In January of 2020, Love/Fate Relationship began its journey to become the most widely read post since I began the blog. It has over 3.5 times as many views as the next most viewed post and is largely responsible for gathering viewers from 70 countries. In light of this, and because it’s the 3-year anniversary of Who Are You?, I decided to repost it.
Why do we love the people we love? It isn’t always due to common interests because sometimes we are drawn to people before we even know what their interests are, and we certainly aren’t drawn to everyone who shares our interests. Conversely, sometimes we know right away that we don’t like someone. We might say we have a gut feeling, but do we understand the origin of such a feeling? Probably not. So what’s going on?
Perhaps the whole phenomena is like consciousness itself: unable to be explained within the confines of our rational mind but rather must be considered with spiritual ideas.
Maybe it’s fate or karma that draws us to those we love. We are all familiar with the word karma; it’s an old Sanskrit term dating back before 1500 BCE and recognized as a universal law in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Karma connotes both action and result. We use it mostly when we consider good deeds that result in good fortune or the opposite, bad deeds that result in less favorable results. We will try to use this word more broadly to consider what it is that attracts or repels us from the people we feel strongly about.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner* has to say:
Necessity and freedom interweave in our destiny… We meet some human being. As a rule, the fact that we have met him is enough in itself; we accept life as it comes without being very observant or giving it much thought. But deeper scrutiny of individual human life reveals that when two persons meet, their paths have been guided in a remarkable way. Think of two individuals, one aged twenty-five and the other aged twenty, who meet; they can look back over the course of their lives hitherto and it will be evident to each of them that every single happening in the life of the one, say the twenty-year-old, had impelled him from quite a different part of the world to this meeting, at this particular place, with the other. The same will be true of the twenty-five-year-old. In the forming of destiny very much depends upon the fact that human beings, starting from different parts of the world, meet as though guided by an iron necessity directly to that meeting-point. No thought is given to the wonders that can be revealed by studies of this kind, but human life is infinitely enriched by insight into such situations and impoverished without it.
If we begin to think about our relationship to some human being whom we seem to have met quite by accident, we shall have to say to ourselves that we had been looking for him, seeking for him, ever since we were born into this earthly existence… and as a matter of fact, even before then. But I do not want to go into that at the moment. We need only remind ourselves that we should not have come across this individual if at some earlier point in earthly life we had taken only a slightly different direction to the left or to the right and had not gone the way we did. As I said, people do not give any thought to these matters. But it is sheer arrogance to believe that something to which one pays no attention is non-existent. It is a fact and will eventually reveal itself to observation.
There is, however, a significant difference between what takes place before the actual meeting of two individuals and what takes place from that moment onwards. Before they met in earthly life, they had influenced each other without having any knowledge of the other’s existence. After the meeting the mutual influence continues, but now they know each other. And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant… What occurs between two human beings before they become acquainted can only be regarded as the outcome of iron necessity and what happens afterwards as the expression of freedom, of mutually free relationship and behavior.
Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, Vol. VI, Lecture given in Berne, Switzerland, January 25, 1924 by Rudolf Steiner. [See note at end of post.]
The above passage from Steiner’s lecture on karmic relationships asks our acceptance of the idea of karma in terms of our relationships to others. If we can entertain such an idea, we must ask whether all karma is just personal? Do we deserve to meet our soul mate – interesting term – or to meet an arch enemy? Based on what? What does Steiner mean by iron necessity guiding us toward certain people? Questions such as these expose us to some of the deep mysteries of our lives.
When we contemplate the people we know in our lives, we can easily recognize those with whom we feel a deeper (karmic) relationship, whether it’s good or bad, and those with whom we feel but a passing relationship. We can trace the events that brought us into the lives of those we care about. We can marvel at the multitude of decisions we (and they) made that resulted in our meeting each other. Enjoy the beautiful complexity of our lives as a welcoming first step toward understanding the bigger picture of karma.
* See Having an Openness of Mind in sidebar.
“Is Love at First Sight Real?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201801/is-love-first-sight-real?amp