A DIVINE TRUE MARRIAGE

Union of Souls

SOUL MATES

Marriage Between Souls

When two souls come together and bring out the wholeness in each other and ultimately unite with Spirit, that union is a true marriage between soul mates. Soul companions, being primarily united in Spirit and love, find the ever-new joy of God as the breath of their existence. The more strongly they become united in Spirit the less they concentrate on sex life. Soul companions in perfect marriage—even if they have sexual union for the propagation of spiritual children to bring good souls to earth—have their minds primarily engaged and engrossed in the perfect love of God.

The culmination of marriage between soul mates is distinguished by the fact that the husband and wife no longer live on the sexual plane—not by forced abstinence, but in transcendence. Being together in perfect love, they become united with God. Any so-called soul mates who have not yet extinguished their sexual appetites are not truly united as soul mates. A marriage that is very harmonious but without God-realization may be a moral marriage, an ideal socioreligious relationship on the human level, but falls short of being an actual spiritual marriage between soul mates, the end of which is liberation in God.

Matrimony without a foundation of spiritual life is not true soul-marriage but chance union as exists in the animal kingdom. By indiscriminate opportunistic breeding, animals produce perfectly good offspring and propagate their own kind; but the original marriage institution decreed by God for man—His special creation, above the animals, capable of expressing divinity—was formulated by the Divine Father of creation on a basis of spiritual love. A marriage without spiritual love remains on the level of Nature’s law of animal union and cannot be termed a divine true marriage, a union of souls.

The foregoing must be remembered in reading Jesus’ words about divorce. Though it was permitted by the law of Moses, Jesus again emphasizes that “from the beginning it was not so.”

Attracting the Soul Mate

As the fulfillment of the union of soul mates is spiritual and not physical, the consummation does not necessarily require the coming together in a marriage partnership on the material plane. Sometimes even a chance meeting between soul mates fills one with a sense of completeness and pure love that wholly vanquishes all sense of need for physical union. This is true of relationships that have evolved through past lives as soul helpmates.

One such instance was brought about by the intercession of my guru, Sri Yukteswarji. A man tormented with debauched desires sought the help of Master. He told the man, “When you find your soul companion, you will lose all consciousness of lust.” One day he was with Master at the railroad station. There was a train on the siding in which a beautiful girl was sitting at one of the windows. Master exclaimed to the man, “There she is, the one you have been seeking. Look at her!” The man was transfixed in an emotion of joy. From that time on, he led a saintly life devoted to God.

Soul mates living on different parts of the earth, or even if one is on earth and the other in the astral world, may come together in a liberating union of God’s love. The ideal man or woman who does not live on the sexual plane develops a spiritual magnetism by which he or she can attract the right soul mate on the earth plane or the dream plane or astral plane or the plane of conscious visions experienced in deep meditation. In the meeting of one’s soul mate by whatever means, there will be no further desire to live according to worldly norms on the material plane. The reunion of masculine-feminine, positive-negative, reason and feeling, brings forth the immutable image of God in the soul. There is no necessity for physical marriage at all. It will be consummated right within one’s heart.

Adultery

Ordinarily, persons go through a process of selection of companions and the misery and trials of a wrong marriage or marriages until they spiritualize their consciousness sufficiently to attract a true soul companion. It is only after soul mates have come together in spiritual marriage—whether for the first marriage or after the experiences of untenable wrong marriages—that if they separate through sex temptations they commit adultery and foil the only purpose of all spiritual marriages: liberation in God by real matrimonial union.

The very word “adulterate” means to debase, corrupt, or make impure. Great prophets warn against improper use of sex not because the procreative force is inherently evil—having become nature’s way of propagating the species when man lost his spiritual creative power of direct materialization—but because when dissipated indiscriminately it vitiates the heavenly soul consciousness and deludes man by identification with the sensual physical body and material world.

The Hindu scriptures speak of the following ways of committing adultery (equally applicable to women as well as men):

1. To think lustfully of a woman, without the woman being present before the physical eyes.

2. To talk about a woman with lustful desire.

3. To touch a woman with lustful desire.

4. To gaze upon a woman with lustful desire.

5. To hold private intimate talks with a woman with the ultimate hope of physical union.

6. The act of physical union without the consecration of marriage.

Consequently, Jesus implies that when a man and woman have coition primarily to satisfy sexual instincts, it is, metaphysically speaking, “fornication.” The intended union of souls, the true mating, is forsaken to cohabit instead with the senses of the physical body—unfaithfulness to the true marriage partner, the soul, by lustful cohabitation with the body. The minds of the parties involved, being wholly concentrated on the sensual physical expulsion of life force, fall from the heavenly joy of spiritual union. The stronger the sex union, the more the disunion in Spirit. Adulterous union is diametrically opposed to the divine union of soul mates in spiritual marriage. In the state of consciousness from which Jesus was speaking, on the high esoteric plane of truth, marriages that are not spiritual marriages between ideal soul companions and in which sexual indulgence eclipses the higher goal are “adulterous,” and are to be spiritualized if a married man and woman are to find divorce-free lasting happiness and soul evolution together. Thus, socioreligious marriage alone does not free one from metaphysical adultery; but spiritual marriage, which has as its object a gradual rising above sexual impulses to lift up the consciousness and reenter the Eden of God-union, ultimately frees one from the “original sin” of the foil of Adam and Eve inherited by ensuing adulterous generations.

Celibacy

Neither Jesus nor any other great master would expect celibacy from persons unprepared spiritually and emotionally for such lofty discipline. Wise counsel is rather that of gradual overall sublimation of physical consciousness, including sex, into spiritual consciousness through daily practice of scientific methods of meditation along with cultivation of pure soul qualities. In marriage, spiritual aspirants should observe moderation in physical relations, and above all the culture of a spirit of love, service, loyalty, and divine friendship between husband and wife.

In marriage, spiritual aspirants should observe moderation in physical relations, and above all the culture of a spirit of love, service, loyalty, and divine friendship between husband and wife.

Jesus himself embraced a life of celibacy, never allowing intrusion of the pleasures of the flesh that would pull his consciousness from its seat in the inner kingdom of God. The Order of Swamis in India also emphasizes the renouncement of sex consciousness for the attainment of the everlasting joy of Cosmic Consciousness.

The Spiritual Purpose of Family Life

The spiritual purpose of family life is to expand one’s consciousness through cultivation of purifying divine love and friendship that is not conditioned by sex or any selfish motivation. In marital coition, love should be uppermost. In time, as real love is cultivated, sex consciousness will wane naturally, replaced by the supreme joy of soul bliss and communion. When love, respect, and friendship are uppermost, the relationship will be successful and will progress surely toward fulfillment of the high divine purpose of marriage.

To love one’s spouse with the pure love of God, and to share a marriage blessed by self-control through mental development, and to create spiritual children, is a noble way to live. To be drowned by material cares, weariness, overwork, greed for money, overindulgence in amusements, buying more things, and slaving for more money and saving no time for God leads marriage partners to the misery kingdom of Satan. A happy, contented, simple, harmonious married life of self-control and meditation leads them to God.

Success in marriage is very difficult if partners expect too much from their spouses. When each demands fulfillment from the other and that demand is not met, they become enemies. That is why I believe that a lasting and fulfilling marriage is in most cases impossible without spirituality—without a mutual effort to seek satisfaction of the soul’s yearning for perfect love and the joy of fulfillment where alone it can be found: God-communion.

Divorce

The animal instinct of uncontrolled sexual appetites is the chief reason for failure of modern marriages. Those modern marriages that are born on the sexual plane usually end in some form of physical or mental separation when the sexual desires are sated. Wrong marriages, with disunion in love and soul compatibility, lead to misery and the destruction of families, the very fabric of society.

Errors in choosing matrimonial candidates, divorces, and multiple marriages are frantic misguided efforts arising from the soul’s pure desire to find one’s real life companion. Selfishness, lust, physical attraction, external beauty, financial lure in marriage, animal magnetism of the opposite sexes—these are the evil forces that misdirect a person from traveling in the right path that leads to the discovery of a proper soul companion.

Man and woman should lead ideal lives and marry only when they are sure they are compatible as soul companions. If man and woman are more spiritual and follow the law of soul attraction and not sex attraction, they will find the right marriage and progress toward freedom in God. Only then will divorces become fewer and fewer until they vanish.

Jesus previously warned that adultery is committed in mind as well as in body. [“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’: But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28; see Discourse 27).] “Delusion’s temptation of untransmuted sexual attraction to someone other than one’s own marital companion so distorts reason that it becomes a mental obsession, continuous and nearly unforsakable. If chronic and unrepented, this mental adultery, as surely as physical adultery, leads to irreconcilable disharmony and disunion, justification for divorcement from the erring spouse. Purity in body and mind is the only sure formula for union of true soul mates.

A husband and wife should be loyal to each other and try to make each other happy in every way. The spiritual wife should not forsake the unspiritual husband, nor should the spiritual husband forsake the unspiritual wife; they should try to influence and help each other as long as it is possible to do so. However, in speaking about divorce, Jesus never meant that a husband or wife who puts aside an ill-chosen wrong spouse, after having exhausted all efforts to bring spiritual harmony into a ruinous marriage, commits adultery if he or she later marries a true soul companion.

Sex Addiction

God-knowing sages have declared that the three strongest temptations of man are money, sex, and intoxicants. In earlier eras in undeveloped civilizations, sex and wine were the primary pitfalls; in our industrial age, with its dependence on finance in individual life and society at large, it may be said that money is the principal tool of delusion, for it buys wine, stimulates indulgence in evil sensory passions, and exerts a powerful hypnosis of self-importance and false security. Scriptural wisdom, which condemns worship of “unrighteous mammon,” needs to be heeded by money-mad modern man.

The mind is single-tracked when it becomes fixated on an impulse. Once it gets used to sex habits, it is very difficult to make it move in the elevating channels of meditation. Sex-addicted persons are very nervous and restless; their minds wander constantly on the plane of the senses, making it difficult to concentrate upon the inner peace that leads the consciousness to the all-intoxicating, ever new bliss of God-communion.

The vital essence lost in physical union contains untold atomic units of lifetronic intelligence and energy; the loss of this power, due to indiscriminate excesses, is extremely harmful to spiritual development. It exacerbates the outflow of life force through the lowest subtle center at the base of the spine, concentrating the consciousness on identification with the body and external sensory perceptions. When one is habituated to this state, no ascension of consciousness to the higher centers of spiritual realization and God-communion is possible. People who live on the sex plane with its momentary allurement and physical excitation cannot even imagine, much less desire to achieve, the incomparable bliss of Spirit in interiorized meditation. Yogis enhance their great spiritual power and realization by a natural, not suppressed, conservation of the vital essence, transmuting it into divine vibrations in meditation that awaken the higher centers in the spine with their exalted states of consciousness.

Speaking figuratively of how even looking at the opposite sex with impure thoughts arouses lust, Jesus said that it is better to lose an eye than that the whole bodily instrument be desecrated by evil—it is better to forgo illicit sensory indulgence than to lose the infinite unending joys of the soul’s communion with Spirit. Christ used a dramatic metaphor to emphasize that if the mind becomes enslaved by desires arising from any sensory perception (“eye”) or sensory action (“hand”) it profanes the divine soul-image within man, leaving him oblivious of God. Nothing in life, no matter how pleasurable, is of any value or lasting happiness if one remains ignorant of God. Without knowing Him, life becomes a “hell” of insecurity with unforeseen disasters and grievous troubles. It is better that man’s misuse of the senses and his wrong actions “should perish” than to allow his passions to annihilate his entire happiness in Spirit.

How thoughtlessly people give up the kingdom of immortal bliss for their material desires for name, fame, lustful gratification, possession, money. Christ decried that shortsighted investment of one’s life; it is more “profitable for thee” to cast off whatsoever casts the happiness of one’s true being into a “hell” of delusive soul-oblivion.

The sin lies in marrying the wrong person, actuated by social custom or physical instinct. One should get married only when one finds soul unity with a proper mate. And the two thus united in holy vows should remain together, steadfastly loyal to one another. Proper marriage nurtures real love, union on a higher plane, and sublimates the uncontrolled lusts of living on the sex plane.

People who marry and divorce time and again never give the seeds of divine love a chance to grow on the soil of faithful commitment. The minds of such persons, being concentrated upon sex and physical attraction, remain spiritually fallow. Hence, divorce for flimsy reasons is adulterous behavior as it focuses primarily on sexual gratification as an end in itself. Marriage should be honored by husband and wife as an opportunity for nurturing growth and understanding through mutual exchange of their finest qualities.

Perfect Divine Love

There is an even higher way of fulfillment than spiritual union of soul companions on the physical plane: union with God by divine communion in meditation and ecstasy.

Seeking soul liberation through union with a soul mate is a spiritually dangerous course for those who are not already advanced in wisdom, for temptation may cause them to sink into the delusion of wrong living that will take them away from God into the karmic bondage of further reincarnations.

But once the soul of man or woman is united with God, the Consummate Soul Mate, that soul never can fall from liberation. This is why Jesus, Swami Shankara, and other saviors have shown this highest path of liberation by uniting their souls directly with God alone.

This method of perfection and matrimony with God is the holiest marriage, between soul and Spirit, where God is the Divine Beloved, positive and masculine, and all human souls are negative and feminine, beloved spouses of God. This concept is posited on the duality of the cosmic creative principle: Spirit and Nature. Spirit, being the source and upholder of manifestation, is the Positive Masculine Absolute, whose active creativity is His outgoing Negative Feminine Power, Nature, of which all incarnate souls are a part. Together, Positive Spirit and Negative Nature with their offspring of masculine and feminine forms and forces propagate the grand universal scheme.

Essentially, therefore, we are all the brides of God. He is the Divine Lover perpetually wed to every soul, never forsaking any soul though it forsake Him in its adulterous roaming in delusion. God as the Perfect Lover pursues each soul through incarnations until it returns to Him. Of all the love that has ever been promised, pure love, love that is eternal, is found at last in God. He is all the love of all the lovers that ever loved. When the soul meets Him, it knows He is the One it was waiting to meet.

If one lives rightly and learns the higher forms of meditation, one develops the spiritual magnetism that neutralizes the animal magnetism of the physical body. With freedom from the “original sin” of sex attraction, one finds the true soul mate in a spiritual marriage on earth, or in a dream or vision, or in the astral world; or supremely, in direct union with God. The love and friendship with the Divine cultivated in the bower of meditation can never be lost. It shall last beyond the portals of the tomb unto Eternity.

The full implication of the words of Jesus, an impossible view for body-bound spiritually nearsighted persons, is best understood by those who meditate deeply and merge their concentration in the Christ Consciousness which Jesus possessed. Otherwise, much truth is lost in misinterpretation, mistranslation, or shallow cognition.

After alluding to the original ideal of spiritual marriage (for attaining soul union and perfect love in God as one means of liberation for worldly people), Jesus goes on to commend those men and women who completely renounce the husband-wife relationship of marriage and seek direct union with God through the self-mastery of celibacy.

A man or woman, singly, by completely renouncing sex pleasure and practicing those spiritual disciplines that unite the soul with God, finds perfect divine love and liberation in that consummate union. In linking celibacy with the attainment of the kingdom of God, Jesus emphasizes that the consciousness of sex must be sublimated by all people, married as well as celibate, in order to free the life force from this compelling impulse that binds the consciousness to the physical body. Spiritual eunuchs are those who withdraw their will, energy, desire, and sex force completely from the sex nerves by proper methods of natural sublimation, such as yoga, so that they no longer feel any overbearing physical impulse of sex. Spiritual eunuchs are not those who maim their sex power and become eunuchs because of impotency, but are those who attain self-mastery by such means as daily meditation and ecstasy and thereby never permit sexual desires to rouse their physical sex nerves.

Proper Attitude Toward Sex

All persons may learn to govern sex urge by wisdom, the pure intuitive intelligence that discriminates in guiding the will to choose the liberating bliss of Spirit “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” instead of the enslaving sensual pleasure of the gross physical body. Anyone who practices physical culture exercises with deep concentration during times of temptation can transmute the sex energy into muscular energy and general vitality. Or during the appearance of sex consciousness in the body, one may sublimate that force into great mental power by concentratedly engaging the attention in creative work, such as writing or music or art. Or the wayward sex force may be used propitiously to create the spiritual power of self-control, mastery of body consciousness, by being transmuted in meditation—the taintless life force then being absorbed in the higher states of consciousness in the subtle centers in the spine and brain.

When I asked my guru, Swami Sri Yukteswarji, to make me a swami, he tested my resolve and asked my reasons for not marrying. I thought of a lot of reasons; but principally I somehow felt I had outgrown it—I could not allot God a secondary place in my life. Master spoke of the many who renounce the world and lead selfish lives dependent on society to look after them while offering nothing in return. Married people, he said, have to renounce much in sacrifice for each other and responsibility for the welfare of their families. The family unit is a micro-organization in which all must do their part. The world itself could not go on if everyone were selfish and did not participate in the services essential to the harmony and welfare of society. After Master had made these points, he concluded, “Remember that he who rejects the usual worldly duties can justify himself only by assuming some kind of responsibility for a much larger family.”

The pranayama techniques integral to yoga (taught as part of the science of Kriya Yoga in the Self-Realization Fellowship Lessons) automatically induce the process of transmutation of the conserved energy into pure life force and consciousness for awakening of the higher centers of consciousness in the spine and brain. One of the basic disciplines of Patanjali’s Eightfold Path of Yoga (video) is brahmacharya (self-restraint); yoga treatises refer to the successful celibate brahmachari as urdhvareta (literally, “keeping the semen upward”), one in whom the physical reproductive fluid is converted into pure conscious life force, bestowing bodily strength, immense creative intelligence, and spiritual magnetism.

Jesus does not say it is wrong to marry and to bring good children into the world by Nature’s ordinary law of procreation. But it is to be remembered that this creative principle is one of God’s holiest laws. We must not think that there is sin in it, but there is inherent physical and spiritual danger in its misuse to stimulate and gratify sex consciousness for its own sake. That is detrimental to the nervous system and weakens the vitality and immune system in the body. Spiritually, it is impossible to lift the consciousness into the kingdom of heaven, the Eden of the higher centers of God-perception, without raising the life force from the lower spinal centers of sensual compulsions.

Mastery in the marital state begins with moderation and self-control and the joyous contact with God in meditation. Hypocritical renunciation, attempted abstinence by the sense-tortured individual, is unnatural, even harmful; that is why Saint Paul said: “It is better to marry than to burn.” (I Corinthians 7:9.) Moderation in married life, supported by tasting of the Infinite Bliss of deep meditation and the unconditioned divine love of God in the soul, transmutes the consciousness in a natural way. When the joy of God, felt in meditation with stillness of breath, remains continuously in the soul, then the physical temptation vanishes forever through contrast: The joy in God becomes more tempting than all temptations. One can even love husband or wife with the love of God and not love of flesh, as did Lahiri Mahasaya (my Guru’s Guru). His marriage was to show people how the consciousness of God can tame temptation and how God’s love can spiritualize and transmute conjugal love. When one is irrevocably established in union with Divine Bliss, that consciousness can exist under all conditions of life. Real freedom can be accomplished in no other way.

Enlightenment

When spiritual marriage of soul union in God is understood and cultured in unmarried or married life, sex is so completely and naturally sublimated in a greater joy of divine love that man and woman become again as “little children…for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Pure reason (Adam) and pure feeling (Eve) reunite in soul consciousness in union with the Will (reason) and Consciousness (feeling) that went out of God to create man and woman. The two are no longer so differentiated; in liberation from bodily identification, they are perfect children of God, made in the one and same immortal image of their Divine Creator.

Physical marriage practiced in this world is meant for the self-controlled propagation of the species and for assisting one another to learn the selflessness of love in faithfulness, giving, and sharing; and for the advanced few, it is one means of soul union for liberation after finding the perfect love of God by intense spiritual discipline, sexual sublimation, and meditation. Couples learn many lessons in the marriage partnership, such as uniting feeling and reason (positive and negative) to make two flesh as one through mutual respect and unselfish cooperation. But the resurrection Jesus referred to in his response to the Sadducees was of souls that have already found liberation in the perfect love of God and can enter into heaven freed from further reincarnation on earth. Hence, the physical discipline of marriage—or even divine seeking in meditation — is wholly unnecessary for those souls who have become immortals in “heaven.” When the fruit comes, the flower falls. Human experiences of marriage, love, success, study, meditation, exercise, discipline, all are necessary to produce the fruit of Self-realization. But when enlightenment is attained, and subsequently liberation, all human experiences in the realm of delusion, having served their purpose, are no more.

Every liberated soul in heaven is married to God. Hence there can be no question of physical marriage for those souls who are complete and perfect in their union with the eternal love of God—the One Perfect Soul Mate.

Souls liberated from earthly ties and promoted to live in the finer vibration of the astral heaven enjoy that sphere with exquisitely refined astral sensibilities. They are able to create according to their slightest desire any object, scene, or luminous atmospheric condition by the sheer exercise of their will. Through the powers of their supramental astral bodies they can materialize other astral bodies by will power. Only on the earth plane is sexual union a requisite for physical birth. In the heaven of liberated souls, all have the same spiritual status—immortality—and are equal in the eyes of God. Jesus was certainly speaking of these supremely resurrected beings when he said they “are as the angels which are in heaven.”

The souls of all men and women in reality belong to God alone — in spite of certain spiritual affinities between soul companions. Hence, in the after-death astral state, the souls of men and women are reminded of their sexless immortality; “marriage,” with all its mortal connotations, becomes impossible there. Nevertheless, souls who are deeply in love with each other or who share bonds of pure friendship during their stay on the earth plane will recognize each other and continue to feel the love and divine friendship imprinted on their souls, even in the astral world after death.

Divine Love & Prayers,

Gabriela

Article by Paramahansa Yogananda, Excerpts from Discourse 62 from The Second Coming of Christ

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