On February 3, 1962 at Madison Square Garden, John Uelses became the first pole vaulter in the world to clear sixteen feet.
Some fool of a photographer rushed forward to get a good shot and bumped the standard, knocking down the bar. Next day in Boston John repeated the feat without the photographer, showing that it wasn't just a fluke. Two weeks later in Louisville he couldn't even clear fourteen feet!
Again in 1962, Arnold Palmer played at the British Open in Troon, Scotland. His qualifying round was a splendid 67 strokes. During that Open he established all kinds of records and won the tournament by four strokes. Ten days later in the Professional Golfer's Association championship he ended up in seventeenth place, ten strokes behind the leader.
In athletics particularly there is ample evidence of the 'on' days and 'off' days phenomenon that seems to require an explanation.
The same pattern occurs in reviewing accident statistics and complications occurring after operations. The performance of students in examinations shows similar fluctuations, apparently due to some regular cyclic fluctuation in the intellectual abilities.
Close study of what seems to be a special case of the rhythmic patterns in nature indicates that there are some simple arithmetical cycles involved.
The initial research on the matter was done independently by the Austrian psychologist Dr. Swoboda and a German physician Dr. Fliess in the ten years from 1895 to 1905. Both wrote in German. Both discovered from examining hundreds of records that there was a definite, medically observable periodicity in fevers, heart attacks, pain from insect bites, anxiety of mothers about their babies, recurrence of melodies and ideas in the mind and many factors found by keen and thorough observations. Both men found the same 23 and 28 day cycles in human behavior and experience.
Swoboda's first book was The Periodicity in Man's Life. He invented a most ingenious slide rule for use by doctors to help them calculate very quickly the critical days for their patients. He died in 1963, at the age of ninety, still working on this matter, and very much honored by the University of Vienna where he was a professor, and by the city which gave him a gold medal for his work in the rhythms of life.
His most profound work was a 576 page book that analysed the effect of the 23 and 28 day cycles through family generations using hundreds of family trees, and data on the major events in the lives of those families.
Three hundred miles away in Berlin the nose, and throat specialist and researcher Fliess had come to the same conclusions in his 564 page book, The Course of Life. He wrote three other large books on the subject and gave many lectures about how to use this knowledge to benefit patients. By going back over generations of well documented families Fliess was able to show a simple mathematical relationship among the historical events of the family.
He concluded that the 23 day cycle, now called the Physical cycle was a masculine rhythm and the 28 day cycle, now called the Emotional cycle was a feminine rhythm. Both occur in everyone.
The gynecologist George Riebold said in 1942 that the Fliess rhythms had been incorporated into modern concepts of gynecology. So how has practical use been made of these discoveries and of the more recently discovered 33 day intellectual cycle?
The cogent fact about these cycles is that they can be mapped along a straight line representing the number of days in the month.
In the 28 day cycle for instance, it has been shown that for half of that period the emotional energy could be labeled as extraverted, outer directed, and for half of it the energy is inner directed. There is a curve like a semicircle above the date line, that continues into a curve like a semicircle below the line. The day the curve crosses the date line is an emotional crossover.
The same is true for the 23 day physical cycle and the 33 day mental cycle. On the 23 day cycle there is a period of poor coordination and a lowering of resistance to physical stimuli. On the emotional crossover day there is the emotional equivalent; sudden changes in emotional energy that don't seem related to any real circumstances. On the intellectual crossover the mind seems to hit a molasses point and mental confusion arises.
These are NOT predictors of doom and gloom. They are like the weather forecasts that sailors in sailing boats take notice of.
If you know that an intellectual crossover may affect about 20 minutes of your day next Wednesday, then you don't schedule important mental work for that day. If you have to do it then forewarned is forearmed, and you observe your mental state without diving into a self-fulfilling prophecy of brain tumor or Alzheimer’s. You know it is temporary.
The athletes who are fortunate enough to compete on days when both their physical and emotional curves are way above the line will do better than when they are not. But they won't take any notice of the doom and gloom critics who pan their performance on a day when the curves are below the line, as evidence that they are past it.
When I had to have cataract surgery I insisted on having the operation on a day when every curve was above the line. The surgeon was astonished at the speed of the healing.
In Switzerland, where airline pilots were not allowed to fly on the days when they had a physical crossover the minor accident rates due to pilot error fell by some 70% In the same country Dr. Wehrli, in his book Biorhythm, testified that he had used the arithmetic for fifteen years to select the best days for operations. He performed over 10,000 operations without a single failure or complication. Where biorhythms are not taken into account, the same operations have a 30 to 60 percent rate of complications.
When biorhythm theory was applied in the Kyoto Transport System there was an immediate reduction of 40% in the accident rate and a great deal of money saved in property damages. Thousands of Japanese companies provide a monthly biorhythm chart with the employee's pay check and warn them of days when they must take extra care. The Nagahama Transport division of the Omi Railway did this and established a totally accident free record over 4 million kilometers. The Meiji Bread Company cut their annual vehicle accident rate by 45% and saved 3.5 million yen the year they began using the charts. It is fascinating to chart the careers of mental and physical athletes and seeing the biorhythms working.
Bobbie Fischer's winning chess matches are remarkable in the way that in so many tournaments the days off play coincide with his low mental curves or crossovers.
Boxers' careers seem to follow the curves almost exactly, and even crimes show a correlation, with many famous assassinations occuring at critical mental points for the man with the gun.
Biorhythms have been used to enhance the probability of the birth of a boy or girl. It appears that at a high point in the physical 23 day cycle a condition of alkalinity in the blood of the mother-to-be is in evidence, and this makes her ovum more receptive to the Y cells and the conception of a male child. The high emotional cycle tends to a condition of acidity, in the woman when the egg preferentially accepts X cells and produces a girl.
We at The Ministry all use biorhythms for our scheduling. We never use them to forecast what the day will bring. That produces a self-fulfilling prophecy in credulous people and is one of the problems associated with telling such people about biorhythms. Fortune telling it isn't.
If we feel confused, or not quite up to par, the first thing we do is check our biorhythms. More often than not we find a crossover, so we DO NOT IDENTIFY with the apparent problem. We don't give ourselves suggestions of impending colds or mental problems. We know that whatever is going on is a natural consequence of the change of some internal rhythm and that the adjustment will be over in an hour or less.
Many road accidents occur when the physical crossover is combined with a high emotional curve. The enthusiasm and optimistic attitude doesn't match the physical coordination, with obvious results.
The very best way to find your own biorhythms is to print them out on your computer if you have one.
We looked at many programs that do this, and one of the least expensive that also happens to have the best printouts and the most options is the one put out by John Halloran, whose astrological software is a masterpiece of accuracy and ease of use. Find http://www.halloran.com and look at the biorhythm section. The one we use costs less than $30 and like all Halloran products has an enormous range of many centuries.
I use it for fascinating insights into some of the incidents in history. You can tell a lot more about about famous incidents when you know that one person was on top form intellectually and the other was feeling optimistic but not in a good state for intellectual analysis, and so on throughout history.
Douglas Buchanan Vol I ,Tid-Bits article # 11
