8 & 1 – Infinity and the Personal Self

8 pairs with 1. 8 is all curves while 1 is a straight line; they are opposites for good reason. Both 8 and 1 work with forces which generate life.

8-ness: Infinity

The number 8, on its side, is also the symbol for infinity

First of all, get paper and pen and spend some time drawing 8s, get the feel into your hand, arm and body. 8, like all the numbers, is more than an intellectual exercise.

As you draw the 8s your pen flows round one circle, crosses over and flows round the other. If you're right-handed you probably began your first circle going widdershins, got half way through it and turned deosil to do the bottom circle. You then crossed back over and went widdershins again to complete the top one. Left-handed people often do it the other way around.

Keep going round and round, over your 8, keep doing it. You find yourself travelling first one way and then the other. The figure 8 is one of the simplest spiral labyrinths, it goes in both directions, deosil, widdershins, deosil, widdershins. Remember, deosil is clockwise and widdershins is anticlockwise. This property of 8-ness is like the labyrinth again, fundamental to how it works with spirit, it brings together the two directions, widdershins and deosil, the energies of feminine and masculine, the pairs of opposites.

Now try drawing 8 on its side as the infinity symbol above, a similar but different feel.

So what is Infinity? Hmmm! Difficult! Eternity, immensity, endless, boundless, limitless, perpetuity, time without end. Like I said, difficult to imagine, at least at first.

Nowadays, we're educated and encouraged to think of things as having a beginning and an end. While this may be convenient and comfortable, it has little to do with reality, or physics! You've likely heard of the Big Bang Theory which suggests a beginning for the universe and is much quoted on TV but ... but ... if you talk to scientists, the real ones who're at the cutting edge of theoretical and particle physics, you'll find them talking about the fact that the maths for the Big Bang don't really hold up. And, anyway, what was there before the Big Bang, what did it come out of and what set it off? So the world, the universe and everything (nor any unified theory of everything either!) is not a comfy beginning-middle-end story, like a soap on TV, it's a deep, confusing, difficult concept that nobody has got the hang of yet.

And yet we live in it and with it all the time, we're constantly part of infinity. We are infinitely part of infinity.

Einstein showed that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It changes constantly. And it completely confuses us because current photographs of the universe seem to show us that it's constantly expanding. How? If matter is not created then how is the universe expanding? I'm not going further with this in this book, but it does strongly suggest to me the concept of a "breathing" universe. I find all that stuff fascinating; comes of having a mathematician-physicist-husband, who's talked all this stuff to me over the cornflakes for the past forty-five years.

Wow! Breathing universes and the Big Bang – that's a huge load of stuff to take on if you happen to be an 8-person and so have connections with infinity. We can make it a bit smaller than that though, and so a bit easier to get a handle on. There's an old song from Yorkshire which does it rather well ... On Ilkley Moor Baht'at ... these are the words, in the dialect:

Wheear 'as ta bin sin ah saw thee,
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at?!
Wheear 'as ta bin sin ah saw thee?
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Tha's been a cooartin' Mary Jane
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Tha's been a cooartin' Mary Jane|
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Tha's bahn t'catch thi deeath o'cowd
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Tha's bahn t'catch thi deeath o'cowd
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Then we shall ha' to bury thee
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then we shall ha' to bury thee
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Then t'worms 'll cum and eat thee oop
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then t'worms 'll cum and eat thee oop
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Then ducks 'll cum and eat oop t'worms
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then ducks 'll cum and eat oop t'worms
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Then we shall go an' ate oop ducks
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then we shall go an' ate oop ducks
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

Then we shall all 'ave etten thee
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then we shall all 'ave etten thee
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

That's wheer we get us oahn back
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
That's wheer we get us oahn back
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at

So the poor lassie catches her death of cold, dies and is buried; the worms eat her up; the ducks eat the worms; we eat the ducks ... and so we eat her atoms, or rather the atoms that made up her body while she was alive. We don't eat her spirit, of course. And that happens all through everyone's, and everything's, life – you eat, digest, excrete, and your excretions become part of the next meal for someone or something. In the sense of our physical atoms, we are all part of each other and always have been.

This works even if you go back before the Earth was solid, before all the atoms stuck themselves together to make this glorious spinning ball of rock we all live on. The atoms came from stardust (as Joni Mitchell wrote) – We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. Only it's one hell of a lot older than the mere billion years that she wrote about, our own earth is at least 4.5 billion years old for a start, and then there's however-long that the atoms were cycling around the universe before they came together as the Earth, and nobody has the answer to that one. I'll let Joni off though as the lines do scan well!

Infinity is about this constant change, the constant reusing and recycling of atoms from one being to another ... and so is all life. And so is 8-ness. It's about beginning to allow glimmers of this reality into your consciousness, about expanding your personal envelope to encompass more. There's no way anyone manages this all in one go, nor should you try to, after all infinity is endlessness, there is no need for an end; it's about the continuous growth of your consciousness, and your ability to be inclusive, your ability to relate to everything and to know, ken, your interconnection with all life.

8 also gives us the linking threads to the ancestral realm which includes everything, not just our grannies; it also links us to the world of potential, connecting us with the unlimited, latent, dormant and embryonic inspiration of ideas and concepts. The world of the ancestors has great wisdom...