Life Cycles: Coincidences

By Neil Killion

Life Cycles - Coincidences is the fourth book in Neil Killions' series on the ground-breaking new theory of life in 12-year cycles based on detailed biographical analysis and not related to the occult.

If you have ever thought about coincidences and were just a bit curious about them, then Neil welcomes you to ‘The Third Way’ to look at the subject.

This is unlike any other book written on the subject of coincidences instead it takes a unique approach to the ongoing debate about the laws of chance determining all coincidences versus some other form of explanation.

Neil explores a range of disciplines and topic areas including, celebrities, royalty, novelists, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy and theoretical physics to name a few.

By incorporating email correspondence and broadcast dialogue transcripts into his in-depth statistical validation studies, Neil provides an entertaining analysis of some of the most historic people and events that seeks to question what you know.

While each of Neil's books cover a different aspect, of theory and explores its place in the wider world of both developmental psychology and philosophy, they are backed up by several hundred blog and related articles usually featuring case histories.

The “Life Cycles Theory” has over 50 unique and easy to understand terms and icons. It has its own method of analysis and form of prediction, but it is not related to the occult in any of its many forms. Neither is it derived from astrology or numerology or any ancient or modern esoteric ideas, rather it is derived from the work of the adult developmental psychologist, Daniel Levinson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Killion
• Release date: May 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463505816

Neil Killion

Neil Killion is a psychologist and former management consultant, who for around twenty years founded and ran his own outplacement company in Sydney, Australia. In this time he interviewed thousands of redundant employees from a wide range of organisations and slowly made several key observations regarding major change in people's lives and just a few key years. He eventually turned this into a brand new theory of life. This represents a significant new addition to knowledge with its own terms, icons, research methods and form of prediction. The theory is known simply as “Life Cycles”.He has written four books (Life Cycles, 2008; The Life Cycles Revolution, 2013; Life Cycles - Relationships, 2018; Life Cycles - Coincidences). All four books are multi-award winners and his average review rating is 4.5/5.0. He is the winner of the Silver Medal, Philosophy and Religion at the Readers Favourite Awards. What makes this theory different to all others is that it is fact-based, using detailed biographical analysis and is thus scientifically-oriented and not a belief system. He has conducted numerous statistical validation studies in support his claims.Neil continues to research and write on “Life Cycles” and has written several hundred blog and related articles, including a guest article in Psychology Today, which has over 8,000 views.

Book preview

Life Cycles – Coincidences

DISCOVER DESTINY’S TIMELINE

LEARN THE THIRD WAY

Neil Killion

Copyright Neil Killion. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

Life Cycles Publications,

Sydney, Australia.

Contact:- info@[e-mail]

Smashwords Edition

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

William Shakespeare

THE LIFE CYCLES SERIES

There are now four books in this series about a ground-breaking new theory of life in 12 year cycles based on detailed biographical analysis and not related to the occult. Each book covers a different aspect of the theory and explores its place in the wider world of both developmental psychology and philosophy. 

However, each book builds on those that precede it and can be read as one continuous narrative. Each book is also based on a twelve-part structure of ten chapters, along with a prologue and epilogue. This is meant to directly mirror the 12 year theory in its form and content. The books are the very embodiment of the theory, as I have expressed in The Life Cycles Revolution. 

This even includes my feelings of not being fully in control of the outcome until I actually begin to write. They are also meant to be cyclical in nature, because I always encourage readers to go back and reread sections to get a better understanding of all my revolutionary ideas.

The series in order is,

1 - Life Cycles (2008)

2 - The Life Cycles Revolution (2012)

3 - Life Cycles - Relationships (2018)

4 - Life Cycles - Coincidences (2020)

These books are backed up by several hundred blog and related articles usually featuring case histories. Since my theory is entirely evidence-based, my task has been to conduct as many and varied tests of validity and reliability as I could. 

Life Cycles Theory has over 50 unique and easy to understand terms and icons. It has its own method of analysis and form of prediction. Yet I am at pains to point out that it is not related to the occult in any of its many forms. It is not derived from astrology or numerology or any ancient or modern esoteric ideas, which I reject categorically. If anything, it is derived from the work of the adult developmental psychologist, Daniel Levinson. I also have much to say about the exact nature of fate, destiny and the eternal philosophical debate between free will and determinism.

Neil Killion is a psychologist and former management consultant, who founded and ran his own specialist Outplacement company for around 20 years in Sydney, Australia. He is one of the local pioneers in this field and his clients represented many leading Australian and international firms and government organisations. 

It was as a result of conducting a study on some of his candidates that he made an unusual finding, which has uncovered a brand new method of understanding and analysing lives. He gave this the name Life Cycles because it involves important changes happening on the basis of a 12 year symbolic cycle.

Since 2008, he has published four books and several hundred blog and related articles, building a large volume of biographical evidence to support his claims. His theory is unique and is unrelated to any other published works and to date his validation studies have never been effectively challenged by skeptical organisations.

Winner Literary Titan Gold Award - For books found to be perfect in their delivery of original content, meticulous development and elegant prose.

This book has the quality that pulls the reader’s interest and absorbs them in the subject matter. I was engrossed with this book within the first five pages. 

"Life Cycles – Coincidences is recommended for anyone who might be curious about life, achievements, failures, pain, joy and everything in between."

Midwest Book Review 

It's one thing to have these stories peppered in diverse accounts over the decades; but juxtaposing them side-by-side, complete with statistical evidence for life cycles and their accompanying coincidental qualities, makes for thoroughly engrossing, thought-provoking reading. 

 "Anyone interested in exploring the framework that underlies life's progression and choices will find intriguing, accessible, and absorbing the theory and examples packed into Life Cycles – Coincidences."

LIFE CYCLES - COINCIDENCES

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE - A BRIEF HISTORY OF COINCIDENCES

CHAPTER TWO - SOME COINCIDENCE EXAMPLES

CHAPTER THREE - MEET THE STATISTICIANS

CHAPTER FOUR - MY JOURNEY WITH BERNIE

CHAPTER FIVE - A PAINFUL COINCIDENCE

CHAPTER SIX - CLASSIFYING COINCIDENCES

CHAPTER SEVEN - MEET THE SKEPTICS

CHAPTER EIGHT - MEET THE ACADEMICS

CHAPTER NINE - LIFE CYCLES COINCIDENCES

CHAPTER TEN - THE THIRD WAY

EPILOGUE

LIST OF TECHNICAL TERMS

LIST OF LIFE CYCLES TERMS

TOP 10 PEOPLE OF THE 20th CENTURY LIST

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This book could not have been written without the support and encouragement of Dr. Bernard Beitman. After all, my focus has been on outlining and providing evidence for my own brand new theory of life in twelve year cycles based on detailed biographical analysis. Until I became an interviewee on Bernie’s show Connecting with Coincidence, I did not see myself as joined with the broader community of people who research and provide theories on the general topic of coincidences.

It was only when I confessed to not really having any colleagues withwhom I could discuss my work, that Bernie kindly offered me an opportunity to correspond with him. Further to this, I approached Bernie again and showed him the manuscript where it featured some of the many conversations that we had. I would not have proceeded unless I had his agreement to do this and I told him as much.

We may not be exactly on the same theoretical page, although I amalways at pains to look at where we do intersect. However I do want to acknowledge my debt to him in terms of his generosity of spirit and open-minded approach to this whole fascinating field of study. Also it was shown in his provision for me to do a guest post on his Psychology Today blog which has assisted me in reaching a wider audience.

Finally, I hope that my in-depth exploration of his famous remote choking moment, coinciding with his father’s death by choking, may assist in it becoming a true cause célèbre in the ongoing debate with the statisticians and rationalists, who claim any and all coincidences can be explained by mathematical formulae.

I have also corresponded with Laurence Brown on my material which features him. This even includes my fantasy material from the Epilogue

PROLOGUE

This is unlike any other book written on the subject of coincidences and there have been many. My central aim is to introduce and expand on my now established theory of ‘Life Cycles’ as an additional form of coincidence. Because my theory and methodology is radically different to what others have done, my contribution to the ongoing debate about the laws of chance determining all coincidences, versus some other form of explanation, will be equally unique.

Also the form and structure of the book will be unexpected. I am going to use email correspondence and broadcast dialogue transcripts as part of the text. I am going to present a couple of in-depth statistical validation studies in order to put my money where my mouth is. I am also going to deliberately take an everyman’s view of academic debates; I’m not assuming you have any particular knowledge of the many subjects I introduce. So welcome to this area in which nearly all people have some interest, even if it’s just outright dismissal. You’re going to learn much, but be entertained as you do it.

You’re also going to learn why I call ‘Life Cycles Theory’ the ‘third way’ in this world of endless dichotomies. It’s either them or us is how most proponents see it. I’m going to take exception with both sides and say to them, Hey guys aren’t you missing something? The whole of this narrative can be taken as just one giant case study on ‘Life Cycles’ versus the rest, if you look at how many of their lives will illustrate my theory to a tee.

So just put this book down right now if you already know all about Sertorius, Thomas Browne, Paul Kammerer, Unus Mundus, the second Pauli exclusion principle, David Spiegelhalter, Charles Wells, Joan Ginther, Bonnie McEnearney McNamara, King Umberto I of Italy, Littlewood’s Law, the 5 Laws of Improbability, how J K Rowling invented Harry Potter, the BOOM Age, Alter and Hershfield, how Lady Gaga got her name, Sigmund Freud’s big secret, Gary Schwartz and the shark statue, telesomatic incidents, mirror neurons, The Coincidence Authority, Prince Rohan, Richard Feynman, the Twin Jims, Simulpathity, the Sun of Austerlitz, the Penicillin Story, Technological Determinism, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Dyson Sphere, the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, the Forer Effect, the Zetetic Scholar, ‘Dirty Ding’, the Stead Act, the ‘Big Society’ concept, the Mother Theresa story, Burt Reynolds biggest year, the Mars Effect, the birth of talkback radio in Sydney, the Golden Hoard of Bactria, how Gene Wilder became Willy Wonka, how The Beatles got their recording contract, the Star Trek story, how the ‘Merry Monarch’ became serious, the Goldilocks’ Principle, Rudolph Steiner, Roger Gould, Benjamin Liebert, Schrodinger’s Cat, James Dyson’s 5,126 failed prototypes, the Royal Flying Doctor story, the LeMans Racecourse flight by Wilbur Wright, the ‘Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost’, the White Palace and The Great Belzoni’s secret message.

Now this is a list of 56 fascinating topics, that wouldn’t even cover half of all the true stories that will await you. What’s that? There’s a Beatles fan from Liverpool who swears blind he knows all about The Beatles’ recording contract. He’s even seen them play at The Cavern. Well if he really knows the exact moment and the circumstances under which they got signed ‘I’ll eat my proverbial hat’.

The range of disciplines and topic areas I cover will include, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, neurophysiology, skeptical organisations, history from ancient to modern, statistics, pop culture, fantasy prose, parapsychology, magicians, royalty, celebrity, novelists, famous historical persons and possibly others, as that’s all I could bring to mind when I wrote this.

So get on board for an intriguing journey that is designed for you the general reader with no particular specialties. I am a true iconoclast, as I will challenge every mainstream viewpoint in one way or another. If you have ever thought about coincidences and were just a bit curious about them, then I welcome you to ‘The Third Way’ to look at the subject.

CHAPTER ONE - A BRIEF HISTORY OF COINCIDENCES

Coincidences are as old as time. Aeons ago, long before mankind walked the earth, they were occurring. The natural world is full of such examples, just like thunder following a lightning flash or a rainbow at the end of a shower of rain. Animal instincts are also often based on learning survival skills, by associating avoidance behaviour with certain events that are seen as linked to danger. The smell of a predator or the sound of sudden movement could herald an attack. So, even before mankind began to see much more elaborate associations, there were all sorts of learned coincidences.

Then as we began to inhabit the earth and slowly evolved, we went through an increase in our level of culture and civilisation, which gave us greater leisure time to examine and comment on strange parallels between quite different types of events. Like the presence of a comet in the sky and the death or birth of a king or important person, or that of a solar eclipse and the failure of the annual crops or victory in an important battle. It is little wonder that many ancient civilisations were led to worship a sun god or the like, to help control the future.

Strange parallels between seemingly unrelated events were not just the province of the higher end of society either. Unusual links between occurrences in more ordinary people’s lives, or sometimes between them and their supposed spirit world, were both observed and commented on. This, in its extreme form, gives rise to a fatalistic view of life, as we are seen as the passive recipients of both good and bad fortune, dispensed as the gods see fit. People looked for signs from a god or gods in their lives and hoped the occult world would guide them. Of course, this also gave rise to various superstitions, which held great sway, sometimes right through to the current day.

As well as these anecdotal examples of irrational beliefs, some ancient philosophers and writers thought the whole subject of the widespread presence of coincidences was worth studying and commenting on. One such well-known case was the Roman biographer, Plutarch, who in his discourse on the life of Sertorius opens with a comment on the probability of seemingly rare events, It is perhaps not to be wondered at, since fortune is ever changing her course and time is infinite, that the same incidents should occur many times, spontaneously………...the same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies.

This is as good a non-mathematical summation of the modern-day laws of probability as you would hope to find. He goes on to cite a number of casework examples from his day, ....accidental happenings as look like works of calculation and forethought. They note, for example, that there were two celebrated persons called Attis, one a Syrian, the other an Arcadian, and that both were killed by a wild boar…..there were two Scipios, by one of whom the Carthaginians were conquered in an earlier war, and by the other, in a later war, were destroyed root and branch; that Ilium was taken by Heracles on account of the horses of Laomedon, by Agamemnon by means of what is called the wooden horse, and a third time by Charidemus, because a horse fell in the gateway and prevented the Ilians from closing the gate quickly enough.

Plutarch observed that after-the-fact linking of events that are in some way interesting was necessary for any happenstance to be called a coincidence. Again, this is directly mirroring the modern-day skeptical argument that so-called post-hoc rationalisation can be used to justify almost any outlandish examples of coincidence.

In a more cogent example he went on to cite a number of very successful generals who had only one eye, such as Philip, Antigonus (one of Alexander’s generals) and Hannibal. To that could be added Nelson and the Chinese general Xiahou Dun, who pierced and plucked out one of his eyes with an arrow and ate it on the line of battle to instill terror in his enemies.

I mean, was he on to something here? Does possession of one eye confer superior military skills? Unfortunately this falls over when we consider the wide number of famous two-eyed generals, like Caesar, Napoleon, Patton and so forth. It also has no bearing on a wider list of one-eyed fame in unrelated occupational skills like Oscar-winning actors, Olympic athletes or CEO’s of top corporations. So though one-eyed generals’ is a coincidence, it’s not widespread enough to be truly curious.

The next stage of our journey sees us travel considerably through time in order to see one of the first relatively modern examinations of the phenomenon of coincidences. However, before we do that, we need to ask a more fundamental question, where did the actual term coincidence come from?

The first recorded use of the word coincidence happened around 1605 with the meaning exact correspondence in substance or nature from the French coincider and from the Medieval Latin coincidere. In the 1640’s the definition evolved again into occurrence or existence during the same time.

This was further refined due to the work of Sir Thomas Browne taken from a section of his most famous book Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor). Browne was an English doctor and author whose work reveals a wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. A friend later commented on the now oft-quoted passage, where Browne wrote about the strange coincidence of someone who dies on the same day that they were born.

"It was a striking coincidence that he who in his Letter to a Friend had said that, ‘in persons who out-live many years, and when there are no less than 365 days to determine their lives in every year, that the first day should mark the last, that the tail of the snake should return into its mouth precisely at that time, and that they should wind up upon the day of their nativity, is indeed a remarkable coincidence, which, though astrology hath taken witty pains to solve, yet hath it been very wary in making predictions of it,’ should himself die on the day of his birth." (i.e., showing how it was prophetically true for Browne).

So here we see the use of the term coincidence as a concurrence of events with no apparent connection. Your day of birth is unrelated to your final day. It would be most unusual for these two days to be the same. This was an early example of what Jung later developed into the acausal principle. So, to take a hypothetical example, you notice a strange connection between two events that occur together; such as three birds sitting on a rooftop at the exact moment that a clock strikes three o’clock and they are to all intents and purposes independent of each other. There is thus no apparent connection.

Now the next step in the process of describing coincidence events from a theoretical point of view happened in the early part of the 20th century when an Austrian biologist named Dr. Paul Kammerer began to study groupings of events that have some relationship to each other. He gave this the name, the law of seriality. So let’s take an example he wrote about in his book Das Gesetz der Serie,

"On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive series:

(a) my wife was reading about Mrs Rohan, a character in the novel ‘Michael’ by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she saw a man who looked like her friend, Prince Josef Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in on us.

(b) In the tram she overheard somebody asking the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach at Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram, she went to the delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where the attendant asked her whether she happened to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee - he had to make a delivery by mail and did not know the correct postal address."

I’m sure you are starting to get the picture here. It’s not just three birds on a rooftop at three o’clock, but a whole gamut of unusual events that all seem to be linked to the name ‘Rohan’ or ‘Lake Attersee’. Coincidences seem to be popping up everywhere. Like saying in the hypothetical example; later on past three o’clock I saw three people standing together near a shop and then when I asked for directions I was told to take three right-hand turns to get to my destination etc.

Next Kammerer even went beyond this type of example and tried to come up with some types of series simply through observation. The people being observed were unaware of his presence. He conducted many (rather naive) experiments, spending hours in parks noting occurrences of pedestrians with certain features (glasses, umbrellas, etc.) or in shops, noting precise times of arrivals of clients, and the like. Kammerer discovered, that the number of time intervals (of a fixed length) in which the number of objects under observation agrees with the average, is by much smaller than the number of intervals, where that number is either zero or larger than the average. This, he argued, provided evidence for clustering.

Now I grant you this explanation sounds too academic for most of us. What he was on about was; when sitting in the park and observing people with glasses (I know, it sounds mind-numbing), he counted by a time interval (say every 60 minutes) and calculated that on average he saw two cases per hour. You’d have to do a lot of sitting on a park bench to do this, but that’s how you get enough data to talk about an average.

So, he then collects his individual observations. Like, here I am on a Thursday morning at 10.00 am to 11.00 am and I know I should, on average, be seeing two people with spectacles pass by. However, what happened was I actually didn’t see anyone until say, after 11.00 am, and then I saw four people together at once.

This is what he means by clustering. If two people per hour is the average, what he saw was either zero cases between 10.00 am and 11.00 am or four cases between 11.00 am and midday, which was obviously larger than the average. Back in the day Kammerer's book attracted some attention from the public and even from some serious scientists, toward this phenomenon of clustering. Albert Einstein said, The idea of seriality was interesting and by no means absurd.

Unfortunately for Kammerer his work lost authority, due to accusations of manipulating his biological experiments (unrelated to his work on seriality), which eventually drove him to suicide at the young age of forty-five.

However, from today's perspective, Kammerer had merely noted the perfectly normal spontaneous clustering of signals in what statisticians and scientists call the Poisson Process. A Poisson Process is a model for a series of discrete events where the average time between events is known, but the exact timing of events is random.

For example, suppose that from historical data, we know that earthquakes occur in a certain area with a rate of two per month. Other than this information, the timings of earthquakes seem to be completely random. Thus, we conclude from the formula for the Poisson Process (which I won’t bother outlining, after all you’re not doing a course on statistics), that it might be a good model for earthquakes. In practice, the Poisson Process or its extensions have been used to model things like;

− The number of car accidents at a site or in an area,

− The location of users in a wireless network,

− The requests for individual documents on a web server,

− The outbreak of wars,

− Photons landing on a photodiode.

So, we’ll leave Kammerer alone for a while until I come up to the section on my own personal journey. The next big development in the theory of coincidences happened around the same period of the early 20th century. This was the work of the well-known psychiatrist Carl Jung. He considered that many events are meaningful coincidences, if they occur with no causal relationship and yet seem to be meaningfully related.

He introduced the concept of synchronicity to cover all meanings given to such cases and used this to argue for the existence of the paranormal. You know, it was the universe in some form that was enabling these special meanings to take place and it was thus a unifying force for all mankind. This, of course, is widely rejected by the academic and scientific community.

As always, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take the extremely well-known example used by Jung himself to describe what he was on about.

"My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts