1 = strong will; unity, purity
2 = duality, harmony (Yin/Yang)
3 = magic, intuition (Holy Trinity)
4 = stability, grounded (nature)
5 = travel, adventure, journey
6 = Sincerity, love, truth
7 = magic, mystery, enlightenment

I have always believed that meaning is defined within the context of a person experience. So although 7 might mean good luck to you, it may mean hate and lust to me because of my experiences with that number.

Each culture attributes meaning to numbers: Chinese numerology

Biblical numerology

Vedic numerology

More examples of spiritual meaning of numbers
THE NUMBER 7 IS EVERYWHERE

NUMEROLOGY:
Life path number - signifies intellect and an introspective, analytical mind. Considered to be a spiritual, sacred, and this is evidenced by the fact that there are seven days in the week, and ancient texts propose that the earth was formed in seven phases.
BIBLE:
In the Hebrew, seven ([b’v, - Sheh’-bah) is from a root word meaning to be complete or full.
It is known as the number of God’s seal.
Example: in Revelation 1:16 — “and He had in His right hand seven stars, ” alluding to the seven churches of Asia.
It is used throughout the Old and New Testament repeatedly with deliberate pattern.

The metaphysical use and meaning of numbers are completely at the mercy of interpretation. As such, it is all over the place with little practical application. That is a shame (as with all metaphysics) its talks around some of the most critical aspects of reality but fails to nail anything down. It is easy to see the influence of culture on the meaning attributed to numbers. The tragedy is that the imposed meaning ends up telling us more about the people and/or culture than the subject they are talking about. Here is a new system that relies less on prescribed meaning, focuses exclusively on the actual perspective of the person which in turn give meaning an absolute path.

Here is an Entirely Different Take on the Spiritual Meaning of Numbers.

We are the numbers. Our point of view, our perspective is the equation, the function through which constant values are passed to produce various results, or meaning.

Essentially, meaning is relative to perspective.

Out of western psychology, eastern spirituality and postmodern philosophy there is a new way to use numbers as a way to navigate awareness itself, the cradle of meaning. How much more enhanced is our meaning if we know its source? Its called Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives. To be fair, it less about numbers than it is about perspectives, so numerology is forever safe.

Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives

Oversimplified description:
Created by philosophical genius Ken Wilber, Integral Mathematics of Primordial Perspectives, we’ll call it integral mathematics, is a comprehensive method of referring to natural points of view that we all have. For example, my first-person perspective would be written as 1p (1-p). 1p = my, 1-p = first-person perspective, but there are other perspectives that I can have from my point of view: 2p = your perspective, 3p = his/her/it perspective.

So, from my perspective, I see that you have a first-person perspective:
1p(1p) x 2p(1-p)

I can also be aware of you from a third person perspective:
1p(1-p) x 1p(3-p) x 2p(1-p)

This means I’m observing your from an objective perspective, this could mean I’m using some theory or some measure or book like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) to evaluated you.

Pathology: Perspective Mathematics

Consider multiple personality disorder (aka Dissociative Identity Disorder). This would be me objectively looking at your multiple personalities:

1p(1p) x 1p(3-p) x (2p(1-p)/n)

n = number of personalities
This may be written wrong, but what I’m trying to express is my first-person perspective (1p(1-p)) view of an objective perspective (1p(3-p)) of your first person view that is (2p(1-p) that is divided by “n” personalities. The slash maybe wrong because Wilber uses “/p” to define something else. By interacting with each of the fractional parts of your first perpective, I can better understand why it has been partitioned. What are you protecting yourself against? What is the common ground of the personailities? One can also explore each personalities perspectives on itself and relationships to the world around it. The end equation could end up looking like the most beautiful monster you have ever seen.

Lucid Dream & Altered States: Integral Math

I had a lucid dream in which I was trying to fly years ago. Once I was aware of my being in a dream, I became peripherally aware of my body. I was able to hold the heavy feeling of my body at bay while I continued my lucid dream. In integral mathematics I would describe it like this:

1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(3/p)

I (1p(1p)) had a first person perspective (1p(1-p)) of my body (3p(3/p)). The equation strip away my personal meaning and allows you to put it in your own contexts although you can still understand the mechanics of the perspective. I’m seeing the body as a separate object the same way I might see a tree or my coffee cup, but perhaps (since the body actually holds the perspective) it should be written like this:

1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p{(1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p {…}}

Which is to say, I had a first person perspective of my body which contains a my first person perspective of my body which has a first person perspective of my body…. And so on. So it becomes like two mirrors facing one another. The only way to maintain the stability of my lucid dream perspective was to minimize my awareness of my body.

Out of Body Experience

In his book, Astral Dynamics, Robert Bruce talks about similar experiences. But he takes it a step further because his theory is that the body itself continues to dream and have its very own perspectives while the subtle body has its very own experiences. He attributes the relatively low number of the phenomenon to loss of memory caused by the body “overwriting” the “shadow memory” of the subtle body.

So it would look like this…

Sleep & Dreaming mind/body seeing objects in the dream: 1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(3-p)

Subtle body experience/altered state of consciousness seeing the sleeping body: 1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p{1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 3p(…)}
Traditional science tends to attribute OBE to some sort of brain anomoly hallucination (despite actual evidence of nonlocal consciousness), but for the purposes of this post we are only concerned with perspective. And the perspective is my first person perspective of the body with a first person perspective of the body… Whatever meaning that Robert Bruce, you or I attribute to this phenomenon should be put in its “own box” so to speak. And with Intergral math, that is easy to do.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 5: Wearing My Body

15 Jan. 08 - 11-12am

Location of coils: Frontal Lobe
Duration: 60
Signal type: Altered States (For Beginners)
(volume 81% output)

Overview:
This is my 5th Shakti session and this time the feeling it produced was unmistakable. I felt like I was “wearing my body”. The intensity of the feeling came in waves.

Wearing My Body
I followed Todd Murphy’s advice, I updated the Shakti software to v.5g.8 and used the longer session (60min for beginners). About 5 minutes into it the session I felt some sort of subtle sinus type pressure in the center of my frontal lobe. I immediately wrote this off. But as I sit here typing, I wonder about that because I have no cold, no sniffles and no frontal feeling until I put the Shakti on. That pressure was persistent until about 45 minutes into the Altered States session when a different experience slapped me in the awareness. I laid on my bed relaxed feeling like I was wearing my body.

Now I know this will sound like an insane contradiction but I felt like a disembodied spirit wearing a body. Its was as if at any moment I could pop out and go else where. It was a very strange feeling. I’ve felt it before a few times (once after reading Osho’s book called Awareness, The Key to Living in Balance… good book). And a couple times in meditation using Robert Bruce’s “rope technique“. I have yet to have a successful OBE after having that experience with the rope technique but I definitely feel something.

So this session was great and I’m anxious to do it again.

OBE… what good it it?

Since I was a kid reading Robert Monroe’s Journey’s out of the body, I have been obsessed with out of the body experiences. Mainly because I was relieved and facinated that someone had had the same experience I’d had. Sadly, I don’t have them anymore (or at least none that I can recall).

When I was having them, I found it quite terrifying. I’d come to awareness and feel like I was floating on the ceiling or partially through the bed and floor and suddenly wake with a start only to realize… I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move my body. Like a chinese finger trap, the more I struggled the harder it was to move. Only when I relaxed was I finally able to slowly wake up my slumbering physical corpse. And when I opened my eyes I didn’t ever want to close them again for fear of being “locked in”.

I was able to conquere my fear of those other worldly experiences and eventually stop them almost completly by time the time I got to Junior High School, but by that time I’d read several books that talked about what I came to know as “sleep paralysis”, astral projection (OBE) and what you could do with these abilities. I was facinated and wanted to be able to do them again, but was never able to recreated the frequency I had when I was in elementary.

These days (’08 in my 30’s) I’m just as obsessed but even more shut out from those experiences. I have strange unexplainable experiences maybe twice per year if that.

Today as I read, Robert Bruce’s Astral Dynamics, I find my self asking what practical good is Out of the Body Experience, anyway? Don’t get me wrong. This is not me playing Aesop’s Fox and blowing the whole thing off because I am an “OBE failure”. Further, I don’t doubt that it is a real experience. The theories behind this global, cross-culture phenomenon may not agreed upon, but I personally know its real because I’ve experienced it. What IS the experience and WHY is another matter altogether.

A bigger question (for me) is, what good is it? If you can do it at will and can teach others, so what? Sure it feels good, its amazing, its exciting (and I definitely want to do it), but how can we use it to make the world a better place. I suppose you could argue that knowing that some part of the self may indeed survive death is pretty signifigant. I guess that accounts for something (I’ll mention with a shrug of my shoulders). Perhaps if everyone knew that physical reality was a mere stepping stone to another place they would behave better.

A warm fuzzy feeling is all well and good however I would submit this to you: OBE is not as important as the ability to shift to different states of consciousness. OBE seems to be only one of many grand symptoms reflecting what the human mind is capable of achieving in altered states of consciousness. Consider some of the inventions, music and discoveries achieved from altered states of consciousness:

Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
Tartini dreamed a famous violin sonata.
Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.

— Robert Moss, Way of the Dreamer, “Two Minute History”

Others altered state creations include some of Paul McCartney’s songs, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Madame C.J. Walker (first American Woman Millionaire… who also happen to be African American) and here are many other examples.

I would take this idea a step further and suggest that our best professional athletes also experience altered states of consciousness when they are “in the zone”. Just thing of the possessed demon that wore #27 in the Chicago Bulls. Micheal Jordan’s enlightenment was a tongue out slam dunk in a 27 point game. Consider Lance Armstrong state of mind while he won his SIXTH tour de France after kicking cancers NATURAL BLACK ASS. Is it a stretch to believe that the greatest among us are capable of reaching the far reaches of human mind by accessing shamanistic states of bliss with amazing feats of focus.

I would also mention some of histories great porn stars, but I guess that would make everything I just a big joke to some. But consider it.. your best sexual performance probably included your most amazing state of mental, emotional physical focus… you were in the zone and the pay off is something you’d repeat every day if you could.

communicating with God

If you want to communicate with God, learn to listen.

God is NOWHERE if not within us.

You are a receptacle of the most miraculous phenomenon in the universe… awareness. The lord is closer than the air you breathe and can not be contained in words, ego, or reason. No matter how beautiful and eloquently they package God, religions, philosophies and art can only point to the Lord with symbols. The true living God is within you right here, right now, always.

Ego is what we use to interface with our worldly surroundings. It is necessary, but unnecessarily worshipped in human culture (particularly Western culture). It is put on a pedestal and inflated like a fool’s balloon animal. An inflated ego serves as a perfect wedge between you and the Lord within.

God is infinity with no center, no beginning, no ending, no edges, no-thing, it is you, it is me, it is us and it is listening all the time to our words, to our hearts, and to our souls.

We are the vessel through which “God” is made manifest. It is manifest via our faith while our faith is manifest via our actions.

The lord not only listens from within you, it speaks from within too. If you will listen and allow it, you will know the answer to anything you ask. Knowing the answers is easy. The hard part is taking the right action because we often betray ourselves.

The trick is to tune in to the signal. After you learn to be quiet and listen, you will begin to separate the signal from the noise without even trying.

Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force

here is a cool article from the NYtimes. Its good to see people with a different idea about the human soul and evolution:

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes — or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

Therefore, she writes, it is “faulty” reasoning to want to distinguish people from the rest of creation. She and Dr. Haught cite the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian who, Dr. Haught said, “spoke of a vegetative and animal soul along with the human soul.”

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

NYTimes Article, “Science of the Soul?..”

Some Thoughts on Astral Dynamics

I’ve been slowly picking through Robert Bruce’s book, Astral Dynamics.  The perspective it is giving me on subtle energy work is very helpful.  Bruce uses simplified and easy language to talk about each of the Chakras and other subtle body structures.  

More than anything its been giving me a greater interest in qi gong, chi, Reiki, Tai Chi and other bodies of knowlege regarding the use and cultivation of energies.   

I used to lean toward a pure self-hypnosis explaination of people’s ”miracles” and feelings of interactions with subtle energies.  Healing for example, one could see as a person’s own belief that heals them not an objective subtle energy.  In other words, Mark 10:25 of the KJV Bible, after healing Bartimeaus, Jesus says:

Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

Or Mathew 9:20-22 in which a woman KNOWS that if she can only touch the hem of Jesus’ garment she will be healed.  To which Jesus says: “Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you whole.”

I still think that belief of the recipient is in play, however that does not mean that subtle energies do NOT exist. Perhaps one must be “open” enough to feel and interact with the subtle energies.  Bruce calls the subtle energies subjective so subtle energies depend on person perceiving them.

Mind-Split and the Mystic Light Body

In his book Astral Dynamics, Robert Bruce talks extensively about the “Mind-Split” which is his theory of where the consciousness goes during and out of body experience. Some earlier OBE researchers such as Muldoon, suggest that the body is empty upon OBE. Bruce’s theory is that a copy of of consciousness is “downloaded” into the projected double. If you have never had on OBE then this is will all sound completely insane. All I can say about the typical skeptic is that this is all anecdotal evidence (meaningless for you), if your truly curious go have an OBE.

I have been studying my dreams and altered states of consciousness since ‘87 and I have to say that mind-split may explain some things that have happend to me. The mind-split theory might explain some strange dreams in which I seem to have dreamt of several things at the same time. I will wake up and write down what I think is one very strange dream but then realize that it is three completely different dreams I had at the same time. These dreams remind me of a stegograph in which data can be hidden with a picture or even and what is called an Alternate Data Stream in computer security, in which data (usually malware) can be hidden in other applications.

Also, his mind-split theory goes into detail about the physical bodies memories being “copied” over the memories gathered in the subtle body (astral body for example). This might also explain why many saints and mystics (Padre Pio for example) are seen by people (in some cases by people who’d never even heard of them until much later.. this is world wide phenomenon called bilocation) but when the mystic/saint/sage is approached they can not remember seeing these people. Skeptically, this is an easy one “hallucination, fantasy, a dream…” but to those it actually happens to, it can not be explained away so easily.

Saint Faqir Chand was called the “Unknowing Sage” because he admitted to not knowing the subtle body visits of his followers while others claimed that they did.

Etheric to Real-time: Wilber vs. Robert Bruce

In Ken Wilber’s view of subtle energies seem to parallel Robert Bruce’s model of subtle world.

Ken Wilber’s Model (according to Excerpt G):