Soul Mates and Twin Souls - What Are They Really?
By Greg Gourdian
Many of us have had a distinctive experience of having met someone for the first time, someone with whom we feel we are incontrovertibly connected deep within our souls. We may believe this new person is our soul mate or our twin soul. But what are our soul mates or twin souls really? Can we truly be linked to another spirit and destined to meet one another in many different incarnations? Were we somehow made for one another by a divine creator who provides for all of us someone special with whom we may share our lives?
Like many spiritual beliefs, the concepts of twin souls or soul mates are predicated upon deep spiritual experiences for which there are really no adequate words. We use metaphors to try to describe such experiences until the experiences become so commonplace that new words evolve to more accurately describe our experiences or the metaphors stick like glue and we come to accept the metaphor as a literal description when in fact it may still fall short of being a valid description of our experience.
While it is undeniably true that many of us have experiences in which we recognize another soul with whom we are intimately connected in some inexplicable way, perhaps we should examine the metaphors we use to describe these experiences to shed some light on what may really be going on. Metaphors are used to apply past experiences which we understand to new experiences which we have no proper concepts for. Without clearly understood concepts we can have no words which accurately describe our new experiences which is why we must resort to metaphors. But a metaphor is only an approximate likeness between two experiences which will usually accurately describe our familiar experience but which will provide only a reasonably close 'as-if' description of our new experience.
So when we meet someone with whom we feel we share a common past or destiny we search for a way to explain this feeling and our culture has developed the concepts of soul mates and twin souls to accommodate our need for words to describe how we feel.
The metaphors of soul mates and twin souls come from our real experiences with having partners in life, our mates, or having known someone with a twin, a biological condition. Both indicate a degree of relatedness that is above and beyond the way we appear to be related to most other people in our lives; that is the essence of what we are trying to express when we find someone with whom we communicate on a very deep level of our souls.
Neither marriage nor twins may have any real meaning in regard to our spirits, so the popular concepts of soul mates and twin spirits may be off the mark in the context of the spiritual reality of our souls. We may have wonderful people in our lives with whom we are deeply connected whom we may have a great affinity for in the context of our spiritual lives beyond the limits of our incarnations, but they may not be our twins or mates, but something other for which we have not yet found adequate words to accurately describe these very special relationships.
Marriage is a societal convention, mates are temporary phenomena, the lives of our souls in the spirit world may have vastly different social conventions and we may have many mates all of whom are special to us each in their own way but none of whom we may be mated to or married to in any sense that is either permanent or exclusive of someone else.
Likewise, this special person with whom we share an incredibly intimate bond may not be related to us in the manner of a twin. Our spirits seem unlikely to have grown from a single egg and our spirits all share the same womb from which they were born so we cannot be twins in the fraternal sense in any manner that may be considered special since in the ultimate sense we must then all be twins to one another including every other spirit in creation.
However, there are considerations which may make the concepts of soul mates and spiritual twins valid metaphors for our experiences of being thoroughly connected with another person's soul.
Perhaps our souls have somehow divided themselves and our souls have thereby created an independent twin or a soul mate. This is one explanation I can offer which would make soul mates or twin spirits a reasonably valid metaphor for the experience of meeting a very special person. When I examine the beginning of creation at the time our souls are created I do not see any of us in the roles of twins or mates. So if soul mates or twin spirits truly exist then perhaps they must come much later. If they did come later then that would make them a different order of being from what I would call our primary souls; those infinite sparks cast forth in the first moment of creation. Each of our primary souls is like a hologram such that every one of us contains every one of us within ourselves. If we were to become divided and become two separate specially related souls we might then be twin souls, but we would no longer be the primary soul from which we originally came, even though each of the souls we have become has its origin in a pre-existing undivided state of our soul.
Another possibility would be that twin souls or soul mates may simply have shared many experiences together over many different incarnations or have always remained close to one another throughout most of their experiences in the spiritual world of our souls.
Soul mates are sometimes described as being paired opposites, however opposites is a weak term to describe this state of connectedness since it appears to preclude areas where two 'soul mates' may be very much alike.
The philosophy of twin spirits or soul mates is most often predicated upon a belief that god provided for every one of us a perfect mate. But then why is finding that perfect mate so difficult? Has god created our perfect mate only to challenge us to find them? I doubt that it is like that, god does not seem perverse to me.
I think we all began in an identical state or condition and that we have then evolved into what we will become. I think the concept of twin spirits or soul mates is too limiting in regard to the potential scope of our love, and that we are meant to love everyone and are not meant to cling to only one special soul throughout eternity.
Of course I may be mistaken, these are only my thoughts of the moment and my position may change as I consider these questions more carefully over time.
One issue I have with the concepts of soul mates and spiritual twins is that they are predicated upon the cognitive process of duality and ultimately duality is an illusion imposed upon us by our limited abilities to think clearly. Again, I may be mistaken, but I do not think that duality applies to who we are as spirits in the most primal sense of our being. Duality appears to be only a tool for picking apart our experiences so that our conscious minds can discover useful terms with which to describe our experiences.
Regardless of the validity of the metaphors we use to describe the sweet experiences we have of meeting someone with whom we may feel we have shared eternity, many of us most definitely connect in a very unique and intimate manner with some very special person in our lives. Those people with whom we click in this extraordinary manner often become pivotal people in transforming our lives for the better so that we help one another to grow and to evolve as more loving, nurturing and compassionate human beings.
If you are lucky enough to believe you have found your soul mate or a spiritual twin you then should go for broke. The person whom you have found may indeed reflect that belief in your deep union and prove to be a loving partner or a deeply cherished friend well worth knowing and loving and keeping close to you in your present incarnation on earth.
BIO: Author Greg Gourdian has worked with the general public as a psychic reader for a little over four years from 1981 to 1986. Much of his written work is channeled, although he will admit that he has no idea who many of the sources for his channeled work may be. He has many strange tales to tell regarding his spiritual journey and he attempts to tell his tales in a humorous or entertaining manner. While not an accredited teacher, Greg has taught classes in psychology, sociology, metaphysics and parapsychology.
  
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