The Numbers of the Guardians by Scott Gingold

Okay so in my last post I said I wouldn't post about Lost anymore, but hey I just can't stop thinking about it... I just can't move on.

So I think I stumbled onto something very big about Lost that's been bugging me for a long time. First off, I didn't think the numbers were completely explained the way they should have been on the show, and second off, I wasn't quite sure why they had spent so much time on the afterlife timeline in the last season.

Then one day I was driving to work and it hit me...

I had been reading Nikki Stafford's Finding Lost Season 6 book and in it she explains in great detail about how the writers most likely modeled the afterlife timeline on the Buddhist concept of Bardo. Basically Bardo is a series of hallucinatory experiences that one goes through after you die in which you are led around by visions of people whom you knew when you were alive and then you achieve a realization that you're dead. Once that happens you have a choice, either to ascend to a heaven-type realm or to be reincarnated as another person back on Earth.

I believe that the whole reason they spent so much time in the afterlife timeline in the last season was to stress the fact that our characters had the opportunity to be reincarnated.

Other evidence of reincarnation was the fact that they included the test that Richard Alpert gave to young Locke in "Cabin Fever" which is the same test that is given to the Dalai Lama to determine if the new potential Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of the old Dalai Lama and in this test they ask the child to pick an object that already belongs to him.

I now believe that the significance of the candidate's numbers is that they were all reincarnations of the old guardians of the island. I think that it's as simple as each number candidate representing the number of the island guardian (for example, since Hurley was Candidate number 8, then Hurley is a reincarnation of the eighth guardian of the island. And when Hurley dies he will be reincarnated as a child who will be the 200th or whatever number guardian Hurley was).

This explains a lot, as far as how and why Jacob chose these particular people. He searched the globe and time itself to find these people because they were the people who were always supposed to guard the island, because they had already. It also explains the significance of the lighthouse and why he was spying on them their entire lives.

When Richard gave young Locke the test, he thought he was looking for the new leader of the Others, but in reality Jacob was having him test Locke to see if he was the reincarnation of the fourth guardian of the island.

Whoever the first guardian of the island was, passed the torch onto someone close to him/her and so on and so on down the line, until any of the past guardians died. When they did, a past guardian or those close to them helped locate a child in the world who was a reincarnation of a dead guardian and then this person was a candidate for guardianship.

All of this predates Jacob, so there were many searches for candidates and guardians happening way before Mother & Jacob's time, given that Jacob's search is what forms the crux of the entire show. By the time Jacob was looking for these particular candidates, it was already shown to him that they were important.

I believe this was done by Mother and the tapestry. It is likely that the tapestry represented a history of the island and its past guardians and is how Jacob was able to figure out who the past guardians were and who the candidates should be. This combined with the power of the Lighthouse mirrors.