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? 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 everlasting 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 so 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, healed 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? Yes, 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." And 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 servants and 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 so many friends, eternal soul companions, that I've also 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.
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