Ever chanced upon something interesting like an episode in How the Universe Works or Ancient Aliens that starts off with an intriguing title and an intellectual introduction, getting you all stoked because you hope to finally glean answers to some of your burning questions, making you sync your bathroom breaks with the commercial breaks just so you don’t miss even a moment of the show, only to realize at the end of the hour that all of that committed craziness was basically for nothing but speculative analysis, unnecessary hypotheses, and over-the-top imagination that got you nowhere and left you with even more questions than you began with?
Well, fair warning, this is likely to be one such post!
Also, I would be touching upon three separate lines of thought, which I promise will converge at some point if you stick around long enough, in order for me to make a proper case for the title of this post.
Numerology – The Vibrations of Numbers
Numerology is all about reducing the date of birth or numeric value of a person’s name to a single digit between 1 and 9 (except master numbers like 11 and 22) and using the resultant number’s qualities to interpret the person’s traits and the cosmic plan for his/her life.
Numerology has been drawing up alongside astrology steadily in terms of popularity, even though science enthusiasts still consider it as occult or pseudo-science. But to take numerology’s divinations seriously or to discard them as heresy altogether is not as simple as black or white for a few of us. If you are someone who reads up on Darwinism, ponders about Dashavatar, and is awed by the similarities in both, if you believe that we are the material of stardust but the life of which was breathed into by the enigmatic force called God, and if you find yourself pendulating between the mystical and logical more often than you would care to admit, then you too are probably split down the middle about this numerology thing.
Personally, I find some of my interpretations to be spot on while the rest sound like generic claims that are applicable to anyone. So, I am not likely to accept numerology as an accurate tool just yet, but more importantly, neither am I ready to disregard it as occult. Because for one, back in the 17th century when Newton discussed about the free fall of objects on earth, his critics considered gravity as a quality of the occult because it acted at a distance across empty space. We still do not know what is that unseen force behind gravity that makes the orbs in the space not smash into each other but we certainly are thankful for it. So if gravity can transform from being occult to physics, I guess my doors will continue to remain half open with numerology.
Anyways, what is relevant to this post is that among the various calculations in numerology, there is something called Universal year/Personal year which is reducing the given year separately (Universal year) or along with a person’s month and date of birth (Personal year) and using the resulting single digit to understand the qualities that will be on the high note for that year (please google for further clarity). These numbers moving from 1 through 9 every succeeding year and then repeating all over again at the end of the cycle represent our progress in life in stages as individuals and as a community, i.e. 1 stands for initiation, 2 for cooperation, 3 for creativity, and so forth all the way to 9 which would be the point of culmination for the set stage. For example, 2015 was the year of 8, 2016 is the year of 9, and 2017 will start another new cycle with 1.
According to numerology, there is inception, growth, and completion laid out in this nine-year cycle that repeats itself over and over, thus marking a developmental transformation for individuals and an unending evolutionary process for the universe. (Now hold on to this thought.)
Reincarnation – The Cycles of Life
The Bible doesn’t support reincarnation. As an insider, I can attest that any red-blooded Christian, any strict adherent of The Word is bound to reject reincarnation vehemently. No “perhaps….” No “maybe….” Just a right-off-the-bat, straight-to-your-face “NO”. Believe me, I have asked.
So thanks to the likes of Dr. Ian Stevenson, Dr. Jim Tucker, Dr. Brian Weiss, and the growing case files in the database of University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, it is interesting to see the West finally starting to warm up to the Eastern concept of reincarnation. But unlike with the Asian populace where reincarnation is a philosophical concept imbued with religious beliefs, here in the West it is more of a scientific curiosity about the mind’s ability to recount memories beyond one’s consciousness as in the case of children with past life memories and patients of past life regression therapy.
Reincarnation, which is yet another beneficiary of my half-open door policy, is the belief that the soul/consciousness goes through many lives, experiences, and lessons in order to progress on the path to self-realization so it could finally merge with the Higher Consciousness. The words and deeds of the individual in the present life, which get imprinted upon the consciousness as memories, would become the karma of the person that determines the kind of life the soul would enter into next. The journey of this soul is probably set out like the progression scale in numerology with each life being an improvement upon the previous so we could rake up as much experiences and good deeds as possible and reach the final stage called enlightenment that makes us become one with the Higher Consciousness. (Hold on to this thought too.)
The one ticket home -Enlightenment
Almost every spiritual teacher insists that enlightenment is not a separate entity to be acquired but rather a natural state of consciousness that is within everyone and that the true work to be done by the seekers is to remove the obstacles that hinder us from being that natural self. It is a kind of homecoming where our gross consciousness softens to a subtle consciousness in order to become one with the Higher Consciousness. In the religious context, it is what facilitates the ultimate release of the soul from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
Now the straight talk –
The ever-expanding universe is 13.8 billion years old, the earth 4.5 billion years old, and we humans a measly 200,000 years old. To bring that into perspective, humans have been around only for a fraction of the time the universe has been around.
We claim that we are infinitesimally small compared to the vastness of the universe; we agree that we can never fully understand the nature or the workings of the Higher Consciousness, yet we can so eloquently describe its plan for humans, the ideal path set for us in terms of first, now, and next in order for us to become one with it. Those who talk so surely about the plans of the Higher Consciousness do not have the experience of knowing it and those who know it experientially are not around to talk about it.
So what if we got the whole enlightenment cycle all wrong? What if enlightenment is the final 9th stage that completes a cycle but instead of merging with the Higher Consciousness, we are reset and sent off to another cycle that repeats from 1-9?
The Higher Consciousness cannot exist if there is no gross consciousness to comprehend it. So what if the birth-death cycle is just a small part of a bigger ignorance-enlightenment-rebirth cycle that the universe keeps spinning around for its own evolutionary process?
What if the reason behind enlightenment being such a natural state for humans is that we have already been enlightened before in some previous cycle from where it got etched in our memory so deeply that in the present life we are able to experience it as a natural state under the ideal meditative conditions?
What if all of our existence is just one big exercise in futility?
