WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Numbers

16 November 1955

Sweet Mother, has each person's number a different significance for each one?

If one wants to give it, yes.

If one doesn't think about it, it doesn't signify anything at all. It's the importance one gives it which counts.

Numbers are a way of speaking. It is a language, as all the sciences, all the arts, everything that man produces; it is always a way of speaking, it is a language. If one adopts this language it becomes living, expressive, useful. As we need words to make ourselves understood usually--unfortunately it is liable to all kinds of confusions, but still we haven't yet reached the state where we can communicate in silence, which, obviously, would be a very much higher state--well, if you want to give numbers a meaning in your life, they can reveal to you quite a lot of things. But it's like that. It is like astrology: if one wants to study the relation between his life and the movement of the stars, one can also find all kinds of useful information.

Fundamentally it is a way of knowing, nothing else--a process. True knowledge is beyond words, beyond systems, beyond languages; it is in a silent identity. It is in fact the only one which does not err.