Article
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.
Graeme Kapono Urlich (November 2009)
Addendum: Shortly before submitting the article this image arrived in my inbox.
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