Maria, a young girl living in a rural part of Brazil wants to experience life differently. She escapes from her home and finally lands up in a brothel on Rue du Berne, in Geneva’s red light district. Her dreams are shattered now. But she hopes to make enough money, go back to her native place, buy a farm house for her parents and live with them happily. Years pass by and she still remains in Geneva.
Now Maria needs a soul mate, a guru, who would teach her what real love is. She lets her life to lead her, without any conscious control from her side. A rich man hires her and tortures her physically to the extreme as he finds sexual pleasure in inflicting pain on his partner. Slowly, she realizes that she too gets liberated while experiencing the excruciating pain. It is a spiritual experience for her. Maria finds a soul mate in this man.
Later in a bar Maria comes across a struggling young creative person. He learns Maria’s story and takes her to a riverside where he asks her to remove her shoes and walk on the sharp pebbles strewn all around by the waves. First she feels the cutting pain in her feet, then slowly she learns to see beyond the pain. The pain becomes a medium for her spiritual revelations, but this time with a difference. No sex involved in it. Maria deems this man also her soul mate.
When Mr.Nigam called me from Mumbai, after reading my blog postings and asked me why I didn’t write something about ‘twin souls’, I could do nothing but remembering Maria of/from Paulo Coelho’s novel ‘Eleven Minutes’ (2003), which I translated from English to Malayalam for DC Books, Kerala.
Mr.Nigam. I have not met him in person. I don’t know anything about him- his age, profession, looks, interests or anything that makes Mr.Nigam Mr.Nigam. As he told me once, he chanced upon my blog while searching for potential writers and he liked my style of writing. Look I don’t even know his first name. May be soon I will meet him.
Mr.Nigam’s question makes me think about the notion of twin souls. And suddenly I find my soul like a broken piece of mirror, which is on a look out for the other pieces that had been once a part of it. Mr.Nigam should be one of those pieces, or the other way round, I should be one of those pieces shattered from his soul.
Indian philosophy says that before an individual takes birth on earth, he/she has to pass through several other existences. He has to live the life of a worm, a fly, a fish, an animal before he becomes a human being. In the process a part of his soul is formed. Before he comes to be the ‘present’ individual, he should also live the lives of other individuals. Life, the ‘wakening’ moments of an eternal ‘unknown’ makes the individual think about his existence as something unique till he realizes that he is a broken piece.
Who is my twin soul or twin flame? Is it my father, my mother, sister, wife, son, a chain of lovers, friends, relatives, casual acquaintances, a character that I came across in a novel or story? Who is that? Who could satisfy the search of my soul for its right counter part?
If we have lived ‘other’ lives elsewhere, then there must be people like us living ‘now’ elsewhere in the world and looking out for us. It is an eternal search. We call it the individual soul’s (jeevatma in Indian philosophy) longing for the ‘eternal soul’ (paramatma). In Yoga you achieve these moments of union with the eternal. In pain and sex too, you find the same. But these are all temporary unions. You still search for your twin soul.
We hear a lot of strange stories about young children identifying people in some other part of the world as his/her parents or relatives. They can even tell the names of those people. We come across stories, even experience at times, about certain psychic feelings that connect two different people in two different places. Carl Gustav Jung, the noted psycho-analyst says that it is ‘synchronicity’. The other person who felt the same as you would be your twin soul but you don’t know.
Déjà vu, the French word that explains the feeling of a past occurrence in the present (or ‘it has happened before’ kind of feeling), I feel is a working of the twin souls but with proper acknowledgement.
She sits against the open door. The light from outside floods on her back. As I sit opposite to her I can see only her silhouette. She is reading a book and a streak of light falls on the right of her face. Suddenly I feel that we have sat like this before, not once but several times. But she is here for the first time. Have I really met her sometime before, if not ‘now’, sometime, somewhere, in some other life?
Twin souls are like ‘soul mates’. For me soul mates are like ‘solve mates’. They can solve any problem of yours. These soul mates are there to help you out and they don’t come with a price. Generally, we find our twin souls in our wives or husbands or closest pals. However, practical life is a different thing altogether as far as living with a ‘twin soul’ is concerned. The more you become familiar with your ‘twin soul’ the more you become numb to his/her presence. Hence, the twin soul should be an ideal concept, whom we should be searching all the time, getting glimpses occasionally and slipping it most often.
I remember W.H.Hudson’s novel ‘Green Mansions’, which I read when I was twenty year old. It was a ripe year to fall in serious love and I fell in love with ‘Rima’, an ethereal character in this novel. Rima is a voice, a bird like or a fairy like character whose identity Hudson guards very well throughout the novel. I was in search of Rima then. I was looking for Rima in each girl I befriended. But I have not yet met her. Every time a new girl comes into my life, I look out for her. (I looked for her in my wife during our courting days but then she became my wife and became a ‘problem and solve mate’ rolled into one)
(Good heavens! Recently myself and my friend Anubhav were playing out a charade, posing ourselves as two up class ladies moving around in the art scene. I gave him a name ‘Pooja’ and he gave me a name, ‘Rima’!)
We don’t meet our twin souls or twin flames. We meet them for a while and then we part. We cannot live with our twin souls because they are as unreal as reality. Some of them would even tell us, ‘Look call reality ‘reality’ and fiction ‘fiction’’. Twin souls just think like us and two souls cannot live in the same body. But the search still goes on.
Twin souls are good when they are always there but not there. Love at first sight is one good example for that. You see your twin soul in the opposite and you yield to it. Then you are gone.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in one of his short stories, recounts his meeting with an extremely beautiful young woman at an airport. He is so enamored by her beauty that he wants to be with her forever. He feels as if he has met his twin soul. But she vanishes in the crowd. Then Marquez boards the flight. Look at that….the same girl comes and sits next to her. Marquez wants to talk to her. But she calls the airhostess and gives instructions not to wake her up even for refreshments. Then she sleeps off. By the end of the flight she wakes up, as fresh as she entered the flight. She walks out of the airport leaving a dumbfound Marquez behind.
What would have happened if Marquez had spoken to her? No idea. The secret of the twin soul lays in that ambiguity.
One has to remain a broken piece of mirror, knowing that other pieces are around. The pieces meet once, virtually or really, but then they part to continue the search.
And in this search for the twin souls lays the beauty of life because these pieces could reflect the world better and diverse.
Twin souls are the web of jewels. They reflect themselves and the world.
2 comments:
This is very beautiful. Have you written a book on this subject?
This is beautiful, it is what every woman especially searches for. That soft yearning to meet one's twin soul in the hopes to find some part of one's self and happiness.
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