The Concept of the Sublime in Eighteenth Century Philosophy

The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the eighteenth century in the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper (third earl of Shaftesbury) and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of Cooper's and Dennis' concepts of the sublime in his Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination,. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.

John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies, in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair." Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin", but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space, where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty.

Joseph Addison made the "Grand Tour" in 1699 and commented in the Spectator , (1712) that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror". The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (sight rather than rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g."unbounded", "unlimited",as wellas "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.

Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination,, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, (1744), and Edward Young's Night Thoughts, (1745), are generally considered as the starting points for Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime in Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, (1756). The significance of Burke's writings is that he was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused." While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction. Burke's concept of the sublime was a stark contrast to the classical notion of aesthetic quality in Plato's Philebus,, Ion,, and Symposium, , and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality.

The eighteenth century was an active period for investigation of the sublime as an aesthetic quality with many writers making contributions, but Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to incorporate aesthetic theory into a philosophic system in the Critique of Judgment,. In accordance with his critical method of the first two Critiques, Kant poses the question "How are judgments of taste possible?" In other words, how can we be certain that a judgment concerning aesthetic quality can be known to be universally true? For Kant, judgments of taste, or beauty, corresponded to the four primary divisions of his categories of the understanding, with the essential element for universalization as the "moment" of "relation" that presupposed a disinterested state where the satisfaction derived was independent of desire and interest. The application of the synthetic a priori, of the judgment of taste, requiring a transcendental deduction, validated the judgment as universal. This treatment of judgments of beauty is analogous to the arguments made in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason,. In those arguments, for example, the intuition of space is presupposed by the mind and not a result of its perceptions. If space is universally presupposed in perception, then the axioms of geometry must be true for everyone. Like space, time, and the categories, beauty belongs to the understanding.

The sublime, on the other hand, was for Kant a feeling of satisfaction celebrating reason itself and our capacity as moral beings. The feeling is experienced when our imagination fails to comprehend the vastness of the infinite and we become aware of the ideas of reason and their representation of the totality of the universe, as well as those powers that operate in the universe which we do not grasp and are beyond our control. The feeling is at once existential in that we realize our own finitude, or smallness, but is universal in the realization of our own moral worth as an autonomous being belonging to the fraternity of mankind which shares a moral destiny through its capacity to apply the moral laws of practical reason. The judgments of the sublime arise from two principles of reason, the mathematical and the dynamic, which are both elements that have a common thread throughout Kant's writings on pure and practical reason. The sublime reflects the exaltation of reason and the nobility of the human spirit, whereas judgments of beauty belong to the "mere" understanding.

In his discussion of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment,, Kant distinguishes between the sensible concept of measuring things by comparison, and an absolute which as a concept of reason defies comparison and is "great beyond every standard of the senses". It is the same concept of reason that Kant refers to in the Critique of Practical Reason, as a source of free, uncaused activity, and in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the Unconditioned which unifies and completes the conditioned knowledge of the understanding. The sublime is the satisfaction derived from the realization of this concept of reason and its aim at infinite totality. In all three Critiques, Kant had warned that these concepts of unity and the unconditioned are only ideas that regulate the search for empirical knowledge. Towards the end of the eighteenth century other philosophers would utilize Kant's aesthetic theory and his notion of the unconditioned to try and reconcile the knower and the known, re-integrating the sublime and beauty in an Absolute which embodied the idealism which Kant had spent his career intent on refuting.

References

Addison, Joseph. The Spectator,. Ed. Donald E. Bond. Oxford, 1965.
Brett, R.L. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury. , London, 1951.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. , London, 1958.
Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of Nature,. Oxford, 1945.
Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristics, , Vol. II. Ed. John M. Robertson. London, 1900.
Dennis, John. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, in Critical Works, , Vol. II. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. Baltimore, 1939-1943.
Hipple, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. , Carbondale, IL, 1957.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. , 1790.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. , Ithaca, 1959.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. "Sublime in External Nature". Dictionary of the History of Ideas. , New York, 1974.
Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory". Philosophical Quarterly, , 43(2):97-113, 1961.

Joseph Bonaparte and The New Jersey Devil

Joseph Bonaparte and The New Jersey Devil:

"Commodore Stephen Decatur was an American naval hero in the early nineteenth century. According to legend, he visited the Hanover Mill Works to inspect his cannonballs being forged. While there, he visited a firing range and sighted a flying creature flapping its wings. He fired a cannonball directly upon it. It had no effect and the creature flew away.

Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and former King of Spain, was reported to have seen the Devil. The incident took place in Bordentown, New Jersey while he was game hunting in the nearby woods.

The infamous Captain Kidd is reputed to have buried treasure in Barnegat Bay. Legend has it he beheaded one of his men to guard forever his buried treasure. Accounts claim the headless pirate and the Jersey Devil became friends and were seen in the evenings walking along the Atlantic and in nearby marshlands.

In Clayton, New Jersey, the Devil was chased by a posse to the edge of a wooded area. The Devil fled into the wood. The posse, afraid to pursue him, halted and declared 'if you're the Devil, rattle your chains.'

The Devil's taste varies. He was seen cavorting at sea with a mermaid in 1870. And he is reputed to have had a ham and egg breakfast with a Republican - Judge French. But the Devil is not known to have specific political leanings.

The Devil's sightings have covered great geographic distances. - from Bridgeton to Haddonfield in 1859; to the New York border in 1899; and from Gloucester City to Trenton in 1909. Until this time, tales of the Devil were passed by word-of-mouth. However, published police and newspaper accounts during a famous week in January of 1909 took the story of the Devil from folk belief to authentic folk legend. Thirty different sightings in a one-week period told of the Devil sailing across the Delaware River to Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Newspaper articles created a near panic in the region.

Theory and the Devil

After the 1909 appearances, the scientific community was asked for possible explanations. Reportedly, science professors from Philadelphia and experts from the Smithsonian Institution thought the Devil to be a prehistoric creature from the Jurassic period. Had the creature survived in nearby limestone caves? Was it a pterodactyl or a peleosaurus? New York scientists thought it to be a marsupial carnivore. Was it an extinct fissiped? However, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia could not locate any record of a living of dead species resembling the Jersey Devil." (2)

There is a remote 'possibility' that the Hapsburgs and Randolphs or other Merovingian sorcerers who live in the upper Chesapeake area have something to do with this Devil. Some of their rituals definitely involve the invocation of Asmodeus or other elementals that some call demons. They also claim to be able to shape-shift but I suspect they are involved in projecting hallucinations or what is called mind-fogging. In any event it is interesting to find Napoleon's brother living in these parts of America.

Privilege - Alfred Lee Loomis and Hecateus

ALFRED LEE LOOMIS:

Privilege sometimes leads to productivity and creativity through community efforts such as this man made possible at his Tuxedo Park mansion. The community he created included the likes of Einstein, Fermi and Heisenberg. The things they studied helped develop many technologies and lead to the Manhattan Project. Loomis had investigated everything from ultrasonics to brain waves as the world moved toward war in 1940. The combination of ultrasonics and brainwaves or ESP is my special interest. The Chaos Science of pre-Ice Age humans might well have allowed more fantastic things than the atom bomb. I heartily recommend serious study of the pentagon-dodecahedron and The Lost Chord which Pythagoras learned a little about from the Pyramid. This enabled Pythagoras to be credited with creating the musical octaves.

Please ask yourself just how much credit was Pythagoras due if he only learned a little about these things that can heal through his 'Singing of the Spheres'? I implore society to understand what his Dean of Studies might have been part of in a long line of pre-Empire knowledge systems that Phoenicians like Thales and Pythagoras kept a small amount from. That Dean of Studies is Abaris (Rabbi) the Druid according to a noted scientist who passed over his privileged opportunity to be a top Basilidae political agent or priest. That noted scientist is Hecateus of Miletus and ML or Mile and his kin are indeed rabbis and Stuart BEES.

Star-Fire Ceremony

The Templar flag Columbus and da Gama traveled under was the dominant economic (and therefore if for no other reason) force in the three centuries before they set sail. Not just in Europe as we have shown, but in the entire world, these progeny of the Phoenician Brotherhood ended feudal socio-political strangleholds and opened the way for new possibilities. For these reasons and the eventual weakening of the church influence and Inquisitions (though that is what the church started against THEM!) we can truly be thankful.

This superficial evaluation is only one aspect of what we analyzed with input from all available quarters and presented a real and true threat from the continued macho or competitive nature of those in pursuit of power. Their progeny has lost much of the righteous underpinnings of the Templar zeal. Needless to say their influence has not been exposed in the cultural history of our various media including schools. Therefore constant harping on the subject is somewhat warranted. I only seek to set the stage for their specific history and influence on the time of Marco Polo and another 'fiction' that was used to create the impression that there was a need for 'discovery' of the 'New World'. The idea that the land of the Dragons in China was not part of a world order continues to the present. There are many perspectives on the origin of the Templars and why they were given Papal 'carte-blanche' but let me quote Gardner again to see something far more ancient than most scholars purporting to know when Templars or Masons became a part of our cultural fabric. He is talking about a re-structuring of much more ancient mystery schools at this juncture.

"It has long been a customary Jewish practice to hang meat for blood-letting before cooking and consumption, but in contrast the Christian faith is especially concerned with the figurative ingestion of blood. In the Christian tradition it is customary to take the Communion sacrament (the Eucharist), wherein wine is drunk from the sacred chalice, symbolically representing the blood of Jesus, the life-blood of the Messianic line. Could it be, therefore, that the modern Christian custom is an unwitting throwback to some distant pre-Noah rite of actually ingesting blood? If so, then since we also know that the chalice is a wholly female symbol which has always been emblematic of the womb, might this even have been an extract from divine menstrual blood which, as we have seen (Chapter 10), was revered as life-giving 'Star-Fire'? The answer to these questions is yes, that was precisely the custom - but it was not so unsavoury as it might seem. (3) Few of us think to enquire about the ultimate sources of many of today's bodily supplements, and those in the know are generally reluctant to tell us. The premarin hormone, for example, is made from the urine of pregnant mares, while some forms of growth hormone and insulin are manufactured from 'E.coli', a human faecal bacterium.

Before considering this ancient practice in detail, it is worth reminding ourselves that the edict to abstain from blood came not from Enki the Wise but from Enlil-Jehovah, the god of wrath and vengeance who had instigated the Flood, wrought havoc in Ur and Babylon and endeavoured to deceive Adam with regard to the Tree of Knowledge. This was not a god who liked people and the Sumerian records are very clear in this regard. If he forbade the intake of blood, this was not likely to have been an edict for the benefit of Noah and his descendants - it was most probably to their detriment.

The menstrual Star Fire ('Elixir Rubeus') of the goddess, being essentially regarded as fluid intelligence, was symbolically represented as the all-seeing eye {The circle with a dot again.}, or as the fiery cross (the 'rosi-crucis') {The Circle with the cross.}, precisely as depicted in the Mark of Cain. The emblems were later used by the mystery school of ancient Egypt, particularly that of the priest-prince Ankhfn-khonsu (c.2170 BC {Check out Crowley's Book of the Law and the name at the end of it.}, which was formally established as the Dragon Court by the twelfth-dynasty Queen Sobeknefru.

Another of the most prominent mystery schools was the Great White Brotherhood of Rameses III (c. 1450 BC) - so called, it is often said, because of their white raiment, but actually named because of their preoccupation with a mysterious white powder {Through 'high-spin' atomic attunement able to levitate the pyramid blocks, he says.}. According to the Supreme Grand Lodge of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, there were thirty-nine men and women on the High Council of the Brotherhood, who sat at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. (4) A branch off this Order became more generally known as the Egyptian Therapeutae, who in Heliopolis and Judaea, were identified as the Essenes. (5) It was into this White Brotherhood of wise therapeutics and healers (the original Rosicrucians) that Jesus was later initiated to progress through the degrees, and it was his high standing in this regard which gained him the often used designation of 'Master'... 'essaios': that is, something secret or mystic. (In the Norse tradition, the gods are called the 'Asen', the guardians of purity, and the word has a similar root.)...

In the hermetic lore of the ancient Egyptian mystery school, this process of achieving enlightened consciousness was of express importance, with spiritual regeneration taking place by degrees through the thirty-three vertebrae of the spinal column {Including the tail bones or sacrum and coccyx.} until reaching the pituitary gland which invokes the pineal body. The science of this regeneration is one of the 'Lost Keys' of Freemasonry, and it is the reason why ancient Freemasonry was founded upon thirty-three degrees." (6)

Though they have impressive pedigrees and lots of nice myths I am sure their knowledge is limited by the lack of ethics entailed in the elitist attitudes and acts of their members. Levitation and use of cosmic thought field potentials including one dimensional harmonic force and the probable 'Lost Chord' pre-dates these people, in my mind or point of view. MacDari is a Masonic linguist who suggests this time was even before the building of the Sphinx, and he says Phre-Masonry of the Lord Sun God Iesa was an early Brotherhood of Man that Jesus was named after. Gardner admits to 'pre-Noah' knowledge and probably has an open-mind about earlier roots, but his story focuses on the Bible and the Pendragon Grail legends.

Purpose

There is no God.

Belief is a stray sentiment; it functions furiously around its determination to survive. If it is healthy, it is impenetrable, if it is not, it is unknowingly so. Sadly, it also doesn't end with man; it ends with conflict and qualms. Men know perfectly to be courageous, they do not know but what to be courageous of, for or against. A belief is a second conscience overruling the normal one, it provides for all expectations of courage. It is difficult to confront a firm belief with the firmest of qualms, it is easier instead to assault it with them. One must never impress a doubt, one must induce it. Frustration is the first offspring of a belief losing its grounds. The firmer the latter, the superior the former.

No belief is entire, hence, no belief can be ended entirely; ridden by disparate proportions of an unapparent guilt, man, of what he believes wholly, holds desires against it. Belief is a personal satisfaction that justifies man's actions; it also appropriates it. 'We do what we believe in' - to the extent of - 'we must do what we believe in'. People aspire towards their beliefs. Like they commit to their satisfactions, they also prefer to commit to the place where they find it. That is in itself the greatest injustice a man can perpetrate - to rely on something uncertain and forge in oneself the assurance that it is not; and then expect it to yield.

Man is never totally satisfied.

Going back to the notion that there is a God helps us with another notion, that we aren't it. The first notion is an indefatigably powerful alibi, or rather, an apology for the limitations we abide by. Outside these limitations we gain our satisfactions. Hence, we are never totally satisfied. Only in little whiles, the elusive points of Time when we're Gods.

A conclusion such as that there is no god helps us to declare another - that within his limitations, a man may rise so, that that satisfaction he aims for must be more than final. They must find a medium to breathe and exist in an inert independence where they can choose to surrender without the reluctance and indifference, typical of their import. When we talk of another kind of survival other than the primary one, with a greater nature of independence, a de facto downright unconditional and total submission, and where the transient satisfaction he aims for is more than the final ability in man or is a somewhat credible challenge to it, when we appropriately stop believing in God to succumb to believing in something god-like in us - we talk of 'Purpose'.

Between man and the obtainable, lies a cheap form of development - motive; between a man and the unobtainable, lies the pursuit that searches beyond the compatible in him - purpose. Motive constricts man to his self; purpose is all and any involvement beside and outside this. Motive and purpose are close counterparts of the range of man's ability, almost like alibi and reason. Motive is a funnel for it, and purpose, a gauge. Both are concrete definitions: motive, of a virtue in man and purpose, of the peak of all his virtues. Both are also stalwart contradictions to that same range of the ability of man for motive becomes the exhaustion of one or more attributes, and purpose, their last gesture.

Purpose is never real. It is so because it is higher than the obsessive human prioritization of reality. A man with purpose is alive only to morality when morality is not a sense of right and wrong but merely a sense of direction.

To know how much we can expand is to understand a persisting relation with ourselves, but to know how much we can expand immediately after that obvious relation is to infringe an unfounded realm, much beyond the scope in us, and find, outside one's personal capacity and in an unnatural uniqueness, a paramount artificial strength (for the source is external) and a tantamount egoistical desire.

A man who finds purpose discovers a satisfaction more pure than any happiness and superior to all joy; this satisfaction rears further the implementation of the purpose, and the pursuit of its result. A satisfied result engenders a threat to the world, to alter it by the means of a single man, by a change personal in one's individuality to a change impersonal in the collectivism of an entire breed.

German Philosophers

German Culture: German Philosophers

German and German speaking philosophers have made vast contributions to philosophy, and through philosophy, to the course of world history. Perhaps the most influential were the 'great triumvirate' of Kant, Hegel and Marx. Other noteworthy philosophers include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Nobel prize-winner Hermann Hesse.

One of the greatest characters of German philosophy was Friedrich Nietzsche, who professed himself to be "a follower of Dionysus, the god of life's exuberance", and declared that he hoped Dionysus would replace Jesus as the primary cultural standard for future millennia.

Nietzsche showed his academic talents early on. As a child he didn't like playing, and the neighbour's children called him 'the little minister'. He died in 1900 after 11 years of madness. He went insane one morning after seeing a horse being whipped by a coachman. Historians argue whether his insanity was caused by syphilis, drug abuse, or a disease inherited from his father.

Nietzsche was heavily influenced by the work of Schopenhauer, a man so unpleasant, negative and pessimistic that even his own mother eventually banned him from her house.

Schopenhauer's philosophy was based on that of Kant, but he did not believe in individual free will, he believed that we are all part of a vast single will which is the entire universe, and any sense of individuality is pure illusion.

Schopenhauer never married, perhaps not surprisingly considering his view of women, he once declared that women "are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long." Instead, he shared his lonely existence with a poodle.

The first of the 'great triumvirate', Kant, was born in 1724 in Königsberg, (now part of Russia, and called Kaliningrad). He was one of the fathers of 'critical philosophy', and divided modes of thinking into two kinds, analytic and synthetic.

Analytical propositions are those which can be proven to be true by analysis, for example 'pink boots1 are boots2'. This statement must be true, because the predicate is contained in the subject. (If pink boots1 weren't boots2, then they wouldn't be boots1!)

Synthetic propositions are those that cannot be contrived purely from analysis, for example, 'the boot is pink', this relates to something in the real world and cannot be shown to be true or untrue purely by analysis of the statement, you need to see the boot. His most famous works include his 'Critique of Pure Reason' and 'The Metaphysics of Ethics', in which he discussed his views on ethics.

Kant died in 1804, when Hegel was 33. Hegel was born in Stuttgart and his philosophy was greatly influenced by that of Kant. After an inheritance he was able to devote his entire life to academic works.

He believed that dialectical reasoning (debate by question and answer to resolve two differing points of view) was the only way for progress in human thought. He believed that all men were fundamentally free, and that our task is to find a state or a set of laws under which we can all live freely.

Hegel did not advocate anarchy, rather he thought that we could make ourselves free by choosing to obey laws we knew to be rational. Hegel died in 1831 of cholera, after one day's illness. He was buried next to another German philosopher, Fichte, and near another, Karl Solger, in a plot he had chosen himself.

The last of these three, with perhaps the biggest influence on recent history, born in 1818, was Karl Marx. He is in fact best known for his economic theories, especially one seminal work he produced together with Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto'. In fact this only represents only a tiny fraction of his thought. Overall, his writing on Communism represents only an aside, he wrote much more simply in criticism of capitalism, or on analysis of concrete political events.

An even more contemporary philosopher was Martin Heidegger, who died only in 1976. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, and in turn his work influenced the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, although Heidegger himself disagreed with existentialist interpretations of his work. His work has had a great influence on Western philosophy, but he has received little public recognition because of his refusal to apologise for his involvement with the National Socialist Party. To what degree he was involved is still unclear.

Standing like a giant over modern German literary philosophy is the Nobel prize-winner, Hermann Hesse. At the age of 13 he was told he would be 'a poet or nothing', so he started off by writing unimpressive romantic novels. His first successful work was the more philosophical 'Peter Camenzind', which positively burned with anger at his repressed and traditional childhood.

His most widely read work is 'Siddhartha', which was published in 1922, it is based on the idea that man's true nature has been lost and can only be found through self expression.

Hesse was at one point accused of supporting the Nazis, whom he did not openly criticize, but while based in Switzerland he did a lot to help political refugees from Germany, and refused to leave out sections of his works which dealt with pogroms and anti-Semitism. His publisher Peter Suhrkamp, was arrested by the Nazis in 1944.

Hesse received the Nobel Prize in 1946, and thereafter did not produce further major works. He died in 1962.

My Insight into Numerology

From time to time, we wonder about the mystery that exists in our day to day experiences and events that happen in our lives. Some parts of these events are beyond our control and some are not. We are all here to experiment the theory that we learnt before we decided to embark upon our journey in this lifetime. Sometimes life does not go as far as what was originally intended in the years of previous planning. Well, welcome to planet earth! It is, of course, alright to make mistakes in life as long as we deal with the experience in an appropriate way. In other words, your individual response to what happens to you in your experience or lesson is as important as the circumstance itself.

We are not perfect as a human race and we are far from reaching full potential in terms of our universal understanding, despite the technological advancement we have at the moment. Even with our vast amount of available technology, we are still far from what we can really achieve when we tap into the energy that is provided to us by the universe, yet remains still to be acknowledged by the majority of us.

This numerology series is about numerology from my perspective and personal experiences with the numbers. Numerology is a down-to-earth science. If we really apply it seriously, we can attain a better result in understanding our circumstances. If we allow skepticism to take place, in reality, nothing will evolve or move in our lives. It is not about the history of numerology. We are not discussing the method or technique I will be using here because it does not matter. You can use any technique because I believe all methods will bring you the same result when applied properly.

The basic cycle of the digits 1 through 9 is used in numerology to symbolize the human life cycle. Within the range of these nine numbers lies the potential for the total life experience, including all things physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. We always reduce the number into one single digit with the exception of the Master Numbers 11, 22, and 33. These numbers have been found to have a special significance that precludes their reduction to their single essence of 2, 4, and 6. The characteristics of these numbers are beyond the range of normal human experiences. The experiences these numbers can bring are only for the highly enlightened and the highly evolved. The numbers 11, 22, and 33 never stop creating the future. These vibrations are the threshold of change and progress in the world. Please don't be carried away here if you have one of those Master Numbers. Do not allow your ego to take an exaggerated effect on you and your sense of purpose here in this lifetime. Maybe you are special, by all means, but by having these vibrations in your surroundings only mean you might have a greater responsibility in terms of making changes in your surroundings or the world. I do use the zero as an identifier to indicate people's internal strength and gifts that they need to explore in their life cycle to achieve their proper growth.

There is no number in all the numbers 1 to 9 or the Master Numbers that can claim to be better than the others, but each number can bring a different experience to the person who has that vibration. Why do we need to have these vibration or experiences? That will depend upon you individually in respect to your evolution and where you are going with it.

When I will go through all the different explanations in subsequent articles, I will list the different meanings of each number, from both positive and negative points of view, but that does not imply you will have all the qualities of those numbers that apply to you. People may have similar numbers or vibrations, however, that does not mean they are exactly the same in terms of their personalities or characteristics. On the contrary, they can be distinct opposites in terms of their understanding of life. This is due to other contrasting numbers existing in their individual charts. It can sometimes reflect a similar direction in life, yet a different twist or flavor might be apparent. What is in a chart? Plenty of qualities, and aspects of yourself and your characteristics that can help to determine the likely course you will take in life.

Do not take word-for-word the explanation of the essence of each number when building your understanding of your numbers or vibration, because other factors might take place or effect in your life. Learn to use numerology to help you find a better understanding of who you are and what you have as challenges and attainment in your life. Numerology can be used as your main direction as well as pinpointing your karma in this life.

Use numerology as a tool for guidance, but not as an easy answer for you because, in the end, you hold your own answers and you do have to do the work to accomplish whatever it is you desire in this lifetime. Your worst experiences are your best assets, depending on how you look at life in the first place. Hope you will enjoy the journey with me to discover your vibrations.