LOVE LETTERS FROM A WIDOWER: THE MYSTERY OF SOUL MATES IN LIGHT OF ANCIENT WISDOM

“Amor de lonh” (Love from afar) is the name by which the troubadour of the 12th century Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, named his beloved. I just quote from LOVE LETTERS FROM A WIDOWER: THE MYSTERY OF SOUL MATES IN LIGHT OF ANCIENT WISDOM: “Rudel is being killed by nostalgia for a woman he has never seen. But he ends up putting a face to this woman: she is the Countess of Tripoli, whom he recognises as his twin soul on account of the stories he hears from trav ellers returning from the Holy Land (Tripoli was one of the areas conquered by the crusaders). He even becomes a crusader himself just so he can go see her. However, during the trip, he falls ill and arrives at Tripoli on the verge of death. When the Countess learns of his presence, she rushes to be at his side, and so he dies in her arms, thanking God for allowing him to see her” https://www.amazon.com/Love-letters-widower-mystery-ancient-ebook/dp/B07CMG3HY3

(Quoted from the book:) "I was telling you that perfume, or that concavity in bed, is like the 'ghost' of an absent person. Well, Jung calls this ghost of a woman present in the soul of every man 'anima'; 'animus' is the ghost of a man present in every woman. In light of the theory of the twin souls, the anima or the animus would be the reminiscence, the remains left in the soul by the spouse from the Origin as a result of its departure. This 'ghost' can appear in our dreams,   Blanca; the expression 'the woman –or the man- of my dreams' would be an allusion to it. Because dreams, my dear (as you may very well know; it has not been long since you slipped into one of mine), are not necessarily the usual banal and inconsequential dreams that serve as an outlet for the worries of waking life. When one pays close attention, dreams can become windows with a view to the backyard of reality, of hidden reality… In his medical practice as a psycholog...

(Quoted from the book:) "This Persian Simorgh is identified as a fabulous bird from Islamic mythology, the Anka. The tenth century Arab historian Al-Masudi mentions it in The Meadows of Gold: "The prophet (Mohammed) told us one day: ‘In the first ages of the world, God created a bird of astonishing beauty and bestowed upon her every perfection: a face like that of Man, a radiant plumage of the richest colours… God created a female on the likeness of the male and named the coup le Anka’.” Note how that is the couple’s name; it is, then, a double, androgynous bird, a bird that embodies the mystery of the “two in one”. Among the ancient Muslim sages, the Anka became a symbol of Divinity equivalent to the Simorgh, to which it eventually became similar. Its radiant plumage, says Masudi, is “of the richest colours”, which leads us to imagine it to be similar to the peacock, covered in the colours of the rainbow, that androgynous symbol." https://www.amazon.com/Love-lette...

(Quoted from the book: ) If you allow me, dear, I would like to tell you now -since I expounded on worldly marriage and its Heavenly model- a few words about divorce... We were talking before about the Early Church Fathers. About how some of them interpreted worldly marriage as a restoration of the true marriage, the one which had taken place in Heaven, under divine auspices. These Christian sages supposed that worldly marriages would be infallible, in the sense that they woul d reunite the original spouses. Hence, they considered divorce inadmissible. They did not count on the mistakes one would predictably make when recognising their predestined spouse among the crowd of potential candidates. John Milton, the great English poet, coming after Shakespeare and Donne, did count on those factors, Blanca. This led to the curious incident where if some Early Church Fathers put forward the concept of love predestination as an argument against divorce, Milton, in the seventeenth century, did ...

(Quoted from the book:) The benefits of looking with the eyes of the heart rather than the physical eyes, Blanca, is, as you know, one of the most repeated messages in fairy tales. It’s also the central message of that modern fairy tale, The Little Prince. What’s more, many stories echo Cinderella's plot, that of the lost and recovered Paradise, with the prince and princess' mutual search, the obstacles and challenges they must overcome before finally uniting (a union that is   usually a reunion) and their wedding at the end. Here abides, as I was telling you, the same subconscious and nostalgic memory of the Origin that gave rise to the universal myth of the Androgyne. But in the story of Cinderella, there is yet another collateral theme also present in countless other fairy tales: superficial ugliness, the ugliness that enshrouds a great beauty. The Little Prince https://www.amazon.com/Love-letters-widower-mystery-ancient-ebook/dp/B07CMG3HY3

(Quoted from the book:) “By heavenly chance express”, Blanca. Meaning that encounter, while coincidental in appearance, was actually arranged. Heaven scheduled an appointment, so to say, and put them both in that place at that exact time so they could meet. You know, the last two verses also make me think about your beauty. Because before and after that afternoon – the one we met -, I had seen   women who were more beautiful than you. Yet, it’s strange; none of them looked so to me. Those two verses - “Unveils to him that loveliness / Which others cannot understand” - suggest an idea that I posit as the starting point to these letters: the idea that beyond objective beauty exists a subjective hidden beauty; a mysterious beauty that reveals itself only to its predestined eyes. (One must not confuse this subjective beauty with the set of spiritual qualities a person might possess, qualities we call “inner beauty”: while inner beauty, my dear, is certainly superior to outer beauty, it...

(Quoted from the book:) The last personal testimony we will visit before returning to the bountiful fields of literary fiction is by a modern poet of “ancient perspective”. It’s not by chance, my love, that this poet born at the turn of century, the French André Bréton, was a key figure of Surrealism, a movement that called for the primordial role of intuition in art in general, and in poetry in particular. Having studied esoteric tradition in depth, Bréton was a profound conn oisseur of ancient knowledge. Well, then, it’s in the autobiographical Arcane 17, where he writes to his beloved Elisa, with whom he married almost immediately after meeting: “Before I met you, but what am I saying, these words make no sense. You know that the first time I saw you, there is no doubt I recognised you.” This, Blanca, is love at first sight, what in French is known as coup de foudre, “thunderbolt”. That is to say, a sudden love that sweeps you off your feet, which Bréton himself baptised as amour fo...

(Quoted from the book:) The belief in the predestination of love had many supporters in ancient times. It explained a phenomenon that is otherwise quite difficult to explain. A phenomenon we could articulate in the following manner: “There are secret links of affection, that no reason can be rendered of.” This quote comes from an essay on matrimony written by a representative of seventeenth century Protestant Puritanism, the Englishman Thomas Gataker. Six hundred years before,  a distinguished Andalusian poet and philosopher called Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, had expressed the same thing with these words: “If the cause of Love were physical beauty, the consequence would be that nobody defective in any shape or form would attract admiration; yet we know of many a man actually preferring the inferior article, though well aware that another is superior, and quite unable to turn his heart away from it. Again, if Love were due to a harmony of characters, no man would love a person who was not ...

(Quoted from the book:) In fact, for our sages, as we have seen, human love is the touchstone of divine love. Hence, throughout the entire heroic process (and this process may last several lives), the predestined “duo” should coincide if not always, then often. The Two will then come together to play that melody that they rehearsed by themselves. After all, that’s why we come into this world: to rehearse, to put our soul to the test in order to polish it, to clean it of impur ities. Just like a musician hones his technique during rehearsals. Practice makes perfect. Reincarnations are as vital for the soul as daily physical contact with his instrument is for the musician. We cannot clean the impurities off our soul all the way up from Heaven, just as a musician cannot perfect his technique just by studying musical theory. Theory is the necessary foundation, but it’s useless if he does not translate that theory into practice. And that takes time and effort. https://www.amazon.com/...

(Quoted from the book:) You remember that sentence from the Zohar relating to the conjugal union: God will not establish His residence in a place where such union does not exist. That being the case, and from the moment that God had established His residence in the Ark of the Covenant, the conjugal union had to manifest itself on the Ark. The two Cherubim represented, then, the divine Spouses. The Scripture says that they contemplated the sacred Ark, but also each other, “the ir faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be” (Exodus 25:20). The tradition of depicting God and His Wife face to face, looking into each other’s eyes, came from Antiquity, dated back to the pagan religions, as archaeological findings can attest. In fact, Blanca, it’s the posture in which spouses, and lovers in general, have always been portrayed (remember the heavenly couple described by Swedenborg, of how they extracted their Beauty from mutual contemplation), and it denotes ...

(Quoted from the book:) Al-Mas‘udi, another Arabic wise man, contemporary of Ibn Hazm, regales us with yet another example of the same belief when, alluding to his beloved, he proclaims: “My soul was bound to hers before we were created.” And a Sufi sage (a sage who adheres to Sufism, the biggest strand on the “reverse side” of Islam), the Persian Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz will, one century later, express an identical conviction in his treatise on mystical love The Jasmine of  the Fedeli d’Amore (The Jasmine of the Love’s Faithful)… But first, what are The Love’s Faithful? “Love’s Faithful” is what numerous ancient sages and poets of mystical temperament, both in the East and the West, often called themselves. These ancient sages, Blanca, were protectors of a belief essential to the theory of twin souls: the belief that erotic love has its ontological roots in Divinity. The Love’s Faithful served as a secular religion: a religion without temples, or Scriptures, priests, or dogmas. ...