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What Does It Mean?
by Graeme Kapono Urlich

This question was posted on an online forum that I sometimes frequent. "I keep seeing the number 158 all the time. What does it mean?"

People have been assigning meanings to numbers and all manner of things for thousands of years. Much of this is pure superstition and some of it is useful as in mathematics for example but even pure superstition can be useful if the belief is strongly engrained and it can be applied to a goal of some sort.

The simple fact is that anything only has the meaning that you personally assign to it. We share many meanings about things but we are also free to assign our own meaning to anything at all. For me personally Friday the 13th has always been a lucky day so I look forward to it and can usually find some event during the day that I can consider to be especially "lucky."

On a practical level you could try the "blue feather" exercise that I teach in my Hawaiian Shamanism workshops on the Huna philosophy. It shows how what we focus on comes to us. This could mean that we become aware of something in our environment that we previously were not aware of or it could mean that our focus brings something new into existence.

When we buy a new car for instance we can have the experience of seeing that type of car all the time when previously we did not notice them. It's just that now that we own one our subconscious becomes tuned to that type and our attention is drawn to them. They were always there but we just didn't notice particularly. This usually fades after a while as our excitement at having a new car fades.

On another level, in Huna and shaman thinking, we actually create the thing or the situation that we think about persistently enough. In a recent workshop in Hawaii that I attended we did this exercise using the image of a black flying pig. Almost immediately a blackbird flew down and landed within a few feet of our group, this being the nearest available equivalent that our subconscious minds could find at the time.

On my way back to my hotel I noticed a large black statue of a pig. I had driven past it many times but hadn't noticed it until after the exercise. This again was a close equivalent to what we had meditated on. It was a black pig but it didn't fly. The blackbird did fly and was black but wasn't a pig. I decided this was good but not close enough and meditated again.

On my way back home to New Zealand I was wandering around the International Market in Honolulu and wandered into one of the back areas that I had never been to before. I came around a corner and found one of those battery operated toys that fly around on a string. It was a black and white pig. I had seen these toys before but never a pig and this one was mostly black which was close enough for me. In shaman thinking this toy might not have ever existed before and our focus on it in the meditation created it.

You can try this with something simple like a blue feather, or something common but that you usually don't encounter. In the workshop we wanted to stretch things a little.

As far as the 158 goes, in numerology you add the single digits up until they come down to a single digit. 1 + 5 + 8 = 14, 1 + 4 = 5. In the system of numerology I studied for a while this number represents intuition so it could mean that you are developing stronger and more accurate intuition. There are many variations of numerology and the meanings that are assigned to the numbers however and this is my point.

When I speak on a subject like this I am talking about it from the shaman viewpoint and specifically from the Huna philosophy and the Kahili Kupua tradition from Kauai (Hawaii). There are many other systems out there and the thing to remember is that they are all made up, even Huna which is probably the oldest on Earth. There is only subjective reality.

One of the main differences in the shaman viewpoint is that we switch from a cause and effect reality to an action reaction one. Instead of reaction to external causes we believe that the external reality moulds itself to our internal reality, our beliefs. We can only experience something that we believe is possible at some level of consciousness. We see the cause of any experience as being a reaction to our own thoughts.

One of Einstein's favourite quotes is "Reality is just an illusion, albeit a persistent one." In shaman talk this means that life is a dream and we, individually, dream it into existence. If you were able to erase all of the beliefs that you hold now and replace them with a whole different belief system then you would cease to exist in this part of the infinite universe and begin to exist in another part that reflected the new belief system. The more people share beliefs the more "real" the reflection seems to become.

Play with some new ideas and you will see your reality changing. Look for ways of thinking that bring more fun into life and life will become more enjoyable.