Love is Stronger than Death

IT WASN’T EXACTLY A HOLLYWOOD first meeting. Neither one of us felt a tingling in every fiber of our being at having found the other half of our soul. But in its own way, that first conversation between Rafe and me that snowy December morning in the monastery barnyard was quietly extraordinary. As our words poured forth into the sparkling sunlight, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of our encounter was the sense of spaciousness and ancient ease with each other, as if somehow we had never been strangers. A few months later, trying to express this mysterious sense of completeness between us, Rafe said, “I don’t know who I am, but I feel right—like a boat that’s not listing.”

Like most of Rafe’s one-liners, it hit the nail on the head. A boat will straighten up in the water when the ballast has been shifted to true center, and that was essentially the experience for both of us in relationship. There was a sense of coming to an inner balance that had so long eluded us separately because all along it had lain in the whole. Like two puzzle pieces interlocking to reveal the larger picture, we began to discover, particularly in those blessed last weeks of our human walk together, how in each other the confused and broken gestures of a lifetime finally made sense.

In the weeks immediately following Rafe’s death, by far the most anguished part of my grief was the fear that this magical process between us would now come to an end. To have seen the puzzle coming together only to have it ripped apart again seemed cruel beyond measure. It was not so much my wholeness I mourned, but our wholeness: the chance to emerge fully into those unknown but amazing people we were starting to become in the light of each other’s love. Only gradually have I begun to understand the truth of what Rafe was trying to teach me that night when he pointed so sharply to the full moon behind the crescent and said, “That’s us!” When the wholeness is there—seen or unseen—the sliver need have no fear about how it will grow.

Now, three years beyond Rafe’s death, I am beginning to be more comfortable in owning that Rafe and I belonged to—and still belong to—that class of relationships known as “abler souls.” I borrow the term from John Donne (although the category itself is of far greater antiquity, first recorded in Western literature by Plato) to describe a relationship marked by a peculiarly intense conviction of belonging to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.1 Far more than a partnership, it is a kinship that is intuitively recognized.

The abler soul is a reasonably rare configuration even among committed love partnerships, which may be why it is so persistently overlooked in the Christian teachings on the soul after death. The closest approximation would be an eternal marriage, but even this term, with its usual fuzzy overtones of “true love,” obscures more than it reveals. The abler soul is a path of true love, but not in the way we commonly think of it—intensely, passionately romantic—but rather true in the sense that it conforms to and reveals the authentic pattern of each partner’s soul—and this is the key to the whole idea. During life, the innate sense of wholeness between the partners makes for an unusual ease and comfort in their relationship. And after death, if the groundwork has been adequately laid, it offers the one clear window of opportunity acknowledged in our tradition (however obliquely) for continued mutual soulwork.

I am convinced that it is the category of abler souls that Jacob Boehme has in mind when he makes his one cryptic exception to the rule “After death, there is no bettering, but everything remains the way it is.” Under certain conditions—when the experienced sense of kinship and complementarity between partners runs so deep that the intimation begins to arise in them that their two individualities are really part of one whole, and when second body has developed to a point that it is possible for them to share in each other’s “book of life” beyond the physical body—then they can by means of a conscious vow (or “earnest promise,” in Boehme’s words) dissolve the boundaries of their individual, smaller selves—“lay down their souls,” in the biblical language of this teaching—and cast their lot entirely with that one abler soul they already sense themselves to be. At the death of one, that abler soul becomes a sheltering principle around both of them that will allow them to continue their common journey, exchanging the very marrow of their lives and actualizing and strengthening that one Real I between them. The final harvest of their soul’s majesty will come at the death of the surviving partner.

If this sounds like special privilege, it is not. The tradition teaches that the abler soul is always given from above, not created from below; it seems to have a peculiar affinity with death and nearly always has something to do with cosmic servanthood. To accept the invitation to forge an abler soul is a virtually certain bet that one will be “nailed on earth.” For true love is given to mirror and manifest God on earth, and not for self-realization and personal happiness. With the acceptance of those terms, the path comes into being.

PRECONDITIONS

One of the reasons I prefer Donne’s term abler soul to the more common soul mates or polar beings is that it implicitly reminds us that the abler soul must be forged. An abler soul does not appear automatically, even in those relationships marked by an unusual passion and intimacy, but must “flow” (in Donne’s words) from the two souls’ conscious decision to become One. Nor can it be formed from the level of personality, no matter how sincere the intentions of the partners or compatible their interests; it always bears witness to a deep essence connection. A natural proclivity must undergird conscious choice, and in general those capable of forming abler souls will be drawn from a fairly narrow band. They will be beloveds in whose relationship the following three conditions are present:

1. A strong erotic connection between the partners.

2. An equally strong spiritual yearning and a maturity of spiritual experience independently acquired.

3. An innate emotional trust that enables their shadow work to unfold at the deepest levels of self-exposure and intimacy.

Even the presence of these three conditions does not guarantee that the partners will be able to consummate an abler soul between them, but it suggests strongly that the potential is there and offers rich ground for soulwork if the partners are sufficiently motivated. With this in mind, let me say a bit more about each of them.

“A Strong Erotic Connection”

The reason this is so—and why abler souls must always be beloveds and not some other type of essence connection (such as parent and child, siblings, friends)—is that the erotic, or sexual, energy is the specific energy through which this union of souls comes about. Sexual energy provides the force of fusion that holds the two formerly separate individualities in the nuclear bonding of one soul.

This is the teaching I believe J. G. Bennett was specifically referring to in that passage Rafe was so taken with: “For certain very high purposes it is essential that man acquire a soul [an abler soul, or a true and actualized experience of one’s own Real I]. The normal way of doing this is through the union of the sexes.”

Union of the sexes does not necessarily mean physical intercourse, as Bennett himself specifically points out a few sentences later. In the inner tradition (from which these teachings mostly emerge), sexual energy is understood as something very different from libido, or lust, which is how the term is almost inevitably interpreted in contemporary culture. It is the highest form of transformational energy, the finest and most subtle spiritual energy that human beings can work with directly while still in a physical body. Sexual energy is the agent of all transformation—not just physical procreation, but every form of creativity: prayer, poetry, and spiritual transformation. It does not necessarily imply genital sexuality, although it does not preclude it either. But in either case, the union of sexes that Bennett refers to is at a far more subtle level than physical intercourse and may well be hindered rather than aided by an expression at this coarser level.

While erotic energy does not necessarily imply genital sexuality, it does imply a deep equality between the two partners, a flowing out to one another in a complete mutuality of personhood. Vladimir Solovyov, the great nineteenth-century Russian philosopher of love, is the only one I know to have seen so clearly the enormous implication of this point, which defines both the process of the erotic love and its ultimate destination:

The meaning and worth of love...is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for another the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but...as the shifting of the very center of our personal lives. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love [erotic love]; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: “They shall be one flesh,” that is, shall become one real being.2

This deep sense of give-and-take (or “complete overall reciprocity,” in Solovyov’s words) is what distinguishes the soulwork of beloveds beyond the grave from the more classic guru/disciple transmission, which also involves an exchange of spiritual energy, or baraka, across the grave, but flowing from the higher to the lower—from the one who is complete to the one who is not. It is the continuing mutuality of our encounters (and hence, the elements of freshness and surprise) that ultimately dissuades me from seeing my relationship with Rafe as a transmission story. Those aspects are there, of course, but the essential flavor of our journey is that continued headlong plunge into pure becoming in which the outcome remains open-ended for both of us. There is something more static about the guru/disciple transmission; the erotic path is pure dynamism.

“Spiritual Yearning and Maturity”

Boris Mouravieff provides the core text for this teaching in his classic study of spiritual love in Gnosis. Affirming that the fusion of two beloveds into one Real I is indeed a true path to salvation, he nonetheless cautions: “In practice, this can only happen when the two personalities are very advanced, and both rich with the experience each has separately acquired in exterior life.”3

The reasons for this caution are probably stated as well as by anyone in Rilke’s inspired seventh “Letter to a Young Poet,” where he warns lovers to hold their own against the overwhelming urge to meld into each other—“for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?” Real love, he says, “is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person.”⁴ In modern terminology, such a premature merger out of desperate needs and fuzzy boundaries would be called codependency. By contrast, the abler soul is abler: its essential earmark, according to Mouravieff, is a “freedom in unity,” which allows the partners to function well even when physically separated.

My own observation, however, is that the abler-soul configuration is intrinsically not codependent, and the difference in taste will be obvious, even when the partners are very young in chronological years. Mature life experience certainly refines the mechanisms of discernment and will in most cases have laid useful groundwork in “breaking through the crust of personality” (as Mouravieff terms it). But it is not a prerequisite for meeting one’s soulmate or even a reliable indicator of success in building the partnership into a full spiritual union. I do not think Rafe and I could have met before we did; we would have been too self-involved to recognize each other. But my daughter Lucy and her husband, Alby, who met each other in their early twenties, from the very start displayed that “freedom in unity”⁵ that in time, and with work, I have no doubt will emerge into a true spiritual union. In this sense, then, I believe “maturity of life experience” is better translated as “readiness as determined by God.” The abler soul, recall, is given from above.

The other stipulation holds firm, however: there must be a strong spiritual yearning—at least if the partnership is to have hope of maturing into a union that will endure beyond the grave. That is because—as I intimated earlier and as is strongly stated in a single sentence by an anonymous contemporary master—“true love demands sacrifice because true love is a transforming force and is really the birth-pangs of union at a higher level.”⁶

In a single, stark sentence this writer foreshadows both the sublime potential of this path and the suffering that may be entailed to arrive there. At the very least, the sacrifice required of the partners will be a laying down of their separate centers of gravity (the metaphor that both Solovyov and Rafe used) in the effort to form a conscious union of wills—far deeper and more binding than in ordinary marriage. At the ultimate, this laying down of self can extend to their very lives.

I mentioned earlier that true love seems to have a strong affinity with death. Perhaps it is more accurate to say it has a strong affinity with eternity. True love has no great regard for the boundary between life and death, which is invisible to it anyway; the only thing that matters is that relentless drive toward complete self-giving. Like the candle flame, it will come alive only by expending itself utterly. This is the Shiva-like aspect of true love, creating-and-destroying, that must be accepted as a given along with the gift.

There must be a strong spiritual yearning—strong enough to withstand the loneliness and ache of the flesh of this world—because whether it lasts a lifetime or only a brief space of months or weeks, the arena where this love will truly come into its own is “at the intersection of the timeless with time,” in T. S. Eliot’s words. And the exchanges will be within terms of the substances proper to the body of hope: conscious love, courage, plenitude, faith. What the two partners can do together in life to build up these reserves will be crucial when those “birth-pangs of a union at a higher level” set in in earnest. In its strictest sense, the tradition teaches that unless their human work together has brought them to the critical level of spiritual maturation known as “permanent individuality,” no further development is possible beyond the grave, no matter how ardent their love. While I am personally unwilling to place such severe restrictions on the free-flowing creativity of love, it is fair to reiterate what I said earlier: the more second body is developed within them, the more the two partners will become fluent and expressive in “next year’s language.”

“A Deep, Intuitive Emotional Trust”

More than anything else, I believe the shadow work between the partners is the real holy ground in their relationship: untidy, messy, alchemical, holy. For what is brought into being, through it, this abler soul or joint Real I, is not simply a blending together but a fusion at a higher level. It is a new creation (as Bennett rightly observes), forged chiefly through the melting down of each one’s chains in the fires of unconditional love. Charles Upton speaks to this point when he writes: “In genuine romantic love the fire of emotional and sexual passion is alchemical not concupiscent: burning away the dross of egotism and synthesizing the Philosopher’s Stone….the power of divine grace working in human relations.” 7 The abler soul is a function of purification, not passion. It comes to pass only in the refiner’s fire of the unconditional giving of self, which is the unique and sacred thing that abler souls intuitively know how to do for one another.

From my own observations, I believe that the quality of their shadow work is the most reliable indicator of whether an abler soul may be in the works for two partners. It is not how they relate during their better times, what inspired quests or common visions they share, but rather, how they work together to unlock and heal each other’s dragons. The techniques can be learned, but the knack is essentially God-given.

THE FIFTH WAY

In the Christian inner tradition, this path of the intense fusion of two beloveds into one abler soul has sometimes been called “the Fifth Way.” The term itself is of fairly recent vintage, coined by Boris Mouravieff in imitation of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, although the teaching it conveys is ancient. If the Fourth Way is the way of consciousness, the Fifth Way is the way of radical meltdown through total self-abandonment in love. There is a beloved objectively other than oneself, and the distinguishing feature of this path is that the true self resides not in the “I,” but in the “we”—in the abler soul that emerges in the union.

The path is elusive because it so easily mutates into something else: at one end of the spectrum, romantic tragedy—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, the whole gamut of star-crossed lovers; at the other end, celibate monastic love, where the beloved is identified as Christ. To hold its fine edge as a spiritual path that commits itself to spiritual transformation through the passionate love for a particular human person is a difficult balancing act, but at least in its essential form, that’s what the Fifth Way is. The core of the teaching is about how two human beloveds come together to fuse their one permanent abler soul, which contains their unique and imperishable identity, or Real I. Monastic love mysticism—the form in which this tradition is predominantly handed on today—represents an elaborate allegorization of this originally flesh-and-blood reality.8

In the terms I have been using in this book, attaining Real I—also known in the tradition as “permanent individuality”—means that in such a person mobility and majesty are developed to the point that he or she moves in the Kingdom of Heaven as a real presence, an amplitude. Such a person will not merely rest, in the classic theological sense, but can continue to be active and expressive in the service of God and, under certain circumstances, to grow. This seemingly minor point is actually of major significance.

The Fifth Way has sometimes been seen as a spiritual shortcut for exactly this reason: the couple’s Real I resides in their joint abler soul. Working together, the partners receive several enormous boosts: the confidence that comes from sensing their common whole; the boldness with which they can plow through their shadow work; and above all, the willingness to die to self, which is the real crucible of transformation. The very intensity of the desire they have to give all to the other will become the bridge on which they cross from passion to compassion.⁹

POLAR BEINGS?

But do they originally have to have been one being? That is the ancient and most mythological version of the theory of the bipolar soul, which has captivated mystical imagination from Plato right down through Mouravieff.10 If this stipulation holds true—that the partners are a singular, eternally foreordained match and that none but this unique partner will produce the desired spiritual results—then, regrettably, the Fifth Way path is open only to those who have already miraculously located their needle-in-a-haystack soul mate. It is this highly romanticized version of the teaching, I believe, that has contributed so heavily to the general distrust of true love as a spiritual path. The quest for authentic transformation is sentimentalized into a quest for the perfect partner, and as one waits on the bank for one’s knight in shining armor or dame de ses pensées to appear, it is all too easy to daydream one’s life away.

I now see that the solution to this koan is really simple. The problem lies in our limited and time-bound notion of the word original. Judged from the standpoint of earth, original means “first in time.” From the standpoint of heaven it means “whole in purpose”—and quite unlike linear time, divine life flows out in concentric circles from that center of wholeness. When our destiny moves into right alignment with God, what is inevitable in our path will come to be; “first” or “afterwards” does not matter. If we are intended to walk a Fifth Way path, the partner we are to walk it with will inevitably appear. Meanwhile, if the way keeps opening, keep on walking.

I do not have a clue whether Rafe and I were originally a bipolar soul. Neither of us ever resonated with the sense of being the other’s only and eternal soul mate (at least not that we would admit to), and both of us had known romances more impassioned and consuming. What I do know is that from early on we both somehow understood that we were entrusted to each other for the next leg of the journey, and neither of us, however tough the going got, ever seriously thought of quitting. The way kept opening, and we kept walking—through sadness and laughter and healing, through locked dungeons in each other’s soul that no person had ever opened before...into death and through it and beyond. That is all I know, and probably all I need to know. The way keeps opening and we still keep on walking.