Universal Number 9 Year

Enjoy the below lecture text, written by Rev. Trish and delivered in lecture form during Sunday Services on January 12, 2025.

Usually around this time of year I like to talk about the Universal Year and try to give people a little bit of my perspective on what that means and how it is going to impact all of us in the year to come. I have had a love of Numerology since the 1980’s. Numbers speak to me, and I see their guidance in many aspects of life. 

As a general background for people who aren't as familiar with Numerology, it's simply a divination technique that is based on the day of your birth and the name that you were given at your birth. The premise of Numerology is that the experiences of our life follow patterns or cycles. Numerology believes that these cycles occur in 9-year sets. The first year in a cycle is the number 1 year and about beginnings. This is when you are just starting out on a path of learning for a particular theme. As the next nine years unfold, you work through the evolution of learning related to that theme until you come to the end of that cycle, which occurs as the number 9 year. In the number 9 year you have closure and completion so you can be ready for the next cycle to start. These themes that govern a cycle are called “Pinnacles,” and Numerology tells us how to compute the number of influence for each Pinnacle. 

Numerology tells us how to compute the Pinnacles for a given person’s Personal Year. The 1st Pinnacle lasts from your birth until you are somewhere between 26 to 35 years old. The set of 9 years that immediately follows is your second Pinnacle. The next set of 9 years is your third Pinnacle. Your fourth and final Pinnacle begins somewhere between the ages of 44 and 53 and lasts for the rest of your life. During the longer Pinnacles (the first and fourth), you will have several cycles of 9 years to work on a theme. 

By understanding the Pinnacle for your Personal Year you know what you are working to perfect and where you are in your learning journey for that cycle. This helps you understand why some experiences keep presenting themselves to you over and over, and why some have such a strong impact on you emotionally. If you believe the premise of Numerology, these themes/Pinnacles are part of the journey you intended for this incarnation. 

Today I want to talk in particular about the Universal Year because the Universal Year is common to everyone on Earth. It is easy to calculate. It's just the sum of the digits in the calendar year. So for 2025, it is 2 plus 0 plus 2 plus 5, which equals 9. We are in a Universal number 9 year. But what does the 9 mean? It means completions, endings, closure, putting things to rest so you can move on to the next thing. And remember, this is the number 9 Universal Year and is the shared experience of all of us on planet Earth. On top of this layer of shared experiences you will simultaneously have your own personal journey (represented as your Personal Year) in progress, which adds its own set of complexity and necessarily alters your perception of that shared experience of the Universal Year. In this way, the Universal Year will present itself uniquely to individuals, even though we all share its common theme.

You can imagine the types of things that will occur in a year when the theme is closure. There will be highs and lows associated with that because on any given issue, especially when you think on a worldwide or societal scale, we tend to have very polarized views. As an example, consider the situation of Brexit when England was deciding whether or not to leave the European Union. Each side felt like life as they knew it depended on one outcome, and the two choices were mutually exclusive. When a number 9 year is in progress with things coming to closure, one group of people is probably going to be relieved, and one group of people is probably going to be saddened. My expectation is that this is going to be a recurring experience in this Universal 9 year. I want you to mentally prepare for that emotional rollercoaster. Of course, completion sometimes is accomplished through compromise, but you know what they say – “A good compromise is one where no one is happy.” 

One way or another, closure and completion will happen in the number 9 year. However, the very good news is that events that happen as a natural part of a Numerology cycle are Divinely driven, even if they feel disruptive or upsetting. Some of these things that leave our lives as part of this number 9 Universal year will be societal norms or societal beliefs, and this can feel destabilizing. As humans, we often take comfort in stability, and our feeling of comfort may be disrupted. But remember that these changes are necessary as part of the universal plan, and that will help. The things that are ending need to end so we can move to the next thing. Expect to see a continuing voice from those who are ready to be finished with specific topics. Look for comments like, “Why are we still beating this dead horse?”, “Can we please move on?”, “I'm so ready to be done with this.” We're going to grow tired of the conversations that we’ve been having for the past 8+ years as part of that closure process. 

I want to come back, though, to the Personal Year versus the Universal Year. As I was pondering this number 9 Universal Year and what it means, it occurred to me that there is an advantage to the Numerologist in computing the Personal Year versus the Universal Year because for the Personal Year you can compute the Pinnacle. Therefore, you know the theme of the cycle and this allows you context for the experiences. I might say, for example, that I am operating under a number 5 Pinnacle for my current cycle of 9 years which allows me to see the common thread of “dealing with change” in the otherwise seemingly unrelated set of experiences. However, there is no method available (that I know of) to compute the Pinnacle for the current Universal Year. And, in my opinion, the Pinnacle is the most important piece of information because without knowing the overarching theme these experiences can lack unity and seem chaotic.

I started really pondering the idea of how to compute a Pinnacle or a theme for a Universal Year. The idea of computing it for the Earth is a bit flawed because there's no birth date for the world that we can pin down to a day and a month. The closest age we have is about 4.6 billion years, give or take a half million years. So that won’t work. Then I wondered if we could tie it back to the birth date for the United States, which could at least have relevance for Americans.  The challenge there became the decision for which birth date to use. Should it be the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence date? That first incarnation of the government didn't do so well. Maybe it should be the opening of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Or, maybe it should be the signing of the new Constitution in 1789? So, I gave up that line of thought because I couldn’t find success there. It also occurred to me that even if I could pin down an exact birth date, the Pinnacle computation in Numerology is only expecting the length of a lifetime. We don’t have the algorithm for anything beyond that 4th Pinnacle. For a human, that last pinnacle is going to last from several decades. If we were locked into only 4 Pinnacles for a Universal Year and basing it on the birth date of the USA, we'd be in the last pinnacle for 200 years, and that doesn't seem right. So, I decided to try something a little bit different.

I started backtracking historical sets of 9 years that define Universal Year cycles and looking for trends or commonality that could apply as a theme because my first question was whether there even IS a common theme. 

One set of 9 years jumped out as a good candidate to start with, and that was the set of years from 1963 to 1971. That was a time of tremendous social and societal significance, and one that I personally remember to assist my assessment. Think about some of the key things that were happening from 1963 to 1971. Those were key years for the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. That was the heart of the Hippie era where the younger generation was rebelling against societal norms and politics. That was a time that many consider to be the birth and the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Key leaders came onto the scene, and tragically there were assassinations of those leaders by those who feared their influence. Look at the technology that was happening. These were key years for the Moon race. Kennedy had announced we'd be on the moon by the end of the decade, and we landed on the moon in 1969. All those things fell into that period of 9 years. With these major (yet disparate) influences in mind, I started looking for the common theme as potentially represented by the numbers of Numerology. Was it new beginnings (number 1)? Was it communication and balance (number 2)? Neither felt right. What really resonated with me was the theme of “control” – the number 8.

If you think about it, war is always about control. It's about two groups of people who are fighting to control a final outcome. The Hippie movement was about people who didn't want to be controlled – by social norms that they believed outdated and by politics that they believed corrupt. Likewise, there were those rebelling against the Hippie movement who wanted a continuation of conservatism, with each group trying to control society. The moon race was about getting to the moon first to control it (which is a crazy aspiration in itself). The Civil Rights Movement was about people being unfairly controlled and no longer willing to endure that treatment. The conclusion I made in that exercise was that there is a theme or a Pinnacle for a Universal cycle, and potentially it could at least be identified after the fact. 

But what we really want to know is the theme for this current set of Universal Years. We'd like to know what we are finishing so that we can make sense of what happened and what we were trying to learn. 

This set of 9 years started in 2017, and it's going to end at the end of this year in 2025. By an odd coincidence, and one that I couldn’t tie to a conclusion, 2017 was the beginning of President Trump's 1st term, and 2025 is the beginning of his second term and the closing year of this Universal cycle. There might be a clue somewhere in that, though I couldn't figure it out. I looked back at Grover Cleveland, the only other president who had a split term, but his terms started in the middle of two different sets of 9 years. 

I looked instead at some of the reoccurring stories that seemed to dominate 2017 through 2025. One was transparency. Over and over there were dark revelations about entertainers and about politicians. Think about all the stories related to the “Me, Too” movement. Another recurring topic was personal privacy. Look at all the things that came to light over the sharing of personal data by social media and digital apps – the stealing of data, the loss of our data, the collection of our data, targeted advertising and the commercialization of our personal data and what we think of as our personal property. Simultaneously there have been serious conversations about the proliferation of social media and all the benefits and the challenges that it offers, especially related to our young people and the increase in suicides because of some of the things that happen over social media. Also, there has been undeniable evidence of climate change and its impact that extends beyond our original expectations, with the current wildfires in Los Angeles and the recent devastating floods in Asheville as examples. We also had continuous conversations related to sustainability. Where is our fuel future going? How long can we continue to live as we live, without damaging the planet.

All of these things together seem, again, very chaotic and unrelated at first glance. But when you look at the themes represented in the numbers 1 through 9 of Numerology, a commonality emerges. I first asked myself if the unifying trend could be the number 1 -- new beginnings? Are these about the number 2 – communication and balance? Neither of these felt right. When I reached the number 7, I felt it resonate. Number 7 is about soul searching. It is the tendency to go within our hearts to understand what really matters. It is the unconscious and intuitive voice that needs to be heard. “Is this really the way I want to live?” “What is important for me and for everyone moving forward?” The energy of the number 7 is an inner journey. With this in mind, the range of topics and the amount of polarization starts to make sense. In so many aspects of our lives over the course of the past 8+ years we have been asking ourselves and each other, “What are we willing to sacrifice for progress?” and “What do we truly value?” We’ve been constantly confronted with issues and situations that challenge our beliefs and ethics. So, this is my conclusion to you – that we are about to complete a cycle of 9 years where have been working as a collective society to decide what we value and what is most important to us, and we’ve examined many aspects of society, politics, nature, and health in this soul-searching journey. ​

What I would really like to additionally offer you is my best guess at what the next pinnacle will be as inspiration for the future. I can't give you that now, but if I'm around in 2034 as we are looking to close that next Universal cycle, I will speak from this podium and let you know my thoughts. In the meantime, understand that all of these highs and lows in store for us in this Universal number 9 year are part of the natural order and are exactly where we're supposed to be.