but the stories we tell about them are…

(Mighty Real)

As I discussed in my previous post about orbs—just because something isn’t “real” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In addition to “far-out” experiences such as UFO and orb sightings and paranormal events, good old-fashioned, everyday numbers also have a questionable reality.  Jung likened numbers to archetypal images, explaining that they both have the quality of simultaneously pre-existing and being created by consciousness:  “they are discovered inasmuch as one did not know of their unconscious autonomous existence, and invented inasmuch as their presence was inferred from analogous representational structures.”  (Jung Synch 41) In other words, when we refer to the number of apples in a bowl, the number itself is not something that physically exists alongside the fruit, but is something that we at once create and discover in our mind. This half-real, half-unreal quality is something that has long confused and concerned philosophers.  In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes pointed out that numbers were not something to which he could apply his famous external validation of reality as the nature of their existence didn’t seem to be effected by whether they were experienced in a state of wakefulness or hallucination:

At this rate we might be justified in concluding that … arithmetic, geometry, and so on, which treat only of the simplest and most general subject matter, and are indifferent whether it exists in nature or not, have an element of indubitable certainty.  Whether I am awake or asleep, two and three add up to five, and a square has only four sides, and it seems impossible for such obvious truths to fall under a suspicion of being false (Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, First Meditation)

Hundreds of years later, the 20^th century philosopher Edmund Husserl returned to this issue and argued that while it was true that numbers were beyond the realm of empirical reality, there was still an “original history” behind ideal objects that made them real.   He pointed out that we recognize lines drawn on a chalk board as a geometrical figure not because of the bare physicality of the chalk line itself or because of anything that is going on in the head of the person who is drawing it—since the act of recreating a geometrical figure, whether imagined or on paper, doesn’t require that the person actually rethink the original creation of the discipline of geometry from out of non-geometry—but simply because we share an understanding with the person drawing about its established rules and explanations.  Geometry is real not because of something that can be directly perceived—but because it has a history.

We can see this historical reality of numbers playing itself out in numerology, astrology and synchronicity.  For example the significance of an individual seeing the numbers 911 appear everywhere is attached to the historical story of the 9/11 terror attacks, which is itself tied to the historical situation whereby the numbers 911 are used for emergency calls in the U.S. This week the NYT ran a piece on the cultural significance of the number 40, and Reality Sandwich did a piece on the 7/22 lunar eclipse—the longest to occur this century.  This once in a lifetime event was made all the more powerful because of the date on which it occurred—22/7 being “the authentic fractional number appointed to Pi - the Golden number of harmony”, and 7/22 being the ancient feast day of Mary Magdalens.

Instead of thinking of these numerical resonances as being merely made-up connections, I’m proposing that these connections are actually more real than the actual numbers themselves.   In the same way that we’re not overly concerned with proving the existence of the number 22, we should realize that it’s not a radar blip or blurry photograph that proves or disproves the realness of a UFO but the fact that it has a history as a rumor—it  exists in the form of all the stories, pictures, TV shows, movies, dreams and paintings about UFOs.  Just as the orb phenomenon reveals the evolution of group-think, the fact that people believe strongly that UFOs are real makes the experience of sightings and rumors of sightings psychologically significant regardless of whether they had really happened.