Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,

In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

Its ancient tale of being apart or together.

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.

At the heart of time, love of one for another.

We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell..

Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you

The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours..

And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Rabindranath Tagore

*

Soulmates

"I go towards my likeness

And my likeness goes towards me. 

SHe embraces me and holds me close

As if I had come out of prison."

Manichean prayer

When we use the term soulmates what do we really mean? Because what the term means is experienced differently by different people. And yet there do seem to be common threads of experience that help us to define the term. When we meet someone with whom we feel an instant and unmistakable affinity we might feel love but sometimes it can feel to us as if it comes from an even deeper level. This level is beyond even the level of the heart and feels to us as if it breaches into our soul. Even though we might only have known that person for a few moments we feel both that the time has been for far longer and outside of time, that time has no real relevance. We feel then that the person belongs not only in our heart but also in our soul.

But this begs a further question: where does this feeling come from? If it comes from beyond the heart, beyond time, do we perhaps wonder if we feel such an immediate familiarity with that person, could it be because they already are familiar to us? Have we indeed met that person before? Have we indeed known them through time and over other lifetimes? Whether this is so or not, it can certainly be the feeling which such encounters give us. 

A true contact with a person whom we feel to be our soulmate is not a common thing. If we are lucky, very lucky,  it might happen once or twice in a whole lifetime. And when such an encounter happens, it can be so emotionally overwhelming that we also feel that to ignore such a powerful signal is somehow against the laws of nature, and that if we ignore it, we do so with a consequence which can only damage ourselves.

We can wonder what purpose is served by these rare encounters. Perhaps they are intended to provide us with experiences we further need, but in such situations again we feel that our soul knows more than we do anyway, and so we willingly allow ourselves to be guided by the knowledge which our own soul seems to have about the situation, and so we surrender.

It could well be that it is because such contacts are on a deep soul level that explains why they can be beyond the physical. A physical relationship might be a consequence when that soul level is also felt with the heart, but the soul not being part of the physical body does not necessarily need this aspect of a relationship for two people to feel complete and fulfilled with each other.

The very word itself - 'soulmate' - is the clearest indication that such a relationship has already passed beyond the physical world, and such encounters bring a sense of joy and wonder because none of the extra baggage which comes with the physical realm is necessary. Our true selves as beings of the spirit is confirmed.

Painting (detail) by Evellyn de Morgan