Soul Mates

"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be." (Anna Louise Strong)

The supreme authority on love, Shrimati Radharani, once said that lust can look like love. The inverse also holds true, love sometimes looks like lust. How do we distinguish the two? The depth of commitment, the intensity of feeling, the shared identification we see between two individuals who have fallen in love seem to so closely mimic the ideal of true love. And yet can such a level of absorption be defended if it excludes Krishna (Divinity), or appoints Him merely a shared place within the heart?

The topic of love is essential because besides the pervasive desire for power and wealth this quest for love is the single most influential factor in the lives of every human being. And yet this quest includes so many contingencies that it makes it a very complex and elusive issue, indeed.

Two lovers offer each other a shoulder to lean on, they offer nurturance and care. The sexual tension may definitely be a part of the picture in romantic relationships, and yet nonsexual intimacy is an equally powerful need and a bonding force. The affectionate and soothing touch is as vital to well-being as sunshine and fresh air. Love is about connection and deep communion. It involves the fact that someone values you so much and whom you can equally cherish in turn and give your very heart to. Yes, these are powerful elements in the search for an intimate friend and lover, a true soul mate.

Yet, despite all these attractions my own heart seems to be irrevocably resistant to reposing its hope and confidence in the sustainability of such a bond with another person in this world. My heart doesn't believe, though at the same time it yearns for the very elements that makes up this powerful dream. And so I write and contemplate to try to make sense of it all and hopefully crystallize some conclusions and guidance for myself.

For sure my doubt and uncertainty is partially rooted in the painful heritage of broken relationships that I have received from my own parents and the many people I've known, seen or heard about in the world around me. I conjecture that it's probably equally a result of a subtle reminiscence of hurtful experiences from past lifetimes. The simple fact is that you don't see too many examples of successful love relations beyond the world of fairy tales.

I'm certain that this pervasive failure is for the most part due to the ineptitude of character and the social environment. The majority of people involved in relationships simply lack the self-knowledge, the skills and the supportive milieu necessary to make relationships work. And yet, even in the rare case of true lovers and friends who have succeeded in having their relationship flourish, I still feel a gnawing anxiety about the prospects of such intimacy.

Falling in love has been described as an infatuation with a fallible god, the making of a religion around a fallible being. Others have described it as a passing neuroses, a deranged perception and a loss of touch with reality. How can somebody become so important to you? Krishna is supposed to be the primary object of your love, not someone else? Yet the depth of feeling and intimacy that takes place between two soul mates perplexes me. How can you reconcile this intensity and depth of bonding with absolute absorption in the Divine? My strongest hesitancy on this issue arises precisely from this, from the prospect of giving Krishna anything less than one's complete being, one's very soul, because that is the true measure of divine love, pure and everlasting.

I sense a profound mistake and a subtle yet pervasive contamination in reposing heart and soul in any lover and friend besides Krishna. That for me constitute the very essence of illusion, of sin. But what raises a possible counterargument on this matter is the equal eligibility and reality of eternal companionship between two souls. Centered around the Divine we can transform transitory relationships, that are otherwise doomed to be broken by the force of time, to the pristine platform of eternity, beyond the possibility of death and separation.

There are eternal friends and couples in the spiritual world who wholeheartedly serve the Divine Couple with all their hearts, for all eternity. Their bonding with each other is real, and at the same time completely pure. They have reconciled the necessity of keeping heart and soul for Krishna, having Him at center stage in their lives and loving Him more than they love each other, and at the same time maintained their own special bonding and soul-deep connection. This, I find, is a profound mystery to contemplate in order to delve into the secrets of love and friendship, the timeless riddle of true soul mates.

The Emptiness of the Heart

This is a constant and recurring theme in my experience. I feel incomplete. Something essential is missing. I look around, toward people, someone to make the pain go away, but it simply doesn't work. What is this yearning of my heart? What is it longing for? Whom is it calling? Why do I feel incomplete and unsatisfied? What is the root of this elusive, yet persistent, distress?

I turn to pious diversions to make the pain go away, but that serves only as a temporary solution. The real issue remains, and so I wonder, what will complete me? Who will complete me? What is this feeling, this experience and intuition of incompleteness? What does it mean to be incomplete?

The sense of completeness goes closely in hand with the experience of fulfillment, satiation, contentment and lasting peace, a soothing and final rest for the heart. "Yes, now I'm home. Now, I'm where I should be. Now, everything is as it ought to be. Now, there is nothing else to long for, nowhere else to go. This is my life, the life I was always meant to live. I can live this life for all eternity. This is it." What will give me this experience?

Many seek love as the final answer in this quest for completion and fulfillment. Yet relationships in this world never truly and everlastingly complete and fulfill you. So what am I longing for, then? It's an oppressive feeling, a heavy burden, a yearning that pains the heart.

This much I know, it's a longing after someone, not a thing or any single experience. It's a deep and profound longing for someone, someone I knew intimately and had in my life, long time ago. Yes, this is an integral characteristic of this profound longing of my heart. It's not a longing for someone unknown to me. It's a longing for someone I knew intimately and had the fortune of having in my life. And this one person, I feel, is somehow the most important person in my life, someone infinitely dear to me, someone closely related to me at the deepest levels of my soul. Someone without whom my heart will always remain broken and empty.

It's a profound experience knowing that I can never be whole or completely happy without that dear one in my life. So who is that person? Who is this friend I must have known in the ages gone, before the very beginning of time, and yet now lost and forgotten? This is my intuition, that there was once a union, a relationship between us, at the very conception of my existence. We were together. In a sense we were one, though two separate individuals. That beloved was with me. But then something must have happened and we were separated, and now, even without my conscious awareness or deliberate search, my heart everlastingly calls and yearns to be reunited again, with the one who completes me. I conjecture that this someone must have very special characteristics, because nothing and no one I know, have seen or heard about lives up to the image, to the knowing and intuition of my heart.

I have come to learn that this unspoken, fathomless longing of the heart is the primordial yearning of the soul for the Divine. In the words of Blaise Pascal, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God." What I have also learnt is that this Supreme Being, Krishna, is not alone. He has His eternal family, associates and dear ones that He is always together with. I originate from that realm and from that community, therefore, not only do I have an intimate relationship with Krishna, but also with His many intimate associates.

It follows that my heart is not only longing for the Supreme Beauty of the spiritual realm, Krishna, but also for His many associates who are my eternal family, friends, guardians and well-wishers. This then escalates the dimensions and extend of this longing of my heart. I'm not only longing for Krishna, who constitute the single-most important relationship of my life, but I'm also longing for many friends, eternal soul companions, that I've lost contact with for so long, too long. Family and friendship embody very cherished values. They are precious. What then to speak of those individuals and personalities that make up your eternal family and everlasting soul mates? I am related to them, not just in the short span of one or two lifetimes, but eternally.

In this way, my heart painfully yearns for completion, longing for the one who will make it whole, a longing to return home, to the place of my origin, my final destination.

Pathways To Love

Divine therapy is a paradigm in which the spiritual journey is presented as a form of psychotherapy designed to heal the emotional wounds of early childhood and our mechanisms for coping with them.

This is a excerpt from a seminar I gave on the topic, entitled Pathways To Love, at Almviks Gård, Sweden, July 2009.

Remember, none of this means anything if we don't keep relating it to ourselves. When you read or hear God's Word, you must constantly be saying to yourself, 'It is talking to me, and about me.'”