When I think of the number four, the “for” part of the word “fort” or “fortress” comes to mind because of the obvious similar sound. Perhaps there is some connection between the number 4 and these words; either way, this similarity to me reinforces the idea of the 4 and some kind of strong structure which provides shelter and protection. This ties in with the whole “4 walls around me” idea of being in a home or some secure building. So obviously, we have a working correlation here with the idea of safety, structure and shelter; but, we could extrapolate this further to include the idea of stability in a general sense, which is not strictly limited to a physical shelter. In my mind, prayer and meditation, or even the comforting words of loved ones and family, could also be thought of as shelters of a non-physical kind, since these activities also provide us a sense of comfort, shelter and strength. It’s interesting to note that both the 2 and the 4 reach a certain balance and inertia. The 2 obviously reaches this with a balance of two opposing forces brought together, if not in harmony, then at least under a balanced control, so that neither is able to dominate the other. However, the two’s inertia and balance is still very crude, because, for example, you can never really have an effective two-legged coffee table or chair since it’s just not supported enough. Also, you certainly can’t have a functioning two-walled house. However, with the four, could you have a 4- legged table? Definitely. Would a four-walled house adequately shelter you from bad weather? “Four” sure (I know, “please..just..no..”). See, compared to the 2, there’s an added ability of the 4 to contain something from all sides, which only enhances its sense of security and stability. True, I mentioned the 3 in the form of a triangle as being amongst the most stable of shapes, even more so than the four- sided square; but, here my point is simply in comparing these two even numbers of the 2 and the 4. Besides, apart from the triangle, 3-legged tables and 3-wheelers, we usually use four-pointed shapes when it comes to physical structures because it just looks and feels more even, spacious and aesthetic. For instance, would you personally find 3-walled buildings and houses with 3-cornered rooms more appealing than 4-cornered rooms of four- walled buildings?
Now, let’s take the negative side of the steady and reliable 4, with its qualities of stability, security and shelter, and what do you get? Guess…I’m getting at things like: stubbornness, inflexibility, inertia and defensiveness. So, these become the “shadow side” of the cardinal qualities of the 4. Indeed, the fixed nature of this number can lend one to become a victim of inflexible thinking patterns, and of rigid, fixed routines. The comforting promise of shelter can quickly give way to an almost paranoid, insecure and miserly attitude of defending one’s property, wealth, ideas or feelings at any cost. You can also just get so damn lazy in your comfort zone (a recurring theme, I believe, of nearly all even numbers, but especially with the rigid 4) that you refuse to budge and try anything new. What’s worse, due to the nature of the 4 and an emphasis on qualities like being fixed and solid, there may be a specific correlation to being chained to things of the physical world; ya know, things like: food, money, and carnality. Of course, we can also become “chained” simply to bad habits, negative thinking, toxic emotions or even toxic people. The point is that now, one becomes a prisoner in the dark dungeon of that very same fortress; and, they are chained to something negative and repressive which doesn’t allow them to grow or expand in any meaningful way; I will touch on this point again near the end of this article. So this then is an illustration of the darker side of the number 4.
So, we’ve established that this number could be associated with anything solid, stable and grounded in general, along with the darker aspects of the same. But also consider this: if the number 3 was the lightning strike epiphany in the last article, then the number 4 would be the grounding rod, metallic pipes and wires on and inside a building to bring that mental epiphany down to the earth and give it a physical reality. Yes, I know; I said the same thing about the relationship between the 0 and the 1 bringing abstraction into an an actual objective form; but ya know, maybe both the 1 and the 4 could be involved in the process of bringing things into physical reality. Perhaps though, the 4 is more about solidifying and stabilizing things that have already been given a concrete form, versus the 1, where it has to create concrete forms from scratch in the first place.
Then, of course, I like to think there is an association of this number with cycles. For instance, the four seasons created by Earth orbiting the Sun along with its special tilt. You could also divide a day into the four components of: morning, afternoon, evening and night. So again, childhood could be likened to both the morning and springtime, where everything is a fresh and new clean slate, full of energy and innocence. Non-morning people and night owls aside, at this time of day you’re supposedly bursting with “zest” after sleeping for the night, and can’t wait to get up and moving. Sequentially then, youth and young adulthood could be compared to the summer or noon-afternoon time; and unless you’ve had a heavy lunch, this is where you’re supposed to “peak” in your activity levels, much like the intense midday and afternoon sunlight. Likewise, we are likely to reach our primes, at the very least, on a physical level at this stage. Also, at this point, our lives get wrapped up in the summer-like storms of serious adult activities, duties and responsibilities. These would include things like the challenge of finding the maturity and strength to live independently and handle problems alone, finding a vocation to support yourself adequately and paying the bills, and perhaps the pressure to find a life partner while in one’s prime and therefore the following burden of family planning. However, since summertime is a time to have fun as well, this is also reflected by this stage of life giving you the chance to enjoy your newfound independence, partying with new friends, forming the first romantic relationships, and experiencing career empowerment. Either way, there is an unmistakable and intense flurry of activity at this stage of life, which is aptly portrayed by the symbolism and metaphors of intense sunlight, peak heat, hurricanes and severe thunderstorms of this season. Next of course, you have late adulthood, which resembles the evening with the setting Sun, where you’ve lived enough of a worldly life, and now want to retreat to your house after a hard day’s work, relax and enjoy time with your family. If you happen to be single at this stage in your life, then the idea’s the same in that you want to either come home and relax, or go to a bar, or maybe have a relaxing evening out with friends. You’ve already experienced the storms, chaos, adventures, thrills and intensity of summertime/young adulthood, and now are probably growing a bit weary of worldly life, demands and duties. At this stage, you may even embark on a journey of introspection and spirituality to balance yourself out, but you still have enough juice in the can to enjoy life. Of course, this process is also reflected in the gracefully falling red, brown and orange autumn leaves, and it gets cooler as the Sun starts to take it easy, as nature begins a subtle winding down of the year. Depending on the local climate, people start huddling inside homes to enjoy pleasant social events and get-togethers over warmer beverages. Lastly, of course, you have the night, which then would logically be associated with old age and becoming a Senior. You also have the obvious correlation to winter, where nature has started to sleep, wild animals show minimum activity, and nature may appear lifeless with bare trees, and in northern climates, frozen with ice and white snow, reminiscent of the abundance of the same hair color at this stage. Now, one is totally weary from the entire day, has enjoyed the evening, and now would like to relax in bed. Of course, across a lifespan this would be an aged person who has reached the final part of their life, is “exhausted” in the sense of being worn out with physical aging, and having seen enough of life, both traumas and pleasures, so that they’ve (hopefully) experienced all that they’ve wanted to, and now there’s not much left to do in the final moments of the day but to relax with loved ones, or read a novel in bed until one falls “asleep,” which *hint hint*, would be symbolic of eventually concluding one’s life and passing on. Of course, if you believe in reincarnation, then waking up the next morning would kinda be like entering a new life once again only to repeat the whole cycle again. But anyways, you can see how the 4 can be aptly symbolic of complete cycles of events and things. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the 4 itself is strictly the only number which can represent cycles and completion, but I think it can be at least one of them. Furthermore, It’s interesting to think that we live out a miniature complete life, from birth to the end, within each day and year itself, regardless of the current stage of life we are in. I alluded to this same point in The Firestarter. But if you really wanna find a crazy example of a truncated “life cycle” as it relates to humans, then consider the process of our breathing. Though it seems like our breathing has two components, inhalation and exhalation, if you really think about it, there’s a small pause between both, which basically makes it a four-step process: inhalation-pause-exhalation-pause and so on, at least for most ordinary and healthy humans. Also, when we take our first breath as newborns, it’s an inhalation, and when we’re ready to leave this world, then life will typically end with a final exhalation. So really, on even a minute basis of 1-3 seconds, we are completing a minuscule life cycle!
This brings me to the last and final point of the 4 being associated with completion, endings, “death” and conclusions; this is true at least in an initial sense, since the 9 and 10 also represent these themes. Anyways, everyone fears the theme of death and it feels like a mysterious and shocking thing that no one could ever really prepare for. But, everyone is really experiencing death regularly on a microscopic level with old cells dying and getting replaced with new ones all the time. Then, as aforementioned, our breath cycle is also symbolic of this as the ending exhalation phase is in itself a minute death, but not in the sense that it actually harms our health, because it’s quickly replenished and renewed by a fresh new inhalation, which gives us a miniature revitalized “birth” again, if you will. In this way, “death” is paradoxical because it’s vitally needed to keep us, well, vital! At least when it comes to the maintenance of our bodies, “death” is essential to bring in new life by destroying the old cells of tissues and organs with new cells to keep us at peak, healthy functioning. Its strange to think of it in this way, but, at least on this microscopic level, “death” in a way keeps the body “immortal;” albeit, this is only for a limited number of years; nevertheless, for that limited time period, though the individual cells are dying and being replaced, the body as a whole outlives those individual cells and has an ability to constantly regenerate some of its tissues, and so it really has a sense of immortality. The inverse of this process happens also, where cancer, of course, takes individual cells, makes them go “rogue” for a myriad of reasons, and thus confers those rogue cells with immortality, at the expense of the functioning integrity of the larger collective systems of tissues, organs and the body as a whole. But anyways, this same theme of “death” and endings again applies to the cycle of a day, and of the year. Then of course, people experience deaths of many other subtle and abstract things as well, such as their personalities, over time. Think about it, are you the same person now compared to say, 10, 20, 30 or even more years earlier? Then comes things like the deaths of relationships, such as breakups and divorces of romantic partners, or falling out or moving on from former friends and colleagues. But again, I would say the 4 very specifically could represent endings and conclusions of “cycles,” versus the 9 and 10 which could portray endings on a much broader and subjective level, in addition to that of cycles of activity. It’s important to remember though that the number 10, along with 20, 30, 40 and all other numbers ending with zero(s) are, in fact, really just higher octaves of the same number 0; therefore, the zero is quite paradoxical in that it can function simultaneously as a beginning and an end of a process, thing or event; essentially proving the cyclical point that nearly every ending of something becomes a beginning point of something else. Anyways, the association of the 4 with death is actually interesting to note because the Chinese specifically label this number as “unlucky” since it sounds like a similar word meaning “death” in their language. However, my personal opinion is that no number is particularly unlucky; they’re all essentially neutral, and have both good and bad traits, just like people, and that the “bad” traits of a number can be looked at as challenges to help one grow and strengthen beyond their current comfort zone.
Summing it all up then, the 4 is a number which can serve various functions in our lives. To begin with, it can broadcast to us the need for shelter, security, safety and stability in our lives; or maybe, it may serve as a gentle reminder that one is indeed protected and sheltered adequately. Now, these qualities may be of a physical nature, such as offered by one’s own house, or any other building, for example; alternatively, it may be of a more subtle and psychological nature, such as afforded by one’s spiritual practices like prayer and meditation, or even by the comforting support of your family members, but the idea is the same. Secondly, the 4 can be warning you that maybe you’re being too rigid in your thinking, too stuck in your beliefs or routines, too defensive about protecting what’s yours, or too chained to bad habits and addictions related to the physical world, or simply to negative thinking patterns and to toxic people, for example. Thirdly, 4 can act as a manifesting and grounding force to help solidify our ideas and plans into reality, or to continue that process of solidifying these once they have already started the process of fruition; of course, the number 1 also shares these same traits. Perhaps you find yourself flooded in a deluge of crazy and creative ideas in your head, but you don’t know how to bring them down into the world into a useful form (I can personally relate to this). Here then, the 4 is signalling the need to ground those ideas into a concrete physical form, such as me writing these articles after getting sudden insights, for instance. Then, we came across the representation of cycles by this number, whether that be the four-part cycle of a day, the recurring 4 seasons of a year, or even the endless sequence of our breathing. Maybe this number is telling you that whatever you’re focusing on in your life at the moment is cyclical in nature, and will inevitably go through ups, downs and other changes, only to come back full circle to the state it began from. Similarly then, it may signify that you’re stuck in a cyclical rut of useless activity where instead of experience forward movement and progression, you’re simply wasting time and energy on something that keeps bringing you back to the same starting point over and over like moving down the snakes of a ‘Snakes and Ladders’ game; more specifically, this could be a harmful and serious addiction, as already mentioned when talking about the dark side of the 4. Lastly, this led into our final symbolism of the number 4 with that of endings, conclusions and “death,” themes also shared by the numbers 9 and 10. So now please don’t panic; simply seeing the 4 doesn’t mean you’re gonna drop dead! It could just be a reminder that you’ve entered into the final and mature part of something, such as a relationship, or that something is concluding and ending, such as a job, for example. It could even mean that something has become worn out and useless, and that you need to change it or replace it with something better, whether that be an old pair of boots starting to really fall apart, or, as twice aforementioned (I know; I overkilled this point), perhaps just a bad habit or an addiction, that needs to be released and replaced with healthier activities.
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