Love, Soul Mates, and Opening the Heart

be still, my beating heart...

Love is the most mysterious emotion in life, yet it is the most readily recognized. Love seems inaccessible, yet it is the most common of human experiences. People write songs about love, people write poems about love, people analyze it endlessly. Everyone is looking for love, whatever it is, and everyone is looking for their perfect partner, their soul mate. But what does the concept "soul mate" really mean? Does it mean that there is one and only one person for each of us. Let us examine three types of soul mates: the Karmic Soul Mate, the Task Companion, and the Twin Flame.

Most love relationships occur between Karmic Soul Mates, people who have karmic ties, either positive or negative. In one way or another the partners have known each other before, probably many times before. Basically, they have "unfinished business." One or both owes a "karmic debt." Sexual attraction is one of the best ways to induce us to get involved in repayment of karmic debts. Sex is the lure, the bait, that induces us to feel and not to think. As a result, Karmic Soul Mates can have intense, but not always positive relationships. Usually, these relationships tend to be turbulent, even obsessive. We move through them, and sometimes we grow.

A second type of soul mate is the Task Companion, a project-oriented partner. The partners get together in order to accomplish something. The task may be outside the intimacy of the love relationship or it may be that each seeks to help the other. Task Companions have positive karmic ties. When united in a love relationship, they tend to be companions and best friends. Their relationship will be more mellow than that of Karmic Soul Mates. This type of love relationship usually provides a stable, healthy environment for raising children and, indeed, that is often one of the shared tasks. When the task is complete, this couple may feel an emptiness in their relationship.

The third and most sought-after type of soul mate is the Twin Flame (also called the twin or counterpart). Your Twin Flame is the person with whom you most perfectly belong in this lifetime. Your Twin Flame is someone with whom you have strong, extremely positive karmic links. If you are lucky enough to meet your Twin Flame, the pull to unite in an intimate love relationship will be extremely powerful. It may be so powerful that it will transcend social barriers of age, race, or religion. This is the most beautiful, most compelling love of all, but it also can be the most dangerous. Twin Flames can build a relationship so strong, so all-encompassing that it becomes its own entity like a third person and each partner is sacrificed to it.

With all the risks and dangers involved in love, everyone still wants it. Everyone is looking for the perfect love. Why? Love integrates us. All our attention focuses on the love. The result is a deep experience of unity, of wholeness that we long for. Love is a blissful, magical feeling. It is a feeling of being totally absorbed, of being totally focused, of being totally present. The feeling of being totally focused in love is liberating. It frees you from inner conflicts and fears, it frees you from tensions, it frees you from hesitation, it frees you from doubt... at least temporarily.

Therein lies the problem. That overpowering magical feeling, that euphoria, does not last. What most people feel when they believe they are "in love" is attraction. True, that intense attraction gives you a sense of integration, but the integration is illusory. You will feel integrated only as long as the object of the attraction is available to you and under your control. Basically, love that is caused by something or someone outside of you will always be complicated by issues of availability and control. That makes it illusory and temporary, even when the object of the attraction is your Twin Flame. Lasting love, true love is an outward expression of your existing integration within. So, in a love relationship, each must love the other with the intention to develop and reinforce his or her own inner integration. If both partners love this way, then the love between them becomes an ongoing, luminous, spiritual experience.

But if love is so beautiful, why is it also so painful? In a love relationship, two individuals are merging at a very deep level. By the very intense nature of this union, we will experience extremes. We definitely experience extremes of closeness, but we also may experience feelings of distance and pain. In a love relationship, two separate beings are attempting to merge in terms of personality, personal habits, backgrounds, likes and dislikes everything. The challenges of merging are further complicated by the romantic notions with which we are bombarded.

Our culture tells us that we should long for the perfect other, but never defines the perfect other. And we are left to wonder is the perfect other a mirror or a complement? Well, it is not easy to find a clone of yourself. You may find someone similar, but there is only one unique, special you who feels, thinks, needs, and acts exactly as you do. So, is it realistic to expect the significant other in your life, the beloved, to know exactly what you want, exactly when you want it, and exactly how much you want of whatever it is that you want? It is not only unrealistic, it is impossible even for a Twin Flame. Many people, sensing this, seek their opposites to complete them and then find that the differences keep them from merging. This too is an impossible predicament, an unrealistic burden for the concept of love.

Love, real love, begins within you. The love you seek already exists in you, in your spirit. You must find within yourself the sense of integration and wholeness that you are seeking. You must find it at your own center, rather than depend on someone else to provide it for you. No one can bring love to you from the outside.

Now, what if you do not find that love at your own center? What if you insist on finding someone else to make you feel love? What happens when you do find that Twin Flame someone who makes you feel so loved, so loving, that it is beyond anything you have ever experienced? It feels wonderful. Indeed, it is so wonderful that you may come to depend on that love. You may come to need and rely on the love of the other to make you feel whole, to make you feel complete, to make you feel integrated. It is a perfect situation. . .as long as it lasts. And therein lies the problem! When you come to depend on that love to give you those wonderful feelings, you will not want to lose it. You will begin to fear losing that love so much that you may become manipulative and controlling in order to hold onto it. Then the love stops being love and turns into fear; whatever mask it may wear, it is fear.

Does that mean that we should never seek a loving relationship? Not at all! The Masters teach that the only real love is divine love. Consider the Hindu chant: "Om mani padme hum." Hail to the jewel of bliss in the lotus of consciousness. The lotus of consciousness is the body, the temple of our lives. The jewel of bliss is that spark of divine love within each of us. So, a beautiful, intimate love relationship is really only a reflection of that inborn divine love. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said in favor of building a loving relationship. Love can be the means, the key to unlock the jewel of bliss. A loving relationship is how we can learn to open our hearts to divine love, and to find that integration, that wholeness within.

But, and this is the big BUT... How do we do that? How do we function in an intimate, loving relationship without becoming dependent on it? The best way, the only way, is to accept yourself and to accept the person you love. When conflict arises, do not blame the other person, your beloved, and do not blame yourself. Understand that the intimate relationship is invariably designed to teach you everything about yourself. Through the intimacy of a deep love relationship, you will learn things about yourself that nobody else could show you. This is true whether your beloved is a Karmic Soul Mate, a Task Companion, or a Twin Flame.

Your beloved cannot cause you problems or give you solutions. It is all within you, already there, and the presence of another just stimulates it. Each of us must begin to take responsibility for who and what we are. We must accept ourselves exactly as we are in a compassionate, detached manner. No guilt, no self-rejection. See the divinity within yourself and let all the other "stuff" come to the surface without judging yourself for it, without labeling yourself with it. Physical beauty, intelligence, positive and negative personality traits are merely overlays, traps of the ego. They are not the real you.

Similarly, the circumstances and challenges in your life are not the real you. To deal effectively with these external circumstances, we must be detached from them. Observe what is in your life without judging, without being for it or against it. Just let it be. Detach yourself from it and just be with it. The moment you are for it, the effort to hold onto it begins; the moment you are against it, the effort to run away from it begins. And both struggles take you out of the present moment and into the future, into worrying about the future. This divides you within yourself; this divides you against yourself. When you are detached from the "stuff" in your life, you can take responsibility for it. You can act upon it, or you can just let it go. You can even truly enjoy it. You can live undivided—in the present moment.

In a loving relationship, each partner must live undivided in the present moment, not judging, not possessing, not controlling. Each partner must permit and experience joyous, boundless, unconditional love to flow from the heart and embrace the beloved. Then your intimate love relationship reinforces and develops your own inner integration. Then your intimate love relationship becomes a true expression of your own inner integration. And as your partner is doing the same thing, you grow side by side, together. The love between the two of you becomes an ongoing experience, a beautiful experience, a spiritual experience.

Copyright © 1996, by Carolyn Gregory

 http://star.goddess.tripod.com/twinflame3.html

Soul Mates and physics

What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?

—Benjamin Staffin

What a nightmare that would be.
There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. As Tim Minchin put it in his song If I Didn’t Have You:

Your love is one in a million
You couldn’t buy it at any price.
But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves,
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.

But what if we did have one randomly-assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn’t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?
We’ll assume your soul mate is set at birth. You know nothing about who or where they are, but—as in the romantic cliché—you’ll recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.
Right away, this raises a few questions. For starters, is your soul mate even still alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93% mortality rate). If we’re all paired up at random, 90% of our soul mates are long dead.
That sounds horrible. But wait, it gets worse: A simple argument shows we can’t just limit ourselves to past humans; we have to include an unknown number of future humans as well. See, if it’s possible for your soul mate to be in the distant past, then it also has to be possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate’s soul mate is.
So let’s assume your soul mate lives at the same time as you. Furthermore, to keep things from getting creepy, we’ll assume they’re within a few years of your age. (This is stricter than the standard age gap creepiness formula, but if we assume a 30-year-old and a 40-year-old can be soul mates, then the creepiness rule is violated if they accidentally meet 15 years earlier.) With the same-age restriction, most of us have a pool of around half a billion potential matches.
But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to break things down further, but we’d be drifting away from the idea of a random soul mate. In our scenario, you don’t know anything about who your soul mate will be until you look into their eyes. Everybody has only one orientation—toward their soul mate.
The odds of running into your soul mate are incredibly small. The number of strangers we make eye contact with each day is hard to estimate. It can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square). Let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I’m pretty introverted, so for me that’s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10% of them are close to your age, that’s around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you’ll only find true love in one lifetime out of ten thousand.
But with the threat of dying alone looming so imminently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other …
... but if the eye contact effect works over webcams, we could just use a modified version of ChatRoulette.
If everyone used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if it takes you a couple seconds to decide if someone’s your soul mate, this system could—in theory—match everyone up with their soul mates in a few decades. (I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work through the math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.)
In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance—few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. Unfortunately for the proverbial 1%, most of their soul mates are to be found in the other 99%. If only 1% of people use the service, then 1% of that 1% would find their match through this system—one in ten thousand.
The other 99% of the 1% (“We are the zero point nine nine percent!”) would have an incentive to get more people into the system. They might sponsor projects akin to One Laptop Per Child (but with a sleazier vibe). Careers like “cashier” and “police officer in Times Square” would become high-status prizes because of the eye contact potential. People would flock to cities and public gathering places to find love—just as they do now.
But even if a bunch of us spent years on SoulMateRoulette, another bunch of us managed to hold jobs that offered constant eye contact with strangers, and the rest of us just hoped for luck, only a small minority of us would ever find true love. The rest of us would be out of luck.
Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family. (Of course, this never happens in our world.)
All in all, the world of random soul mates is an even lonelier one than ours. I prefer Tim Minchin’s take on things:

With all my heart and all my mind I know one thing is true:
I have just one life and just one love and, my love, that love is you.
And if it wasn't for you, baby,
I really think that I would
have somebody else.

 http://what-if.xkcd.com/9/