Excerpt
Content
I. Introduction
II. Cycles that Repeat
III. The 20-year Curse of American Presidents
IV. Identification of the Cycles of Nature in our Lives
V. Conclusion
References
Cycles that repeat, the 20 year “curse “of American presidents and identification of the cycles of nature in our lives
I. Introduction
This book Fractal Time by Braden is fascinating. The author centers his analysis on the year 2012, which many people gave interpretation to. An interpretation that consisted of seeing that year as the end of the world. Besides, that way of viewing things for the year 2012 was a confusion of events. At least Braden wrote the book before the coming of that year, which proves that the explanations he gives in his book are trustful. When Braden works on the year 2012, his focus is about the cycles of times. Cycles of times that can occur in our day-to-day life and are more likely to repeat after many years. According to the author we have to approach this year the best way possible. To convey his message, he talks about 20 times codes that are developed in the book. Time code 1 says that we are living the completion of a 58,185-year-long cycle of time- a world age that the ancient Maya calculated would end the winter of the solstice on December 21, 2012. We are living the end of time, not the end of the world as a lot people predicted, but the end of a world age. For example, the present world age began in 3114 B.C. and will end in A.D. 2012. Time code 2 states that our ancestors recorded their experience of the last end of time showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the close of one world age is the beginning of the next, and not the end of the world. Now, the question might be: what is the meaning of the end of world age? Those who came before us knew the end of the time was coming, they knew because it always does. Accordingly, Braden asserts that every 5,125 years, the Earth and our solar system reach a place in their journey through the heavens that mark the end of such a time cycle. Only five generations in the last 26,000 years have experienced the shift of world ages. We will be the sixth. The only way to arrive at the light of the next cycle is to finish the darkness of this one. Many themes are developed in Braden’s book. I have selected those I thought to be more appealing. The first issue I will discuss are cycles (time cycles) that repeat, and then I shall debate the 20-year curse of American presidents. The last discussion will be the identification of cycles of nature in our lives.
II. Cycles that Repeat
Somewhat, it might be unbelievable that cycles exist and can repeat in our lives or whatsoever. Some critics might attribute them to coincidence, but not as something that had already occurred in times. To explore that issue, we will see what Braden (2009) says about those patterns. Braden (2009, chapter 5) starts with a shocking story, the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The author experienced that event when he was a child. On that sad day, his teacher told them to remain calm before collecting their coats and suppliers because school buses were waiting for children outside of the school. It was too early to go home, that was the middle of the day. Braden asked his teacher what was going on, she replied that they had no right to talk about that issue with children. Parents will. When he arrived home, he found his mother with tears and who finally told her to watch the television, solely to see that the American president had just died.
Two days later, the local media printed a story that actually drew Braden’s attention. The story was about the curious circumstances about his assassination. The title of the story was “History Repeats Itself”. The main point was the strange coincidences that related the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy to another that had happened about 100 years prior to that- that of President Abraham Lincoln. Both presidents were deeply implicated in racial equality and civil rights. The two presidents had wives who lost children while being in office. The two presidents had been murdered on a Friday. Both had died from a gunfire wound to the head.
Braden, at the time he was reading the article simply did not want to take it seriously. Lincoln for instance, was sitting in box 7 of Ford’s Theatre when he was shot. Kennedy was riding in car number 7 when he was killed. The two presidents were with their wives at the time they were shot. Before being president, Lincoln entered elective office in 1846. A century later, in 1946, Kennedy was elected to Congress. Lincoln became president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. The last name of the men who replaced them in office was identical: Johnson. And both Johnson were born 100 years apart. President Andrew Johnson was born in 1808; meanwhile Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908. As the article kept moving with those comparisons, to Braden they seemed to be more than coincidences, in so much as they went further than the mere assassination of both presidents. Both presidents had four children and both had lost two of them before their teenage age. Both had lost their son while in office. The name of both presidents ‘doctors was the same: Charles Taft. The name of Lincoln’s private secretary was John (the first name of Kennedy), and that of Kennedy’s secretary was Lincoln (the last name of President Abraham). In addition, the events even extended to their murderers. The name of the man who arrested Lincoln’s shooter was Baker. The name of the man who arrested Kennedy’s assassin was also Baker. According to Braden, it appeared that those patterns were endless; he as well recognized that they were irrefutable. It was difficult to understand why and how those two events with a 100-year interval could be so similar. The truth is that they were. Although we may not want to acknowledge it or not, history repeats itself in the case of both presidents if we take into consideration these two occurrences.
I have to admit that Braden’s books are strange in a sense that as in the case of The Divine Matrix, you always discover things that you did not know or could not explain before reading the book. How is it that there are some cycles in our lives or other people’s lives or in our environment? How could things that occurred in the past come to pass again? Maybe those phenomena might be understandable in the example of catastrophism – the idea that many of Earth’s crucial features (strata layers, erosion, polystrate fossile, etc.) formed as a result of past cataclysmic activity – that happened in the past, I mean things that occur naturally. However, when it comes to things that occur to people, we start having headaches. When I try to figure out what can explain the events that happened to both presidents, I think about the Matrix Braden (2007) talks about. It is the Matrix that has the power to cause events that once occurred in the past to repeat.
What I would like to point out is that for those things to repeat a supernatural intervention is required. That supernatural intervention can only be made possible through the Divine Matrix. I refer to the Matrix because Braden (2007, p. 25) gives us an explanation to understand what had happened to both presidents. He states that everything in our world is connected to everything else (key 2). For the author, we are all connected one another, connection exists between us and the world around us. What I mean is that both presidents were already connected although they lived in different times; they were connected spiritually in times. I believe the author is right when he says that connection exists between everything within the Matrix. Remember the experience I shared in my previous book analysis in Braden’s Divine Matrix’s book about being connected to things that had not happened yet. With this in mind, Braden (2007, p. 27) supports that connection within the Matrix goes far beyond what we see in our lives today, it has to do as well with everything we have ever seen and also with things that have not materialized yet.
This is the experience I shared. Many, many, many times I might have found myself with some friends drinking, or eating or simply talking at a friend’s place, or in a bar or whatever, and had the feeling that I had already been to that place. What I mean is that the kinds of conversations we shared at that very moment seem to be the conversations I had already shared with them while I had never been to that place neither my friends. At the time I would experience such a thing, I would try to find out what was happening. Because I had the firm belief that me and my friends had already been there (physically) and been witnesses of the event, but in reality we never went to that place before. The reason is that my mind was already connected to that event and my friends prior to the occurrence of that situation.
I would like to point out that Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were connected, that is the reason why they might suffer the same karma. We cannot deny that something out of the ordinary connected these people. Accordingly, they undergo the same fate. We can notice that the cycles of darkness repeat in their lives dangerously. I have just discussed the part about cycles that repeat, now I would like to debate the 20-year curse of American presidents.
III. The 20-year Curse of American Presidents
Braden (2009, chapter 5), declared that a curse on American presidents might have existed, that is the fact that every 20 years a US president dies. The author stated that historians worked on the issue and started to suspect that the assassination of President Lincoln in 1863 was the beginning of a cycle that started a little more than 20 years earlier when another US president died. William Henry Harrison had become sick and died of pneumonia. With his death it looked as if the seed (cycle) had been engrained from that very moment, to pattern such tragic events. In the years after those events, the suspicions of those historians proved to be truthfully real.
As strange as it may seem, in the nearly 160 years after the death of President Harrison, almost every 20 years the American president has either died in the White House or has survived a shot on his life. As an illustration we have the unsuccessful attempts to kill Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Braden figures out that scholars question if these attempts to kill the cited presidents have put an end to the 20-year curse of American presidents. Braden says that the presidential cycle of 2020 will be the answer. But when observing the statistics, they appear to be obvious. The following table in the book of Braden will illustrate better the so called 20-year curse.
illustration not visible in this excerpt
· Bush avoided injury from a grenade that was tossed in his direction during a 2005 visit to Georgia, the former Soviet satellite.
This table shows that since the election of the United States President in 1840, the country has lost sitting president to illness or violence every 20 years.
The table obviously reveals that the 20-year curse seemed to have been a reality. Here again comes the question related to cycles. How is it that statistics prove that since 1840, a US president has either died in office or been assassinated? It is a cycle that I believe we can absolutely do nothing about. According to the question Braden asked whether or not the seed or the cycle stopped since the failure to shoot Reagan and Bush occurred, I believe that nobody has the answer. As the author pointed out, the year 2020 presidential elections will determine the answer to that question. Because it will culminate 40 years if no president is assassinated.
To conclude this part of my dissertation, I shall agree with Braden when he says that whether we talk about the cycles that repeated between President Kennedy and President Lincoln, or the 20-year curse American presidents witnessed, three things are palpable:
Fact 1: There are cycles underlying both events.
Fact 2: Both cycles are “triggered” by a seed event.
Fact 3: The conditions of the seed event repeat at regular intervals.
This apparently illustrates time code 15 that states that patterns identified for an earlier time in history tend to repeat themselves with greater intensity at later dates.
I have just debated the 20-year curse US presidents have faced. Here and now, let me tackle the last subject of my book review: identification of the cycles of nature in our lives.
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