Many people today are feeling despondent about the state of the economy. It’s clear that their real needs are being ignored by well-off politicians with free health care and assured future income, and the fact that if they actually have a job they are doing twice as much as usual because of lay-offs and the blackmail of ‘Do it or you’re next out.’

In such an atmosphere of induced fear and despair it is important to distinguish the real problems, physical, emotional and mental, from those that occur naturally in the body and can be misinterpreted by someone in a low state of mind. So educate yourself about biorhythms. Everyone has them, rich or poor, old or young, and knowing when they are occurring will give you a clue about the importance of your current feelings. Here’s a little historical summary to show you that this is not superstitious nonsense and how other countries use this knowledge to help their workers and their public.

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 above the date line that continues into a curve below the line. The day the curve crosses the date line is an emotional crossover. The emotional crossover occurs twice in the cycle, as the curve goes up and as it goes down.

The same is true for the 23 day physical cycle and the 33 day mental cycle. On the 23 day cycle there are two short periods 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.

Have you heard of any American company doing this?

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.

When the current situation seems to be getting you down more than usual, physically, emotionally or mentally, check your biorhythms. You may find yourself right at a crossover or two and then you will know that your problem is body chemistry and will be fixed within the hour.

Sometimes there will be two crossovers on the same day. For instance, 23 x 28 is 644, so every 644 days you will have a physical and emotional crossover on the same day. Same applies to physical intellectual, emotional intellectual and so on. On these days when for a while you are being unusually clumsy, or despondent, or angry, or all three for no apparent reason, you can check and see that the world isn’t conspiring against you. It’s just a cyclic change of body chemistry, probably over within an hour.

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. There are many download free ones on the Web now. Of those that cost, 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 cost less than $30 and like all Halloran products has an enormous range of many centuries and right on the button accuracy. You can also use it to compare the biorthyms of two people to check at least their body chemistry compatability, but that is more problematical and needs interpretation. The straight three cycles calculations don't need anything except your knowing when they occur.

I use biorhythms for fascinating insights into some of the incidents in history. You can tell a lot more 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. We use ours here for trips too. We always take a set of printouts with us for the time period so we know whether what is happening is due to where we are or body chemistry.

For those of you coming up to age 58 check your biorhythms for the year. About 58 years after birth the 23, 28, and 33 cycles coincide on one day. A triple crossover. It will be good to know that day so that you don’t misinterpret what seems to be happening as a permanent meltdown. Next day will definitely be crossover free and for days after.
Happy Trails along your own curves. May literally be a life saver if you know about them.