Mirror of my soul – Stories of you, me, the world and eternity

So many spiritual paths, while seeking the same oneness with the Creator, still manage to uphold the illusion of separation. God is made into something so vast, so unattainable, that we forget and are discouraged from exercising our own ability to reach into the spiritual realms, to reach God and to commune with Him, where in truth this close relationship with Him is needed. It is implied that we can never truly know the nature and character of God, only his will. But is God’s will limited to what is written in the Qur’an, the Bible or other Holy books, and their interpretation by a chosen few, or does God speak to us continuously in a myriad of ways, such as through people we meet, music we hear, dreams we dream and through the intelligent design of Nature and the creatures in it?

Likewise, isn’t God’s energy an ever-present, dynamic, healing, and creative flow from the ethos into our consciousness and heart, revealing itself to us when we open ourselves to connecting with something greater than us? Therefore, isn’t it our right and privilege, to not only find the truth of God in what is written, but also to go beyond this and seek to know God personally? Hafiz, the great Sufi poet who often expressed his love for the divine in his poetry, knew the entire Qur’an by heart, but he also grew in God’s love until he “held hands with God”, becoming a shining beacon of light for all those seeking God and the Beloved, such as when he wrote:

Let us be like
Two falling stars in the day sky.
Let no one know
of our sublime beauty
As we hold hands with God
And burn
Into a sacred existence that defies –
That surpasses
Every description of ecstasy
And love.

Many people believe that God gets angry when human rules are broken. But is it really so that the love of God and His benevolence are withheld from those who practise certain deeds or manifest a certain character, such as the sinners and unbelievers, and that only certain categories of individuals become recipients of God’s love because of their deeds? I believe only those who are still waiting to feel the Oneness of God’s love would ever believe anything like this, since this would be making God’s love a conditional statement based on human activity, rather than permanent state of unconditional Love and Mercy. It seems contrary to all logic that God, the Almighty, Merciful, Loving would at any given time choose to only love some of us with conditions attached to that love. How could something that is Unlimited, Eternal and Infinite, limit itself and not be All That Is, in any given moment, towards all of his creation? How could this ever be so?

God is One – if truly a separation exists between those who deserve his love and those who don’t, this separation would also exist within the One who gives out that love. This would bring into existence something which is OUTSIDE OF GOD, no longer making God all-compassing. Surely no religious or spiritual person would argue on behalf of God being ephemeral or powerless, in any shape or form? Furthermore, if as humans, in all our imperfection, we are able to unconditionally love one another, even those who have abandoned us, hurt us and whom we have hurt, and we are aware that it is DIVINE to do so, then how could it ever be possible that God would not be able to do this too? It just isn’t. Think about it.

Isn’t all that which appears in duality merely the result of a choice to turn away from God? And if the illusion of separation comes from the decision to believe that we are separate from God – then we reclaim our closeness by releasing this illusion. It is only once we are truly in unison with God and when we understand this blending of God in everything that we see and are; that we will ever be able to fully rejoice in who we are and accept ourselves as part of God. Then, we become fountains of light, with our love overflowing everywhere, showing up before us as our divine counterpart, our twin flame, who is of course nothing but a reflection of this; of our own togetherness in love with God.

How I have experienced God

My experience of God and the spiritual realms, and the perceived infinite beauty of All That Is, is that God has unconditional love for us. God is personal, fully conscious and fully present in us. We vibrate as divine sparks within the heart of God, which sustains us at the very core. God, the Almighty, is everywhere and there is nothing that isn’t a part of Him. He sees everything – and everything that he sees is Him. We are surrounded by God as much as he is within us, after all, how could there ever be anything within us that isn’t part of God, our Creator?

Thinking back to my own childhood, I was brought up by parents who were both, more or less, atheists. My upbringing was free of religion, except for secondary school “Life stance studies”, which included philosophical subjects such as ethics and moral principles, but also covered different religions in depth. My parents always encouraged free thinking, respect for other people’s belief and openness of mind. I now realise that the fact that I didn’t grow up in the shadow of anyone else’s religious beliefs or impressions of God allowed me to experience God in my own way, initially without the label of “God” or other.

This of course doesn’t mean that I didn’t at various moments in my life seek God through an interest in religions. I have always had a fondness for various teachings in Christianity and Buddhism, and in my adult life, Islam; I shared my life with a Muslim man for ten years; attended a women’s group at a the local mosque, frequented message boards for women married to Muslim husbands; I joined in fasting during the Ramadan, and what really spoke to me – and still does – is the Sufi path of divine love, with masters such as Hafiz and Rumi as my inspiration.

Despite these and many more ways in which I sought closeness to the Universe, or God, and learned about All That Is, I never knew that a person could reach into the realm of the divine and experience God in a way I now know to be true. I thought it was a matter of having blind faith, which it of course isn’t as having faith is not an act of blindness, but an act of seeing and trusting, even when your senses, other people – even your mind, tells you the contrary. It is a feeling, a peace in the heart. I always yearned for and sought “home”, and there are many definitions and levels to this of course, however ultimately I guess our ultimate “Home-coming” is the return to our original state of Oneness; a return to love, to our divine counterpart / twin flame, God, All That Is.

The biggest influence on my spiritual path has however without a doubt been the otherworldly, metaphysical, transformative love for my “beloved”. In meeting him, I felt within me but also emanating from him, a LOVE so huge and so unlike any that I had ever known. He was like a Sun that warmed up all the unloved, hidden parts of my heart and soul, covered by eternal ice, never to be rediscovered, always to be kept from the Light. Not only did he melt the ice from around parts of me that even I could no longer reach, but he breathed new life into a barren landscape and something flourished. Every moment as I recognized the power of our closeness, not to mention its depth and beauty, I found MYSELF blossoming like never before.

The feelings of recognition, belonging, remembrance and reminiscence, of unconditional love, acceptance, friendship, creativity and passion knocked me into another dimension. It seemed as if the whole Universe had conspired to bring us together. I had never felt the closeness of God, nothing even remotely like it, but suddenly with him I caught myself feeling complete, at one with him, God and the whole world. I also learned so much about the nature of real LOVE which I now liken to the qualities of God. I saw SUCH PERFECTION in his soul that I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I also could be NOTHING ELSE but perfection. This realisation literally BLEW MY MIND. It was as if I was experiencing an aspect of myself- and in fact I was. I knew that there had to be a divine force behind all this; God, Creator, All That Is, because it was much more than I could ever have dared to dream, yet whoever it was that orchestrated it clearly knew me better than I knew myself by not only sending me a reflection of myself but also a physical manifestation of a person I had loved since the beginning of time, although it took me some time to fully piece the puzzle together. Eventually, when our budding connection met resistance and I was hurt by what seemed to be his rejection of me, I ran and asked God to help me forget – and he did. He granted me the relief I so desperately needed.

It wasn’t until 3 years later, in 2005, after a moment of deep despair and loss suddenly descended on me and culminated, that I spoke to God again in my most heartfelt prayer; for the first in a long time. I asked him, is this all? Is this really all I am here for? I asked him to show me meaning and purpose, to show me what is expected of me and to lead me to what is in my highest good. I promised to follow him wherever he would lead me. Well, as the Universe would have it, it didn’t take long until things started happening big time: I narrowly avoided an accident on the motorway; a moment during which suddenly I saw myself swirling upwards in a current of love with my beloved. This was followed within days by him appearing to me in his light body, with my soul immediately recognising him and igniting a kundalini awakening within me that left me in no doubt of whom he has to me.

During the months following my kundalini awakening, this divine force absolutely took me by the hand and led me. I went where I was guided to go, even when I didn’t know why. I listened to messages coming through from above, through friends and strangers, through music, birds etc. – and wrote down hundreds and hundreds of pages of inspired messages. Suddenly, the man I had begged God to let me forget was everywhere, and little by little, as if awakening from a deep sleep, memories of him and me started coming back to me, except now I saw them differently. I saw only LOVE, not rejection and lies, but pure divine love, mixed with a hefty dose of imperfect humanness. After 3 years of not even allowing anyone to mention his name, I got back in touch with him. He was ecstatic to hear from me. After much internal debating, I flew across an ocean to see him, not understanding why. I never stopped feeling God’s closeness to me since then. The intensity of it all has been such that if it had all been revealed to me at once I don’t think I could have survived it.

But the thing is, when the longing and memory of LOVE LOVE LOVE of such magnitude is in a person’s heart, and when one has had a taste of that love, then one will do everything to feel that love again. Perhaps things didn’t go our way, or we are ourselves still caught in the illusion that somehow we can find that feeling of fulfilment and nourishment elsewhere. Yes perhaps, but all we are really doing is setting ourselves up for a major serving of humble pie washed down with salty tears. We wander around with a gaping hole in our soul seeking that fulfilment, that oneness, in other relationships, in meaningless sex, in drugs and alcohol etc. In my case, I threw myself back into my old relationship, and then eventually into a new one.

The truth is, once we come to know that love within us, the expression of that love within, which has no choice but to give, seeks it’s opposite, it seeks it’s return in an infinite figure eight loop – it seeks that which is able to effortlessly match all that it is breath to breath, soul to soul, heart to heart. But the thing is, there is only one person who matches us fully: our twin flame. When deep within we know this but are in denial of it, failing to see it, we will remain UNTOUCHED to the deepest part of our heart and soul; something we yearn for so much. No matter how much love we give those other partners; they will never be able to return that love to us. It is only when we become whole onto ourselves that we rise in this realisation. Until then, the sweet perfume of the desert rose evades us, and the jungle drums turn into echoes inside our hollow heart.

The soul never stops wanting a reunion with itself but also begins to crave the original feeling of oneness with its source, God. While part of this hunger is satisfied by the spiritual nourishment of the divine counterpart, eventually, for the seeker, there is nowhere left for to turn other than God. And this is truly where our journey Home begins. The thing is, only closeness with God can fill every empty place, every feeling that is less than whole, less than perfect. It is an error to seek that fulfilment in the other, just as it is their error to seek other lovers rather than seeking the wholeness within. This is only a detour on the path back to God. It is an easy mistake to make, because once you look into your beloved’s eyes and he looks into yours, what you see there will set your heart into an unstoppable expansion, and the perfection that you understands he IS, must be manifest in your life because nothing else will do, nothing else will honor the perfection of your shared love.

The truth of who we are

In time, this spiritual, divine force showed me the truth of who my Twin was, is and always will be to me in so many ways and so many times that I had no choice but to surrender to it. I had to trust that there is a divine/perfect plan in place, that nothing is ever lost and that everything is as it’s supposed to be in every moment. God does not make mistakes, He’s got this – and if indeed I sought to be guided by him in the higher good of all and according to his will, then surely this would lead me to where I needed to be. I learned that seeking and finding God is not a shortcut into happiness and eternal love, nor can it, without work, heal our deep wounds caused by our perceived lack of love and Oneness.

So I started the tedious task of bringing all those things about me that I had spent years hiding, avoiding, all my feelings of unworthiness and rejection, all my personality, ego, and emotional debris to surface. And, sure enough, the more I surrendered them to God, the more I started to feel my beloved as part of me, but not as a static memory but actually as a loving, reassuring energy, completely entwined, interacting with mine. I realised that the more I became free, the more in became myself; and the more I was moving into closeness with him – and with God.

The truth is that each part must FEEL these things on its own and know and recognise itself as a part of the equation, within the bigger plan that God has for us. It is an enfolding process; a quest which will eventually lead us to a balancing of the energies within (masculine – feminine) and inspire us to question and discard everything that is not the Truth of our heart, including other relationships. This is only ever a decision – a decision to finally release all the false beliefs, roles and personas and become the bridge between God and his people, as He always intended.

The thing is, through this internal work this becomes the most magnificent bonding that one can ever have, in or out of human form. But it will be bliss only when you let go of all of the illusions of who you might be; when you have fully embraced and come to know the truth of WHO YOU ALREADY ARE. The delay is only because you are still working on fully loving YOU, and on fully accepting God’s will. Then, rather than feeling that deep abandonment of Love, you can recognize that God’s Love, and within it, the love of the beloved, is always there. When you are ready to say “Yes” to this Love, then the old ways are healed and forgiven and totally dissolved, because they came from your separation with God. By accepting the divine plan and your own purpose within, we then come to realize that we chose all of this – the good, the bad and the ugly. We chose the twin flame path, in service to God, each other and humanity.

As spiritual beings having a human experience, the truth is that we are here to experience love in physicality. The whole purpose, the whole “plan” was to know love and joy in our physical form and in sacred union. This is the opportunity we have planned for ourselves and a living proof of the love that God has for EACH and EVERY one of us, regardless of our virtues or vices. We are here to help each other, as eternal souls, to lift each other up. We all have our mission and purpose here; to become all that we are meant to be – or more precisely, to UNBECOME everything we THINK we are, and that social, societal conditioning has moulded us into, in order to BE who we really are. Otherwise, wouldn’t we simply have stayed on the other side of the veil, in perfect peace with our Creator?

Once you find and share this closeness with God, He fills your heart completely until you are overflowing and you feel his touch in every moment, and everything will start to seem immersed in God. Not only will you see it with your heart, but the words that you speak will touch other lives and awaken this light in them. You become as a living sun pouring forth this radiance, transforming the very idea of duality into unity. This love now becomes your only option, your only desire, because its potency, depth, movement and richness nourish you in a way that NOTHING ELSE ever has or ever will. And once you come to this place of fullness, every measure of this Love pulls you closer into union with your beloved. This is just you responding to a yearning, to a sense of belonging and being where YOU need to be, not only in the greater scale of things but within your own journey. It is only within your heart, in your own energy, that you will find your beloved. In God’s creation, they are the part which vibrates to closest to us, in a shared internal space where mind, spirit and emotions flow from a common source.

By opening our hearts and letting love flow we are supporting our beloved, whether they know it or not, whether you know it or not. By turning away from your mission and purpose; from our Self, you turn away from your beloved. But you will never cease to hear their call, their beckoning – and eventually they get your attention, no matter what, because such is the divine law; like attracts like, as above, so below etc. And when you finally acknowledge and know this soul who shares our mission, there is enormous opportunity. This love is then to be delivered to the world as this glorious, living flame to guide everyone to the one clear answer – closeness with God.

There is a saying which says that a woman’s heart must be so lost in God that a man must seek HIM in order to find her. This IS the TRUTH, for only God can reveal who our beloved/twin flame/divine counterpart is. By seeking God this way, we are helping not only ourselves, but also them. But the path to a true and lasting union is for each of the parties, together or apart, to achieve wholeness within, in union with God. Then you, your Beloved and God are united and inseparable forevermore.

It is this closeness with God that allows me to have only LOVE to my beloved and all those that he loves and has grown close to, including his wife. Ultimately all relationships are our mirrors and we are always seeking the qualities of our divine counterpart in our partners and in deed, we can choose to see the divinity even in the most difficult of partnerships. But in the process of returning to Love, there is an opportunity to expand into a Sacred union. Once we come to a place of wholeness and know that this is our only choice, we should continue loving our beloved for the sake of God, regardless of their choices or physical presence or lack thereof.

In our hearts, we can always have Faith that he will be led to God if and when he is ready to receive this most perfect love. Then, he will choose with absolute conviction to honour that which is in within his heart and there will be nothing left hidden, unrecognised, untouched and misunderstood within him. May God free us all from judging the Truth which is in our hearts. May the day come when we are no longer blind or fearful, and when there are no more conditions attached to how we are able to allow ourselves to Be-loved. May everything which keeps us from our own wholeness in God come to light, so that we may surrender it to God and excel in the path assigned to us, since this is what our souls have chosen.