How You Can Find Your Own Soulmate: Soulmates

By Way of Introduction   I had thought of love as an ideal seldom if ever realized. I had been told that love, like faith, could move mountains, conquer evil, and put adversity to shame. Yet even when I seemed to be experiencing it, I found it transient, fragile, possessive, often cruel, consuming itself with the very passion that set it apart.   This was something that had always been, and would always be. Or so I thought. And then, suddenly, I began to hear about an unlimited love, of soulmates, people of all ages and descriptions talking about their soulmates with a glow in their eye.   They spoke of the Aquarian Age, the New Age, of the time for an outpouring of universal love which would ignite a flame that would spread through a stricken world.   As I examined the phenomenon—I could think of it as nothing less—I was struck by the growing awareness that there must be more to life than grinding out a living and propagating offspring. There was a recognition that I—whoever that I was—am a very special person created by an all-knowing God for a very special reason, which I will get to know about through a very special love.   Since all this was new, very few existing relationships seemed touched by its special magic. For even with those who already had a satisfactory mate, there was a deep-down searching, a restlessness, that seemed to cry out, “Should I not have more?”   I had seen people in love before, and known that state myself. So what was it that set soulmates apart? There was, I found, one telltale sign. This was its delicious urgency, a feeling of warm and instant familiarity, an overpowering impression of having known one another before.   It was often confusing, yet always exciting. And it seemed a communicable state, intriguing others who wanted as much for themselves.   Because of my interest in the metaphysical I was besieged by those who thought I might have greater knowledge of the properties of the soul—and soulmates.   But I was as much in the dark as they, and had to go quietly to the dictionary. There I found, as I had surmised, that the soul was the intangible psychical and spiritual essence of the Universe and the individual, the animating and actuating foundation of life. So a soulmate was a spiritual partner, whose love was tied somehow to a universal love. It was more instinctual, hence closer to the Creation, since originally man was more instinctual than rational.   This instinctual yearning for a soulmate was deep and sometimes obsessive, transcending any and all other relationships. The realization of love’s dream often became its own justification, with normal prudence abandoned and convention ignored.   “How,” I asked one beauty who had disrupted another’s marriage for a love she considered eternal, “how can you build happiness on another’s unhappiness?”   “When love ends,” she replied, “marriage ends. It cannot sustain itself.”   “But how about the wife?”   A gleam came to the woman’s eyes, and she recited from the Reverend Gladys Jones’s ode to soulmates:   I am known as the other woman, A statement to which I disagree. I did not steal what is already mine, I’m not second but first, you see. Though I’m known as the other woman, Our love’s ruled by destiny. It all began many lives ago, That is why he belongs to me.   Whenever the subject of soulmates came up, there was an interest surpassing even nuclear weaponry in its hold on the imagination. There was something intensely reassuring about the mating process, however mysteriously it worked, as opposed to the impersonal and incomprehensible immensity of universal annihilation.   The questions put to me were naturally related to the individual interest:   Firstly, what is a soulmate? How do you recognize him or her? Can one program a soulmate? How and why does it transcend any other human connection? Why is so much of it happening now?   The questions were new, and I had no answers, and so I turned to mystics, psychics, counselors, psychologists, and sociologists, who had been familiar with the new phenomenon before I was even aware of it.   In the final analysis, the greatest authorities were the principals in this ongoing saga of love. This is their story, delving into the nature of a love that is as inevitable as it is deep and heartfelt, recasting lives in a moment of truth as it brought a depth and breadth of understanding they had never before achieved.   “It was as if I had never lived before,” recalled one middle-aged woman, “for I saw love not only with new and brighter eyes, but the world around me as well, giving me a unity with God I had never known before.”   “It brought me a new dimension of feeling,” said actress Susan Strasberg, “permitting me to look back and understand better the nature of my father’s love for me, making me realize what gaps there were did not come from lack of caring, but from fear of rejection.”   She knew then that fear was love’s greatest adversary, for it closed off not only what was natural to man, but what was inspiring and enhancing, that which made him aware of his potential.   I soon learned that in speaking of soulmates, people were telling me of an eternal love out of a misty past that had only to be remembered to be renewed.   But where did this memory come from? How were we to judge its validity? Some spoke of reincarnation, others of genetic memory, some of universal racial consciousness, akin to instinctual recall, or some other form of recollection we had no explanation for. As a skeptic, a former newspaperman, it gave me a lot to think about. Even so, if there was an effect, didn’t this establish a cause, however hidden or obscure that cause? Was a Universe boundless in its vastness, to be bound by the petty limitations of our own limited experience? If the soul was a spiritual essence, an energy force that never died, why could it not have shared and remembered a love as deep and meaningful as the soul itself? Thinking of all this, had not the brilliant Voltaire provocatively pointed out: “It is just as remarkable to have been born once as twice.”   And indeed it is.   I had half-expected to find that soulmates had clear sailing on their voyage to a deathless love. Instead, I found they had as many, if different, obstacles as the rest of us. But there was still a difference. There were relationships as beautiful and poignant as anything in history or literature. But even these were no more beautiful and exalting than those that fell short of the perfection I had assigned to an eternal love. There was an enduring quality, which exalted the individual, even when the relationship itself did not endure. For in that interlude, many memories were invoked and many lessons learned that prepared soulmates for even greater excursions into life and love. And the greatest lesson was that true and abiding love was the strongest force of all. It had no limitations. For where there were limitations, it was not love. It was then other things—friendship, sex, affection, companionship. But not love. For love, it became clear, was a giving for love’s sake alone, enhancing not only he who received, but, more, he who gave.   All this was self-evident as I came to know the people in this book. Theirs was indeed a special kind of love, bringing growth to themselves and those they loved. A true mating of heart and mind and soul. In other words—soulmates.