all these momentous events happened? Was he 28, or 32, or 35, or 39, or 44? No the most important Revolution year for many people and their career-defining crossraods is 36. Von Stauffenberg was 36! Check it out for yourselves. His Revolution year almost changed the course of history. Instead it only emboldened Adolf Hitler, who saw this as a sure sign the gods were with him.

I analyse Adolf Hitler in Chapter 3 along with many famous historical figures. However only those who read all of "Life Cycles" can possibly know exactly how it predicts Hitler's reaction to his lucky escape."Life Cycles" is both disarmingly simple, highly statistically significant and yet so complex, that it will take you 12 years to really grasp it. Check it out at the web page. Remember you're never going to see this anywhere else. And if you think I can't top this article, well you better keep posted for the next!