All Life Is Yoga: Numbers and Astrology. Sri Aurobindo

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      Chapter 3

      Significance of Numbers

      Words of the Mother

      (To a child) Have you prepared a question for your Birthday?

      What is the significance of 18?

      Of the number 18?

      It depends on how it is read.

      It can be read as 10+8; it can be read as 9+9; it can be read as 12+6. And each of these readings has a different meaning.

      If we take 10+8, it can indicate something quite immobile: because 10 indicates a static perfection, something which has reached its perfection and stops there; and 8 is a double enclosure, that is, something which is framed in, surrounded, demarcated, and which naturally stops there. So if we put 10 and 8 together it truly makes something which can be an accomplishment but one that is terminated.

      On the other hand, if we take 9+9: 9 is the process of creation – not the creation itself but its process – and 9+9 is a process of creation which continues and follows another process of creation, that is, a creation which is dual and implies the idea that it continues indefinitely. This gives us two meanings which are almost contradictory.

      And if we take 12 and 6, then it becomes something very good. 12, you know what it is, don’t you? It is the number of perfection in conception and creation; and 6 is the number of the new creation. So if you put 12 and 6 together, you truly have something absolutely remarkable.

      Now we can have other combinations. But it becomes a little more complicated.

      18 itself – as 18 – was the number of the consciousness in its effort for material realisation: the consciousness trying to realise itself materially, express itself materially.

      So now you have something...

      From the social point of view it is the first number for attaining majority, the first majority; that is, from eighteen onwards one has one’s own will, one has the right to have one’s own will, from the social point of view. It is clearly a very interesting starting-point.

      There, then.

      Sweet Mother, has each person’s number a different significance for each one?

      If one wants to give it, yes.

      If one doesn’t think about it, it doesn’t signify anything at all. It’s the importance one gives it which counts.

      Numbers are a way of speaking. It is a language, as all the sciences, all the arts, everything that man produces; it is always a way of speaking, it is a language. If one adopts this language it becomes living, expressive, useful. As we need words to make ourselves understood usually – unfortunately it is liable to all kinds of confusions, but still we haven’t yet reached the state where we can communicate in silence, which, obviously, would be a very much higher state – well, if you want to give numbers a meaning in your life, they can reveal to you quite a lot of things. But it’s like that. It is like astrology: if one wants to study the relation between his life and the movement of the stars, one can also find all kinds of useful information.

      Fundamentally it is a way of knowing, nothing else – a process. True knowledge is beyond words, beyond systems, beyond languages; it is in a silent identity. It is in fact the only one which does not err.

      *

      Words of the Mother

      Mother contemplates a flower she is holding in her hand. It is the golden champak flower (Michelia champaka).

      Have you noticed this flower?

      It has twelve petals in three rows of four.

      We have called it “Supramental psychological perfection”.

      I had never noticed that it had three rows: a small row like this, another one a little larger and a third one larger still. They are in gradations of four: four petals, four petals, four petals.

      Well, if one indeed wants to see in the forms of Nature a symbolic expression, one can see a centre which is the supreme Truth, and a triple manifestation – because four indicates manifestation – in three superimposed worlds: the outermost – these are the largest petals, the lightest in colour – that is a physical world, then a vital world and a mental world, and then at the centre, the supramental Truth.

      And you can discover all kinds of other analogies.

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