An Astonishing Discovery The Seasons Of Our Lives How They Alternate from Good to Bad Ones and Vice-Versa And How You Can Benefit from this Knowledge For a Much Better Life George Pan Kouloukis E-mail: [email protected] The Author George Pan Kouloukis is a Greek attorney-at-law, a barrister. As a member of the Athens Bar Association, he has provided legal services to the Ionian Bank of Greece, the Greek Electric Railways Company, and other corporations. Of course, his book here has nothing to do with law; it is the result of a series of observations that everybody could have made after extensive research, provided he/she had experienced the specific events and situations the author has experienced, described in the book. To help as many people as possible to benefit from his discovery, the author decided to offer his book free online. The book is also available in printed form, paperback, published by Heart Space Publications, an Australian publisher, and is sold all over the world. You can find it also at Amazon under the words: The Seasons of Our Lives Kouloukis Stokol. (Ian Stokol is the designer of the cover). Copyright © 2009 by George Pan Kouloukis All rights reserved by the author. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 1. The Astonishing Discovery 5 2. Ludwig van Beethoven 9 3. Giuseppe Verdi 16 4. Pablo Picasso 23 5. Napoléon I 32 6. Victor Hugo 39 7. Winston Churchill 46 8. The Complete Picture 58 9. The Advantages 64 10. Mikhail Gorbachev 72 11. Nelson Mandela 77 12. Christopher Columbus 83 13. King Henry VIII of England 89 14. Margaret Thatcher 96 15. Queen Elizabeth I of England 102 16. Aristotle Onassis 108 17. John Glenn 120 18. Elizabeth Taylor 126 19. Maria Callas 132 20. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 141 21. The Dalai Lama of Tibet 148 22. Jimmy Carter 155 23. Sarah Bernhardt 161 24. Auguste Rodin 169 25. Josephine, Napoléon I’s Wife 175 26. The Confirmation 182 27. Practical Use 186 Endnotes 194 Sources 198 3 Acknowledgements I want to thank the following literary consultants, who helped to make my book publishable. — Elizabeth Judd (Casco Bay Literary Services, U.S.A.), for evaluating, copy-editing, and fact-checking thoroughly the entire book. — Ashley Stokes (The Literary Consultancy, London), for his two successive editorial reports on the manuscript. — Peter Gelfan (The Editorial Department, U.S.A.), for his evaluation of the manuscript. — Cornerstones Literary Consultancy (London), for their final critique and encouragement. 4 1. The Astonishing Discovery The moment you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll be able to know whether the years just ahead are good or bad for you, and how long this season will last. You’ll be able thus to act accordingly: if there is a storm on the horizon, you’ll take shelter in time; if sunny days loom ahead, you’ll take advantage of it before the opportunity passes. In short, you’ll be able to take crucial decisions regarding your career, marriage, family, relationships, and all other life’s issues. This ability derives from the fact that the seasons of our lives alternate from good to bad ones –and vice versa– according to a certain pattern which I explain in the book, based on the way the good and bad seasons have alternated in the lives of lots of famous men and women, whose the biographies I cite in the book. From that pattern derives, of course, that we, too, can foresee how our own good and bad seasons will alternate in the future. This knowledge radically transforms the way we all live today, and helps us to live a much better life. I will explain first in the book how our seasons alternate from good to bad ones and vice versa and how thus you can foresee how your seasons will alternate in the future. Then, I will cite all the advantages and benefits deriving from this ability. Before continuing, however, we have to clarify first some terms we’ll meet in this book. A “good” season tends to include both inner satisfaction and outer success, while a “bad” season is a season of anxiety, with failure and disappointment. But a good season is not always paradisal, without any concerns or difficulties. Life is never like this. Similarly, a bad season is not necessarily a hell; it may contain moments of satisfaction. Conditions are especially mixed at the beginning of each season, which could be seen as a transitional period. The first part of each good season resembles spring, and the first part of each bad season resembles fall. So there can be “storms” in spring and “Indian summers” in fall. All of us have had good and bad seasons in our lives. Great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, went through a bad period around the age of 32 because he had become totally deaf. Contemplating suicide, he wrote his will. Then a good season returned. Beethoven overcame his hearing problem, was recognized as one of the greatest composers of all time –he wrote nine insuperable symphonies– and became a celebrated member of Viennese society. 5 Napoléon provides another example. During a good season of his life, he conquered almost all of Europe, was crowned Emperor of France, and lived a life full of grandeur, triumph, and success. Then a bad season arrived: Napoléon lost all he had achieved, he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, and he was exiled ultimately to the remote island of St. Helena. The specific criteria that characterize a good or bad season usually include factors like money, fame, love, and health. These criteria differ from person to person and can change over time. But usually there is only one main factor that shapes at a given moment the good and bad seasons of a person. For famous Greek ship owner Aristotle Onassis, for example, only money had any meaning throughout almost all his life, as you’ll see in his biography. But at the end of his life, when he fell seriously ill from incurable disease, only his health counted – though he was the wealthiest person on earth, money meant nothing for him anymore. Also for Beethoven, health –his hearing problem– was of uppermost importance during one of his early bad seasons, but later –when he overcame that problem– his recognition as a composer became the main factor shaping his seasons. For Napoléon, on the other hand, fame was the only main factor shaping his seasons throughout all his life. Some of you may have not noticed that there are good and bad seasons in your life, so you might have hard time believing these seasons exist. To be convinced, you only have to look back over your life the way I explain in this book. In the book, I also provide scores of detailed examples of good and bad seasons in the lives of a lot of famous people, which fully confirm the existence of these seasons. The Story of My Research Before explaining, however, the way our seasons alternate in life, we must first see what happened that led me to start a research regarding the alternations of the good and bad seasons in our lives –and how I arrived finally at the discovery described in this book. This will help you to fully understand my discovery. Like most of us, I had, too, observed in my life that a certain obvious alternation of my seasons from good to bad ones and vice versa had occurred. Later, I asked myself whether these alternations happened according to a certain pattern – and thus we could foresee how long each season would last – or irregularly, without any pattern. But since it appeared to me too difficult to find the answer to this question, I abandoned then every such idea. 6 Suddenly, however, a book arrived at my hands (The Universe, published by Time-Life Books), which gave me the first impulse to continue trying to find whether our seasons alternate according to a certain pattern or irregularly. That book mentioned that the magnetic poles of the sun reverse themselves every 11 years: the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice-versa every 11 years. And that reversal always occurs on certain dates: somewhere in 1957, in 1968, in 1979, and so on every 11 years. These solar alternations led me to a spontaneous thought: Do the alternations of the sun’s poles influence human behavior? Are the alternations of the good and bad seasons of life synchronized with the patterns of solar activity? To test this hypothesis, I reflected on my own life. But my hypothesis proved to be wrong: my life’s good and bad seasons hadn’t alternated the way the sun’s poles reverse –every 11 years. All I could come up with, however, was a turning point in 1957: a bad season had ended for me then and a good one had started. But 11 years later –in 1968– there was no reversal. On the contrary, my good season continued even better. I therefore realized that my idea was groundless and I abandoned it. Later, a new book caught my attention. It was its title that aroused my interest: The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Its author, Daniel J. Levinson, a professor of psychology at Yale University, carried out a study showing that everyone’s life has four seasons, each lasting 20-22 years. But he did not distinguish which of those seasons are good and which are bad. That book however, brought me back to the question of the alternations of the good and bad seasons in our lives.