When Numbers Speak

On symbolic perception, financial pressure, and the quiet cost of staying awake

There is a number that keeps finding me.

I’m not going to tell you what it means. I’m not sure it means anything. But I’m beginning to remember that’s the wrong question anyway.

---

It started — or at least, I started noticing — sometime in the middle of a week that had its full weight behind it. The kind of week that arrives with a list. Outstanding figures. Conversations that need to happen. The quiet arithmetic of a family man trying to hold things together with enough grace that the children don’t feel the tension humming beneath the dinner table.

I was sitting with a spreadsheet I couldn’t quite balance when I first clocked it. 108. Not on the spreadsheet — on the clock, the timestamp on an email, the price of something I was looking at. I noted it with the mild interest one gives a passing cloud and returned to the numbers that actually mattered at that moment in time.

Then it happened again. And again.

By the fourth time that week, I was no longer dismissing it.

And here is where it gets interesting — not because of what the number means, but because of what my response to noticing it revealed about me.

---

I live in two worlds. I always have.

There is the world of spreadsheets, standing orders, school runs, business strategy, organisational structure, and the very tangible weight of providing for the people I love most. And there is another world — the one I have been apprenticed into over many years on my travels—in the Amazon, in the Andes, in ceremony and in silence — where the world is understood to be alive and communicative. Where patterns are not coincidences but invitations. Where a number appearing three times in a week is not evidence of a glitch in your perception, but a nudge from something that moves beneath the surface of things.

Modernity — and I mean this clinically, not rhetorically — has produced a civilisation that is functionally symbolically illiterate. We have outsourced meaning to algorithms and productivity to calendars, and the net result is a population that is drowning in information and starving for significance and connection. When a man begins to notice patterns — numbers, recurring themes, the uncanny timing of certain conversations — he is offered precisely two socially acceptable responses: dismiss it as coincidence, or monetise it as a “sign from the universe” and package it into a manifestation course.

Neither of these is honest or sincere—at least not to me. Neither of them is what indigenous wisdom actually teaches.

---

Every tradition I have sat with — Andean, Amazonian, North American, Celtic, and others — shares one foundational assumption that modernity has largely abandoned: the world is not inert. It is not a backdrop against which human drama is played out. It is participating. It has what the Quechua tradition might call Kawsay — aliveness, vitality, consciousness woven into the fabric of things.

This is not mysticism for its own sake. It is a profoundly different epistemology — a different way of knowing — one that asks not “is this sign real?” but rather “what is my relationship to it?”

That shift — from verification to relationship — is at the heart of what I mean by re-indigenisation. Not returning to a romanticised past. Not performing ceremony as costume. But recovering a mode of attention that our ancestors held as naturally as breath: the understanding that meaning is not manufactured inside the human mind. It arises in the encounter between an attentive being and a living world.

Erika — who was raised inside a living Chanka-Quechua cosmology that never entirely severed this thread — does not find it remarkable when the world speaks through pattern. She has simply never been systematically taught to distrust it. I have had to unlearn that distrust. Slowly, imperfectly, and in the middle of weeks that also contain spreadsheets.

---

Here is what nobody tells you about trying to stay symbolically awake inside modern life: it is expensive. Not financially — though it can be that too, if you follow it down certain paths. I mean energetically, relationally, psychologically.

To remain genuinely curious about pattern — without tipping into magical thinking on one side or anxious rationalisation on the other — requires a particular kind of discipline. The discipline, in fact, of holding two things simultaneously without collapsing them into each other.

In the same week that 108 kept appearing, I was navigating real pressure. The kind that arrives without symbolism — just weight. And there is a version of spiritual life being marketed out there that would ask you to treat the number as the answer to that pressure. A cosmic reassurance. Proof that things are moving in your favour. I’ve seen that move. I’ve watched people make it. And I understand its appeal completely — because when the practical world is pressing in, the idea that the universe is winking at you is enormously comforting.

But I do not trust it. Or rather — I trust something more demanding than that.

Staying awake, to me, does not mean interpreting every symbol as personal endorsement. It means remaining in relationship with the mystery, whilst simultaneously doing the actual work. Filing the return. Making the call. Having the difficult conversation. The sacred and the practical are not in opposition. They are — when you get the posture right — the same motion.

---

The Andean concept of Yanantín speaks to complementary opposites held in dynamic balance. Not one defeating the other. Not synthesis into a grey middle. But both fully alive, in creative tension.

I have come to understand my own life through this lens. The man who knows how to read a balance sheet and the man who sits with the mystery of a recurring number — these are not contradictions I need to resolve. They are Yanantín. They need each other. The groundedness of one prevents the other from floating off into fantasy. The openness of the other prevents the first from calcifying into mere function.

The question I keep returning to is not whether the numbers mean something. It is this: what energies and vibration are being reflected to me by life right now? And, most importantly, does the quality of my attention — my willingness to notice, to remain curious, to stay in relationship with the world’s aliveness — make me a better man, a better father, a better partner, a better builder?

My honest answer, this week at least, is yes.

---

I do not know what 108 was trying to tell me. In fact, I’m certain that “trying to tell me” is not even the right frame. As alluded to above, it is less about a message and more about a mirror — a surface in which I can see the quality of my own presence, vibration, and current reality. Am I awake enough to notice the world? Am I grounded enough not to be swept away or swallowed up by what I notice?

These feel like the right questions. Not because they lead anywhere conclusive, but because they keep me honest. Curious without being credulous. Open without being unmoored.

There is a civilisation-wide hunger for exactly this kind of inquiry — not the manufactured certainty of “manifestation” movements and culture; not the closed door of materialist rationalism, but something that genuinely and sincerely sits between those two. A return to symbolic literacy. A return to the ancient and deeply inherent, instinctual and ontological science of patterning. A re-indigenisation of the human mind and its way of interacting with life.

We used to know how to live here. In the question. In the encounter. In the exchange. In the aliveness of a world that — whatever else you believe about it — is clearly not finished speaking.

It’s been quite a number of years that I’ve been learning this all over again. Week by week, number by number, spreadsheets and all.

Thank you for reading me.

Marc-John

---

FYI: The Re-Indigenisation book is being written live on this Substack. If you’d like to read the chapters as they emerge — and go deeper into everything touched on here — consider becoming a paid subscriber.

---

Marc-John Brown is a coach, writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub. Born in Scotland and steeped in Andean and Amazonian traditions through decades of apprenticeship and life in South America, he writes at the intersection of re-indigenisation, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of meaning in modern life. He is currently writing his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, published live on this Substack. He lives between Scotland and Peru with his wife and co-creator, Erika.