A thought recently popped into my head that blew my mind a little.
Facebook was advertising Mala beads to me, which have 108 beads. Some people say it's because 1 has a certain meaning, 0 has a certain meaning and 8 has a certain meaning.
But I suddenly realised (late to the game, I know, but maths isn't my strength) one hundred and eight and one-zero-eight aren't the same thing.
One is an amount, the other a sequence or a series. You could replace 108 as a number with a word that means one hundred and eight things (I shall call it "a shiffle" - as in, a set of Mala beads consists of a shiffle of beads, and a shiffle of onions is way too many onions). Where as I could replace the sequence 108 with any series of words or symbols (starfish-apricot-tractor).
It gets even further away from numbers when you think of 108 as being (as the yoga magazine I read recently suggested) that it's sort of a sequence of actual symbols. A solid line for ultimate truth, A circle for inherent emptiness, and an infinite loop for timelessness. Or the classic binary sequence of 1 (everything) 0 (nothing) plus infinity (it's an infinity symbol on it's side). So you could have exactly three beads and it would still "mean" 108.
108 and 108 (and, possibly, 108) are two (maybe three) completely different things that just happen to share the same three figures (and the same set of beads).
And now I'm going down a Derridan wormhole if signifier/signified, phenomenonolgy vs structuralism crap, and I really need to get more sleep.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
No comments:
Post a Comment