Numerology: Comparison of 5 & 8

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Numerology Comparison of 5 & 8 Audio

Numerology Comparison of 5 & 8 Audio Transcript

NUMEROLOGY

This is Thea Elijah speaking. We’ve taken some excerpts from a lecture that I gave on the subject of how Eight Principle and Five Element thinking each apply to herbal studies, as well as how they can be integrated to give the practitioner a much more complete understanding of how to treat the client’s body, mind and spirit with Chinese herbs. This is the first of two lecture on the relationship of 5 and 8. It focuses on numerology, and the basic nature and differences of the Eight Principle and Five Element paradigms.

Oh, ye who wish to understand the unity of Eight Principle and Five Element, all gather, all hail. We’re going to talk about numerology, because how can we know the unity of Five Elements and Eight Principle unless we know the unity of Five and Eight? And how can we know Five, and how can we know Eight, unless we start with One and learn of that, and move up from there. 

There is a lot that becomes much clearer about Five Element and Eight Principle thinking if we have some sense of what is Five, and what is Eight, because the element thing, the principle thing . . . it’s not Five Elements and Eight Principles, really. It could be Five things, and Eight things. It’s the Five and the Eight that really mean something there.

Let’s look at numbers, and what they’re all about. Numerology is not about counting things. It’s not about how many of something is there. It is about states of consciousness. Each number represents a state of consciousness. 

ONE

For instance, the state of consciousness of the number 1 is the state of consciousness of the unity, of the Oneness. It’s the state in which there is no observer separate from the observed, an undifferentiated state of unity. That’s the 1. In Chinese medicine, the state of consciousness associated with the number 1—the 1 space, the 1 state—is associated with the Water element, the ocean of all, the seed containing every possibility. This is 1, and 1 gives birth to 2. 

TWO

The 2 space—the consciousness of 2—is the state of awareness, of distinction between me and not-me. It’s the first division, the moment of consciousness. Consciousness is always consciousness of; as soon as there’s me, there’s that which is not me. In that moment of distinction between me and not-me comes contact. You can’t have contact without 2. In a state of oneness, there’s no contact; there is just unity. This is why the number 2, and the state of 2, the consciousness of the 2 space is associated with the Fire element. It’s the state of you and me. It’s the state of connection. Every time you look in someone’s eyes and you see somebody looking back at you; oh, that moment, contact, 2, that’s the 2 space. 

When you meet that, that’s 2, and it’s such a different thing than the 1 space. There’s an excitement to it. Ah, not-me! There’s a thrill, a kind of joy, when there’s this meeting, this 2 space. It’s this place of Yin and Yang, the 2 space. Yin and Yang, to the Chinese, is a loving 2; it’s not a warring 2. It’s not a separate 2; it’s the 2 in contact. Yin and Yang as lovers, facing each other; not separate polarities that never meet. It’s that same feeling of our eyes meeting. 

Awareness of distinction between me and not-me, contact and everything associated with that which happens in the 2 space, is the Fire element. It is what the Chinese mean by 2. 

THREE

But then, what happens next? There’s you and there’s me; there’s this moment of contact, as my hand meets yours, and my life meets yours. I like you or I don’t like you; I get a little closer to you; I pull a little bit back; I kind of shove my elbow into your ribs; you kick me in the head; all kinds of things start to go on. 

There’s you and there’s me and there’s contact, but what develops out of that contact is a relationship, which is a form of movement. A relationship is a third thing that exists as movement. There’s you and me, and there’s how we rock and roll. This is the 3 space demonstrating itself, the place of movement. Anything can happen from here; it’s always changing, always moving. It’s a unity with moving parts. 

There is still distinction between you and me when we’re dancing together, or when we’re jamming, but there’s a kind of unity within it. There’s you, there’s me, and there’s the dance—and when it’s going really well, it’s said that the 3 blends back into 1. This is healthy Wood. This is the dynamism of Wood. This is movement as living bridge between all beings, the relationship unfolding, the happening, the busy streets. 

Watching Tai Chi people do push hands is beautiful Wood space. From the Fire of contact, then we’ve got the push and shove, giving rise to this third non-thing between you and me, making a unity like a living bridge between us. All this relates to Wood. 

FOUR

Then something happens, or does not happen. There are two choices. One is that 1 gives birth to 2, 2 gives birth to 3, and the 3 blend back into 1. This can happen. In the Tao Te Ching, this is described as a kind of paradise state where everything is in a perfect dance. It just keeps moving, and it goes on and on like that, and it doesn’t have to become 4. 

What happens in the 4 space is that we start talking. This is where the Tao Te Ching talks about “Nameless, it is the mother of heaven and earth. Named, is the mother of the 10,000 things.” 

Things are things, and you know that they are things because they have names. You know that’s a pen and that’s a glass. That’s an E flat. That’s a kick. As soon as we start making distinctions and naming things, we’re not in that flow state anymore. We’re not in that 3 space. We are saying, “Should I put my left foot or my right foot there?” We are asking, “Should I put a little dab of yellow paint?” We are deciding, “How about the word ‘additional’ as opposed to ‘superfluous’?” 

We are now in this space where it’s no longer that flow, blending back into the 1. We are now in the land of the 10,000 nameable, talk-about-able, distinctly quantifiable things. The Chinese didn’t say “1,2,3,4,” it’s “1,2,3, 10,000. Once you’re out of 3, it’s everything. It’s all of the things. 

The number 4 is associated with the Metal element. Often people don’t understand that right away, but as soon as you have things, you can lose things. Before you had things, there was no death; there was no loss. Now there’s this distinctness, there’s this separation, and there is the potential for loss. There is also the potential for respect; there is the potential for valuing, and thinking that this is gold, whereas this is a piece of crap. I want to buy that car, not that one. I want a hat, not an orange. This is all the Metal consciousness, the consciousness of the 4 space.. 

Western science is a 4 space science, a way of thinking about things by making greater and greater distinctions into finer and finer levels of understanding. It’s a reductionist model; it’s a dissect-reality type of model. There are certain things that are knowable in a 4 state consciousness. If you dissect a cat, you know what the parts of a cat are, but you don’t know how a cat runs. That’s back in the 3 space. The most important thing here is that it’s a whole orientation towards reality, being in the 2 space, being in the 3 space, being in the 4 space. 

In this 4 space, with its sense of distinction, there’s a little bit of an echo here of the 2 space, where the first distinction came in. I also want you to notice that in the 3 space, with its unity, there is a little bit of an echo of the 1 space, with its unity. 

We’re going to see this as the numbers get higher and higher, that the even numbers have an increasing level of distinction to them. The odd numbers, as they get higher and higher, have an increasing level of sophistication of unity. Even though there is distinction, there is a sense of blending back into the 1. 

FIVE

When we move from the 4 space of consciousness-of-distinction, and all these separate things, to the 5 space, we are now moving to the living relationship between things, a.k.a. ecology, the consciousness of how the things interrelate, how they are family, how they nourish each other. 

The Sheng cycle is the story of 5-ness; it’s how things nourish each other, and bring each other into being, and support each other. It’s the ecology of individuals working together as a unity. 

5-space science is a very different kind of science, a very different way of knowing, a different sort of understanding, than 4-space science. How do things become inter-sustaining? This is the consciousness of the Earth element, the consciousness of family. This is the heart of the Five Element tradition, this ecological way of knowing, the sense of knowing the ecology of things and how they interrelate and interrelationship inter-sustainment. Family sense is the heart of 5 Medicine.

SIX

Let’s go on to 6. 6 is complicated. Here we’ve got 2 times 3, an odd number and an even number. We also have 5 plus 1. So 6 equals the 2 times the 3, and the 1 plus the 5. 

What we are thinking about here is how Yin and Yang, the 2, play out in dynamic 3-space movement. How does Yin transition into Yang, and Yang transition back into Yin? How do they boogie? What we get from that equation is something called the 6 Stages of Yin and Yang, where we have this early Yin that begins, that flourishes and comes into its fullness, and then goes over into the beginning stages of Yang, which comes up into greater maturity and into its fullness, and then it declines over into Yin. 

We also have 5 plus 1, how an ecology organizes itself into a single life, which is in the 6 Meridians.  People in the 5 Element tradition don’t tend to do a lot of thinking about the 6 Meridian tradition, and the cosmology of the 6. They generally become very familiar with 1 through 5 on one level or another. So now we’re moving into a new terrain. Don’t panic! It’s just the number 6. It occurs in nature. 

Oh my God, we’ve gone beyond 5! We’ll fall off the end of the world! There isn’t anything beyond 5! If you go beyond 5, it’s as if you just fall off. 5 is all there is.

Let’s check this out. What is 6-ness about, and the feel of 6? It’s very, very exciting, very vibrant, very vital, this place of 2 times 3, with the stages of Yin and Yang and the 6 Meridians. 

We’re going to look at the model of 6 in terms of the 6 stages of Yin and Yang, and the 6 Meridians. These six terms that we’re going to be looking at are, in fact, the words that show up on that funny rectangle on the 5 Element chart where they say “Small Intestine Greater Yang” etc., so there was a time when there was a 6, beyond the edge of the 5. I guess it atrophied and became a vestigial organ in the Worsley tradition. 

It is also true that these terms that we are going to be using also get applied to all kinds of things. We are going to be using words like Lesser Yang and Greater Yin, and we are going to be using the Chinese terms for them as well. 

First and foremost, these are names which indicate specific energetics, which then get applied to a whole bunch of different systems. In other words, when we get to the feeling of Lesser Yang or Young Yang, there is a meridian that tends to have the feeling of Lesser Yang, and so it gets called the Lesser Yang meridian. There may also be a stage in the rise and fall of empires that has the energetic of Lesser Yang, so it’s called the Lesser Yang stage of empire building. There’s also a stage in certain illnesses that have the energetic of the Young Yang, so it gets called the Lesser Yang or Young Yang stage of the illness. 

Now, a meridian, an illness and an empire are not the same. You could be in one stage of an illness, living in an empire that’s in a different stage, and neither of them have anything to do with the meridian necessarily. It’s a qualitative energy that gets applied to things e.g. the term “green.” It could be a hat; it could be a car. Hats and cars are not identical, just because both of them are green. What I’m trying to get across in this lecture is a feeling that defines an energetic. 

SHAO YANG

What is the feeling of Shao Yang, of Young Yang, early Yang, the first risings up of Yang? It is associated with the Officials of the Triple Heater and the Gallbladder, and the Triple Heater and Gallbladder are considered a single meridian. The Gallbladder is considered foot Shao Yang, and the Triple Heater is hand Shao Yang. 

This is a new thought for many. What do these two meridians have in common? They are of a different element; how can they be considered two ends of a continuum of one thing? 

What they have in common, the Shao Yang energy, is the energy of the first buds of Springtime, the first scouts that life sends out. It’s very annoying for people who are just staying in the 5 element correspondence system that those first new buds on the trees are red. Why is that? The Chinese word for the color of the new buds is qing, which is sometimes considered blue-green, or green, and is sometimes translated as red. 

Now, why is that? It’s because it’s the color of Shao Yang. It’s the color of something that is very rapidly growing, the beginning, the young, the bursting forth—that kind of energy. A five-year-old who just got a tricycle, who is zig zagging around, the scout getting out there—this is the Shao Yang energy of Spring. 

In empire building, Shao Yang is the energy of the Boston Tea Party, or the moment that Rosa Parks decided not to stand up. It is the small but mighty moment of inception of what becomes a huge movement. It’s just the first movement, but it holds all the power of what’s going to come.

There are some people and some herbs which carry the energy of Shao Yang very strongly. When we are thinking in the world of the 6 stages, of how Yin and Yang move, we may say about a particular herb that it really carries that energy of whoomp! Of the small but mighty, of the Boston Tea Party, of Rosa Parks saying “I won’t stand up,” that lets something loose on a large scale. 

We may say about a particular person that they are carrying that Shao Yang energetic, and if I’m living in the world of 5, maybe I’m going to have to call it Wood, and maybe I’m going to have to call it Fire. But if I’m looking from the 6, I can just say, this is Shao Yang person; it’s a Triple-Heatery Gallbladdery kind of energy. Now here’s a formula that’s a Shao Yang formula, so we can put them together and make them very happy.

There is a zigzaggy quality to the Shao Yang also, which makes a lot of sense because of the zigzagginess of that meridian; it’s a meridian that zigs its way along.

TAI YANG 

The next thing that happens after that first burst is Tai Yang, Greater Yang. The Yang really expands into its fullness. It’s associated with the Small Intestine and Bladder meridian. The meridian is hand Tai Yang Small Intestine, and Foot Tai Yang Bladder, seen as one meridian, one energetic. It is seen as the energy of the full expansion of the perimeter of the territory. 

Here the Empire establishes its territorial boundaries, in the fullness of Yang. I call it the electric fence around the perimeter. 

When you actually look at this meridian, it’s covering your whole back. It’s very much associated with the nervous system, which makes sense because it’s all along the spine there, and the Small Intestine has that quirky neurosensory quality to it. It’s the hairs that rise up on your back at that level of electric perimeter of your space, and of your nervous system. Long before anything actually touches you, it hits your neurosensory zone. That’s Tai Yang, that outer perimeter of the nervous system, that kind of buzzing edge. 

People who have a strong Tai Yang energy, you can feel the buzzing nervous system happening at their perimeters. That’s both the Water feeling of that hyper-alertness, and an inability to settle, and the Small Intestine sense of figuring figuring figuring figuring. There can be confusion/unknown, fear. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the person is in the unknown, or in confusion. The two states can look really similar when there isn’t a lot of data around. The question is, is there enough data to have actual confusion? Or do you just not know? Issues of confusion and unknown and the figuring-out and the “what-is-it?” is a Tai Yang issue. 

Tai Yang is a kinky meridian. It isn’t just the wide exuberant zigzags of Shao Yang. It looks like it goes up, and then it goes back down. It has quirks in both the Small Intestine’s quirky kinks, and the Bladder that’s going here and then there… There’s a kinky feel to the meridian, literally because kinky sex issues generally end up classified in the Tai Yang neighborhood. The sense of hanging out with the pure and the impure, being able to interface with that, and with the dark, and unknown, and private. 

All of this will get more illuminated as it comes up in the context of people or herbs or formulas.  This is all worth reviewing and looking at, so that if I say, “This is a Tai Yang formula,” or “This is a Tai Yang herb,” there’s some memory that will be aroused of, “Oh, Tai Yang, that’s the quirky kinky electric fence on the perimeter thing.”

YANG MING

Oh, I love that Yang Ming. You’re going to get to know a lot about Yang Ming with me sitting at the front of the room. Yang Ming is sunlight Yang, or the Yang Brightness stage; it’s shining, gleaming,  swanking Yang. This is Stomach and Colon as one meridian. The Big Tube down the middle. 

In terms of the empire-building, we’ve had the Boston Tea Party (Shao Yang), we’ve established our boundaries (Tai Yang), and now in the Yang Ming stage, the Empire builds bright monuments to itself. Now we are putting up statues; now we’re going to build a Taj Mahal. There is overt prosperity and richness. 

In health, there’s some classiness to it, and in ill health . . . I think of a Lily Tomlin line: “Most of what passes for corruption is actually just bad taste.” Yang Ming can get a little bit Liberace. I have this gold dress and jacket that I wear with a friend of mine who has a silver one, and we call ourselves the Yang Ming sisters. Yang Ming is an over-the-top meridian.

Yang Ming; it’s big. Everything’s big in Yang Ming. It’s a larger-than-life kind of energetic. It can be a trifle bizarre, but it’s the bizarre of the exaggerated, rather than the bizarre of the kinky. It’s ultimately wholesome, in a way; it’s just a bit much. 

Yang Ming sense of humor is taking something too far. It’s like it’s the Macy’s-Day-Parade-balloon type of stuff, e.g., thinking something’s really funny because you keep doing it. It gets so absurd. It can be an absurd meridian, or a tremendously generous energetic. There’s plenty. There’s surplus. Blatancy, blatancy. There’s nothing subtle about Yang Ming; it is the no-brainer meridian.

TAI YIN

Now we’re going to be moving inward. We’ve gone from the beginning with Shao Yang the small but mighty; Tai Yang the energy of full expansion; Yang Ming the overt prosperity and richness and possible swank… Now there’s a turning inward of the culture or of the meridians, a sense of internal prosperity and richness.
It’s the energy of good and basic cultural infrastructure, the energy filling in, the empire filling in, culture developing, and average citizens doing well. 

We’re now in the Spleen and the Lung; this is a very wholesome meridian. We’re talking about good food and clean air, whole grain bread and well-swept floors. It’s all those basic staples, but good versions of them. There’s a sense of the good things in life. Tai Yin is such a wholesome meridian, like really good wool socks. 

It can also be the preacher and schoolmarm meridian. It’s not known for its sense of humor. It can get a little bit goody two shoes, a little bit mealy, a little overly wholesome. 

SHAO YIN

Shao Yin is the Heart and Kidney, as one meridian. What do they have in common? Core energy. When they say Lesser Yin, they don’t mean “lesser” like not important. They mean the small, hidden thread at the very center. Core energy is that which is most important, and hidden because it is so vital. Your root, your heart.

What’s happening in terms of empire building is there starts to be a hidden power elite running things from behind the scenes. The CIA is doing this, even more covert organizations are influencing that, and nobody believes anymore that what’s happening on the outside is what’s really happening. There is this whole other thing going on, unseen. 

There are people in whose presence you may feel Shao Yin core energy, that root, that depth, that power, that control at the center. There are herbs and there are formulas that work with the issues of the core, the hidden power, and the control at the center. 

JUE YIN

The last one, Jue Yin, is Liver, and Heart Mediator. I call it Heart Mediator because it does more than protect. It also says I love you. 

Liver and Heart Mediator is the Jue Yin Meridian. In terms of the Empire, it’s the waning of the Empire. In terms of the cycles of the moon, it’s the dark of the moon. We’ve gone all the way up into the big brightness, we’ve had prosperity and richness of cultures, then the behind-the-scenes manipulations of the secret power elite. 

Then eventually what happens is, all the citizens know that somebody else is running the show, and public spirit declines. Nobody votes anymore. The Empire is crumbling; it’s in its last stages, and the average citizen is concerned with private matters. I love you, I hate you. I’m fighting you, I’m marrying you. The fist with one hand, the embrace with the other; this is Jue Yin. It’s very personal, up close. It is a totally relational meridian. It is also the place of the last coming in, and then the next thing that happens is, somebody does something that’s Shao Yang, and the whole thing starts again. 

SEVEN

Seven is such a fun space. The seven is the place of the seven emotions. The seven is the place of, as Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallée says, “Something happens.” In Chinese texts, the numbering of the chapters is not random. What shows up is orderly and predictable in chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, etc., and then chapter seven, something unexpected happens. In medical texts, it’s when pathologies start appearing; we’ve stopped talking about the healthy way things work, and now we’ve got pathologies. Or it’s where, in novels or drama, the plot thickens.  

You’ve got it all coming together 1-2-3-4, you’ve got this ecology 5, you’ve got this order 6, and you’ve got everything running just fine. And then vroop! something unexpected comes out of that. What will it be?  

The character for 7 shows something coming out, piercing of the envelope; something rising out of the soil, something appearing. We’ve got all these workings inside of us, and then we have an appearance. We have what actually goes on. Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallée speaks of it as “the violent surging of something very difficult to keep in order, all the power of life and all the dangers of the power of life, eager to express themselves by any means.” It is easy to deviate, because there’s all this happening. 

We speak of the 7 emotions. Why? Because it’s 7. What are the 7 emotions? You can make them up. They didn’t care; they just cared that there are 7, and so they make it be 7. When you look at lists of the 7 emotions from text to text, they vary. It’s the usual 5, plus 2, whatever they think of, to put there to make it 7, in order to express the sense of 7: “We’ve got these orderly systems going, and then what comes out?”

EIGHT

Let’s look at 8, oh, there’s been such suspense. We’re going to look at 8, which is 2 times 4, or 2 times 2 times 2. 2 was a distinction, and 4 deepened that sense of distinction. Just think about how much distinction we’ve got going on with 8! With 4, we have the 4 directions. Here we have not only the 4 directions, but we have up and down, making all these different quadrants. We have this sense of a map, and we have what the Chinese called the anchoring points of the wholeness of the year, the procession of the equinoxes and the solstices. 

With 8, there’s this sense of having the whole map, of mastering of all the forces that make life. This is where we have 8 times 8 makes 64, which is the number of hexagrams of the I Ching, which is the sense of the mapping out the path of Yang in the universe.

In 8 there’s the sense of having a very clear orientation and identification: it’s the solstice, it’s the equinox, it’s the top, it’s the bottom, it’s Yin, it’s Yang, and having this whole system of distinctions all mapped out. The 8 principles: hot/cold, interior/exterior, deficient/access, Yin/Yang, are criteria for the mapping out of what’s going on here. What are the forces of life doing? How can we plot this? This sense of making the map, and having the distinctions among distinctions, is a very different way of going about knowing life than the dynamism of the 6, or the ecology of the 5, or the uniqueness of the 4, or the movement of the 3, or the simple contact and contrast of the 2, or the unspeakableness of the One. 

Just as we contrasted the reductionist 4-space science of the West with the 5-space science of Five Element acupuncture, we can look at the same situation very differently with a 5 science and an 8 science. We have people who are proficient in the 8 science saying, “We know life—we have the map,” and we have people of the 5-space science saying, “We know life—we know ecology.” Both of these are valid. Both of these are talking about a whole different level of reality. We can know life by knowing the ecology, and we can know life because we have it mapped. Why throw either one away? Where’s the contradiction? 

There is a difference, but a difference is not the same as a contradiction. 8 is different than 5, is different than 6, is different than 4, is different than 3. We can look through all these different lenses and say, “In the world of the 3, we have stuckness. In the world of the 5, we have Earth. In the world of the 6, we have Yang Ming. In the world of the 7, we have a raging greedy hunger. In the world of the 8, we have stomach fire, blazing upwards, scorching the lungs. In the 4 in Western terms, we have a heck of an ulcer. One doesn’t make the other untrue. There are different ways of looking at what’s happening in the same place, in a different language.

NINE

Briefly, to complete some numbers, and get us to a place that’s a more Chinese type of ending, we’ll look at the 9, which is 3 times 3, movement among movements. Nine connotes a sense of perpetual motion. There’s a sense of forever. I’ve heard from Chinese friends that in 1999, a whole lot of couples got married, because of the sense of perpetuity of the 9, the symbolism of going on and on and on and on. It’s taking all the anchor points of the eights and moving among them perpetually. 

You’ve seen the diagram of the Imperial Palace where the Emperor lived in the center room, and for the Spring Equinox, he would come out and go to a certain room in the East, perform a certain ceremony and go back in. At the solstice, he’d go to one of the corner rooms and come back. He would keep going, moving around the map and back to the center, the Emperor moving around the map perpetually. This is the 9. It’s also the 81 chapters of the Tao te Ching. It the perpetual movement of the universe, from the perspective of Yin. 

TEN

10 is 2 times 5, and connotes another type of completion. I like Elizabeth Rochat de la Vallée’s phrase for it: Oneness that’s been talked about thoroughly. Yes, it’s the Oneness. When you’re in the One, you are just in the One; there is nothing to say. But then you go through this whole mishegos, and come back to saying, “It’s all One.” 

ELEVEN

The 11 is the five Zang and six Fu, the five solid organ and the six hollow organs, ecology and organization, heaven and earth in one number. It is also the 7 and the 4, the seven orifices and the four limbs, the sense of a system; a moving, working vital system. 

TWELVE

The 12 is similar. It’s 2 times 6. We’ve got those 6 meridians chopped in half, so it’s the 12 meridians and it’s 3 times 4, the dynamic relationship of individual things. How do the Officials interrelate? What’s the 3 space between how the Liver is relating to the Spleen? How is the Lung relating to the Heart? That’s a 3 space. The 4s are like the Officials, the unique individuals. And the 3 is: are they fighting? Are they moving together? What’s happening? There’s more of a sense of mapness and orderliness to the 12 than the dynamism of the 11. 

So this is brief lesson on numerology. It’s a subject that you can go much deeper on than I went into, but then you’d be here learning numerology more than herbs. I hope this begins to give a sense of how it is that there isn’t a contradiction between 5 and 8. They are ways of looking at things, and we can look in all these different ways, separately or simultaneously, or as the need comes up with this person. This at least is clear with this person, and what can I find out if I ask about the other numbers as well?

© 2018 Thea Elijah