~ Soul Mates & Love ~

Susan Vaughn

We are one global consciousness mated or wedded together by a common cause: evolution and mutual growth. In this context, everyone on the planet is our soul mate. From the Michael material, I have also heard of the concept of Essence Twins, which he says is a single soul that divides into its masculine and feminine polarities. He says these essence twins are eternally mated and are in constant communication with one another. They can incarnate at the same or different times, as the same or different sex, or years apart in age. They can be your parent, your child, your grandparent, or your sibling. Therefore, looking for a single person who is your twin, or soul mate, will probably be a fruitless activity. If you are meant to meet, you will. If you aren’t, you won’t. Although you may meet and fall in love with them, if you are unskilled in the art of love, the love won’t last any longer than it would with anyone else. Your struggles and conflicts will simply be more intense.

Ultimately, what everyone is looking for is someone to love and someone who loves them. In order to find someone to love and someone who loves us, we must develop our ability to love. Love is a learned skill. It is not an instinct and it does not come naturally. There are five distinct instincts: feed ourselves, fight, flee or freeze in the presence of an enemy, and to reproduce ourselves through sexual mating. In survival of the fittest, in both the animal and human kingdom, love is a non-issue. Rather, it is a choice that a mature individual can make if they are so inclined.

Our drive toward sex is often mistaken for love simply because our sexual hormones temporarily make us feel so good. Sex is an enjoyable activity that brings momentary pleasure but leads nowhere, at least where love is concerned. That is because love is a decision, having nothing to do with feelings at all. Sex can also be a major numbing device and an addiction. It can either lead to fission or fusion, producing either ecstatic states, or separation, alienation and pain. It is the intent behind it that makes the difference. The intent has to do with the spirit with which it is engaged in. If we want to create loving relationships, we must learn the skill of being loving.

My teacher, Lazaris, says that we are love apprent-ices. Every incarnation is focused on learning the skill of love, and eventually we must raise this skill into an art form. What is love? Love is an enormously complex energy filled with many paradoxes. Sometimes what looks like love isn’t and what doesn’t look like love is. There is even such a thing as tough love, which is turning your back on someone you love to allow them to deal with the painful consequences of their own actions. As every parent knows, or anyone who is outgrowing being an enabler, this is a very challenging kind of love that doesn’t feel good to do at all.

Love is an emotion. Like all emotions it holds both thought and feeling. In order to feel love, you must think the kind of thoughts that both generate and sustain love in you and others. These thoughts are a choice and take a daily decision to make. No one can make you think these thoughts. No outside circumstance can cause these thoughts to manifest. Loving thoughts are created by a decision that you have chosen to act upon despite external circumstances. In order to think these thoughts you must know exactly what they consist of. If you haven’t had any loving role models and have only depended upon the media to tell you what loving thoughts consist of, your knowledge of love will be severely lacking, for love is never discussed in school, bars, or at parties. Consequently, you must discover what love is for yourself, either through trial and error or by seeking the advice of experts.

The love scenario is complicated by the fact that our concept of love matures as we do. A child’s concept of love is totally self-centered. If you give a young child everything they want, they won’t throw a tantrum. This is a two year old’s modus operendi. Children aren’t grateful for the things you give them. They expect these things as their due. Their good behavior only lasts until the next thing they desire. Not a single thought is given to love as a decision. Although a child is capable of feeling love, they are not capable of choosing to be loving when external circumstances aren’t going their way. This takes a more mature set of thinking skills. When my daughters were five and six years old they had a kitten that they “loved.�?Sometimes they’d fight over it, one child pulling the upper body, the other the lower body as they tried to get it away from each other. Although they both “loved�?that kitten, neither of them were capable of creating the thoughts that allowed them to behave in a loving way. Although this is normal childish behavior that they can’t be condemned for, it leaves a bit to be desired.

Eventually, if you are lucky, you will finally develop the concept of love that is known as the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”For the first time in the love continuum, people begin to connect their behavior with how other people treat them. This is the realization that “through my behavior, I am responsible for generating and sustaining the love I find.�?This is actually the first step in learning how to love.

As an evolving consciousness uncovers more and more hidden agendas and loveless, self-centered, self-gratifying behavior, he or she will expand on self-generated principles and values until he or she becomes truly loving. Of course, this general rule is not guaranteed to work every time. The reason why it doesn’t work every time is that it won’t work with someone who is not also following the rule. When someone consciously moves into the maturity level of the Golden Rule, they begin to create the principles and values that will purposely control and limit their loveless behavior. Through resonance, this draws to them other people who are doing their best to follow it as well.

In the next step of learning love, an evolving conscious-ness will move into the polarity of altruistic love, or love for its own sake. This is love based solely on the principles and values you hold even when love has a cost. Love then becomes a concept that is valued for its own sake. When we fall in love with Love, or the idea and concept of what love is, there is nothing we will not do to generate and sustain it. It is this kind of love we feel when we become willing to fight until death to abolish slavery or to vanquish Hitler or save an abused child who is not our own. I believe that this was the love that Jesus felt when he walked to the cross. He loved us so much, he died teaching us that we are not bodies, but that we are spiritual beings who are eternally free.

There is so much to learn when it comes to love. Love is not black and white. What is right to do in one situation is absolutely wrong to do in another. Or what is right to do with a child is wrong to do with an adolescent or an adult. Setting boundaries is also an aspect of love. Not being a doormat is loving. Ending relationships that aren’t healthy for you, even though they are fun, letting go of self-destructive habits that one enjoys and then, as every recovering alcoholic knows, choosing to associate only with people who are healthy for you to be around are all aspects of love that can be challenging for many people to do.

When one chooses to master the skill of love, they become motivated to do their shadow work, heal their negative personality characteristics, and release immature beliefs related to past pain and suffering. They consciously evolve their negative ego, transforming it into a strong positive ego with an empowered sense of self. It is for love that we consciously choose to evolve ourselves, forgive ourselves and others, and release our grievances and let go of the past so that we can be fully mature, fully functional and responsible adults.

So this brings us back to the concept of soul mates. Your soul is a lovaholic that desires to love and be loved intensely. This desire can never die no matter how monstrous and abusive a lifetime is. However, because of poor cultural programming and role modeling, our thoughts and feelings about love can become terribly warped.

Everyone holds within them the spark of love. It is an eternal flame that never dies, yet it can lay dormant within us just as a coal can lay dormant within its bed of ashes. When we consciously begin to fan the spark it will eventually burst into flame. It is the action of fanning the spark that produces a deep and emotionally compelling relationship with our own soul. As you continue to fan your flame, your soul’s voice becomes increasingly louder and more active within you. Eventually, it becomes a voice that you can’t ignore. This voice says: become more loving.

Your soul is you and yet not you. It is a higher part of you. It is the part of you that is unconcerned with your material survival. It exists apart from your body and its instincts to feed, flee, fight, freeze and have sex, which is the domain of your ego, who deals with your physical survival needs. Lazaris says that your soul is only concerned with how loving and forgiving you are. It is the voice of your soul that speaks to you about love. If you desire, you can personify your soul in form as the Beloved, which is an ancient concept best known through the poet Rumi. In the Sufi tradition, it is said that God is love, lover and Beloved. As you face you own soul in personified form, with love within you, it is possible to fall madly, passionately, head over heals in love with who you really are in all your glory. And who are you? You are quite literally Love incarnate.

If you allow it to, your soul will begin to express its love to you. This is your truest soul mate. It will say exactly what any lover would say: I love you. I need you. I desire you to come home and dwell with me eternally. When you choose to respond to your soul’s call you will mate with your soul in a union that is literally indescribable. At that point you will have found your soul mate. You will then enter into the most amazing, sweetest, tenderest, most loving relationship it is humanly possible to have. It will change you at the very core of your being, right down to your DNA.

As you mate with your soul you will create within you a sweet cocoon of love that is impervious to outside influences. In time, you will emerge from that cocoon, a radiant being of light, fully at one, fully united with and mated to your own soul. The result will be a transcendent human being who is divine. You will become someone who knows who you are, why you have come and how you shall serve. You will have an unshakable set of principles and values that will become the ground of your being. You will know your talent and will have turned it into a power. And you will simply do, with full knowledge, what you came here to do.

This is the transformative power of having a soul mate. It is the pinnacle of your growth and evolution into a transcendent being who is no longer human but divine. In time, all that you have learned from mating with your soul can be applied to an external relationship. Everyone is your soul mate, truly, and you can apply this ability to love and be loved to any relationship you have on Earth with anyone and everyone. When the relationship with your soul mate, your own soul, becomes the supreme example for what relationships are all about, you have a chance of creating a physical relationship that was born in heaven and made manifest on earth, for you will have dreamed it within your heart, created it within your mind, and consummated it within your body. And what is powerfully dreamed with emotional impact must manifest, for THAT IS THE LAW.