This is a potentially dangerous book, in that it may create a self-fulfilling prophecy for the individual. The authors are walking a narrow tightrope in explaining to us that genuine cycles in human affairs really do exist, while cautioning us that we should not regard destiny as fixed and immutable.
     The “11:11” in the title comes from a number of people waking up and noting the numbers on their digital clock, or suddenly coming across addresses, scores in video games, licence plates, or whatever bearing those numbers.
     The most famous example of course is the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Jones and Flaxman outline a number of astonishing connections of 11 with the crashing of the passenger planes into the Twin Towers. The Towers themselves resembled a giant 11, and the first plane to hit the Centre was Flight 11.
     It seems that someone, somewhere is trying to tell us these coincidences have meaning that is not apparent on the surface. This inevitably leads to numerology, number as symbol, sacred architecture, and the very structure of human consciousness.
     It may be that cycles only persist for a limited time, and then they fade away into oblivion once we take notice of them, only to have some new cycle take their place. Back when I was in high school, there were a number of international crisis events, and I suddenly got the notion that perhaps these occurred on a 2-4 year basis. I self-importantly titled this “The Benedict Cycle of Crisis Propagation,” 1948 – The Berlin Airlift, 1950 – The Korean War, 1954 – Indochina and the H-Bomb, 1956 – The Suez Crisis, 1960 – The U-2 Incident and the Congo, 1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1966 – The Vietnam War, 1968 – North Korea and the Pueblo, etc.
     Of course, some events did not quite fit, so I wondered if there was a 30-year exception to cover things like the Berlin Crisis of 1961. I was trying to make things fit and they just didn’t totally jibe.
     Much has been made of the coincidences occasioned by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, which the authors detail at length in the section on number trivia and anomalies. They have even covered some items that I have not heard of before, such as the telegraph and telephone systems going down during each assassination.
     What people do not generally realise is that the parallels do not stop there but continue into the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson were both Southerners, General Grant ran against Horatio Seymour for President in 1868. Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Horatio Humphrey for President in 1968. Nixon and Grant both had five letters in their names. Grant was the first President to visit China; Nixon was the first President to visit Communist China. Both Nixon and Grant were vexed by major scandals during their term of office and both had a vice president resign. During Grant’s term, Jules Verne published a book about a trip to the moon, launched from Florida. During Nixon’s term, men actually did land on the moon after being launched from Florida.
     The parallels seem to peter out after that, just as the infamous fatal 20-year cycle with presidents seems to be doing the same thing. George W. Bush should have been the latest victim, but he survived long enough to become an ex-president. The authors do mention a threat against him while he visited Russia, but this in retrospect seems no worse than those faced by other presidents during their terms of office.
     One interesting theory is that numbers act as triggering codes for certain events. Currently, much speculation centres on the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012. When you consider 21 is the reverse of 12, and December is the 12th month of the year, it is certainly suspicious to say the least.
     Numbers govern everything from computers to money and the stock market, and may, as the authors state, be encoded in the human DNA code especially timed to trigger events and reactions. All of our art, music and technology have a mathematical basis. When you get into concepts like fractals and imaginary numbers, it is hard not to get into mysticism, simply on the basis that something must be behind it all – hence the Hebrew Kabbalah and the Golden Ratio.
     The history of numbers is dealt with in several chapters and Jones and Flaxman have been able to make the subject interesting without drowning the reader in a sea of abstractions. Speculatively speaking, we really go down the rabbit hole of possibility. If other quantum universes truly exist then they must exist at a different frequency or octave than our own, and strange coincidences and synchronicities are surely based on number as well. The authors go so far as to suggest that God may be a number due to the order found in nature. Either that or the supreme deity is an expert mathematician.
     There is even what we might call “the folklore of numbers,” such as knowing that 26 moves is the lowest possible number of moves to complete Rubik’s Cube (funny, I always thought it was a lot more than that). Of course, most of us know that 666 has an evil reputation, but is it really justified? There is pseudomathematics, a term coined to describe mathematical theories that do not fit within the framework of conventional math. Something like UFOs and ghosts that also do not fit into conventional frameworks of science.
     Jones and Flaxman concede that they do not know what is going on with the 11:11 time prompt. Maybe it means nothing at all, but that does not mean we should not pay attention to why it is happening at all. Attention or meaning seems to be the key to the whole thing. It ultimately leads to the question, “How do you quantify pure mind?” Mind is needed to understand mathematics, but mind itself is likely beyond mathematics (if you can conceive of such a thing). This brings the consideration of intelligent design to the foreground and the question of how life originated.
     The authors state that we tend to disregard any errant information that pops up in our lives. Maybe we should try to figure out what peculiar events are trying to tell us, as they are part and parcel of a much bigger picture.
     In a book such as this, it is necessary to marry a serious approach with a certain light heartedness. That Jones and Flaxman have managed to pull it off is a major achievement. A puzzle beyond any computer game known!