do you believe in soul mate?

1.
And wide eyed companions,
Like hidden pearls.
- The Quran, the Inevitable, 56:22-23

We have made them pure - virginal -
friends - lovers - for the Companions of the Right Side. - 56:36-37

Your partners are your garments and your are their garments.
- The Quran, the Heifer, 2:187


2.
“What you think of soul mate?”

“Do you believe in soul mate?”

Someone asked those questions to me few months back. Do I believe in such concept, I was asked.

I didn’t answer that day because I do not know. I did not know.

Few days after that I had a chance to spend some quiet time in a nearby park and it was so lovely that rain started as I was strolling in the park and I found myself taking shelter on a floating deck restaurant. The view from the deck met the rain drops coming down and kissing the surface of the lake. There is so much beauty in the world, so often so hidden from our eyes and heart! While enjoying the rain, I sat down and wrote this small piece on the inspiration about soul mate.

3.

From my limited life experience so far I have no doubt about human heart’s infinite capacity to love another human heart, and the human being to whom that heart belongs to. And why this should be surprising when each human being has as his or her essence – the divine quality, al-Wadud: the Lover, the Beloved and the Love – the Source of All Three.

Each human being has tremendous capacity to love. The person whom you can give the most amount of love, and / or from whom you can attract or receive the most amount of love unrestrained – is your soul-mate: The friend of the soul, the soul's beloved, the beloved at the soul level, the anam cara, al habib.

Through many life time, this tremendous capacity of our soul, for some, remain only an unrealized possibility unfortunately. Such possibility doesn’t always find their reciprocity and the story doesn’t always end as ‘...and they lived with each other happily ever after’ - fashion. But this never invalidate the domain of true lovers or the manifestation of soul mate. Infact the greatest love stories known to mankind became great only in their separation, not in their union - such is the paradox of love.

Yes there are human characteristic trait which make us attracted to certain person / personality and make us not so attracted to others / types of personality. This does not mean that we can not transcend our limitations to love anyone or anybody with our highest love that our heart is gifted with. Infact the wise ones say that the ones most difficult to love, deserve the most love from us. Remember how its the sick ones who need medicine. And infact to direct our heart to love whom our ego find most resistance to love is perhaps the most effective spiritual practice to widen our heart's capacity for love. It is like an exercise for the nafs (ego) and the qalb (heart).

Due to our heedlessness, due to our too much absorption into the material world we begin to lose our pure capacity to love with which we were born into this world. With time many of us actually forget to love that encompasses in a grand way. The boundless love of ar Rahman and ar Rahim  - two essential and most encompassing attribute of God.The great beings who lived among us, whom many hearts came to love, receive that love because they were human beings who were able to maximize their heart's capacity to love. If you think, you will understand that the great ones we remember,  our heart is made to remember, who perhaps lived in thousands of years back, are remembered exactly because they could love others with an uncompromising love the ordinary mind can not even imagine.To human history such beings we call luminous beings, the divine messengers, the saints, the awliyas.

Those whom we adore, whom many hearts love with such single pointed devotion, the great godly beings (rabbani), they succeeded in doing exactly so. Such quest to love more fully is the quest which all mystics have.

Just as one is his or her destiny and the destiny does not wait somewhere else outside of themselves but it is through them that their destiny manifest - the same parable applies for soul mate. In our new age discourse, often time an illusion is created that there is one, only one in the whole universe who is your soul mate and unless you have not found him or her, you haven't found your love truly. Well, in a sense it is true, but not like how it is thought or imagined to be true.

Popularly some believe that there is only one soul mate for us out there, which is right and wrong at the same time (yes reality permits such paradoxes, the simplest example is a glass half full and half empty at the same time, in quantum physics light particles behave both was wave and particle as well). When one is able to love another human being with perfect love, then that person become the focus of the heart and hence become the unique and one 'soul mate' for the person and since within human breast there is only one heart, so the perfected love becomes arrested to only one as well. In that state, there is only one beloved, one soul mate. So from post-love perspective, there can only be one soul mate for individual soul in the moment; but from another perspective, the possibility for the heart's ability to love any human being with a more perfected love and hence embracing that human being as soul mate is an open possibility and dynamic. The soul mate is not a static possibility with a single person waiting somewhere. It is an ever dynamic possibility, always present knowing no limitations.

Give me freedom to sing without an echo,
Give me freedom to fly without a shadow,
and to love without leaving traces.
- Message of the Golden Sufi

So there is a discovery awaiting for each of us. The discovery to find the soul mate. Not somewhere else but by being more loving and being more open to love. It is not subject to speed dating but even the long married spouse whom one partner never allowed himself or herself to love or let be loved so completely, can also become the soul-mate for the rest of the life time once the love is perfected. To allow others to love us takes much much courage because it transports us into a very vulnerable place where we have to let go the last boundaries by which we separate and (tend to) protect out individuality.

You may find your soul mate in any person if you are able to love that person with a love that your heart is capable of to the highest degree, with the highest unconditionality, so unconditionally that your eyes can never look upon anybody else like that, so unconditionally that your heart has no more space for anyone else.

"God has not placed two hearts in the bosom of men." - as says the revelation.

And Allah knows the best, the Exalted, the Bestower of Wisdom.

4.

The moment I first heard about my love story

I was looking for you,

Not knowing that lovers don't meet anywhere,

they are inside each other, all along.

- Hafiz

(to be continued)