The Purpose of Relationships

- By Paramahansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi)

"Have you not read that from the beginning of creation. God created soul mates among males and females and signified that due to the divine soul attraction between a man and his mate, he will leave father and mother and cling to his wife? When a man and wife are united as true soul mates they will be one flesh, they will act in harmony and unison in body, mind, and soul; their souls will not act with different ideals, but as two bodies, two minds, two souls, with one ideal."

" When God divided Himself as man and woman, both dualities expressed the same unified consciousness, rather than the differentiation or polarity necessary to sustain the illusion of individuality in the manifested world. So He conceived a clever plan, a trick to keep man and woman different from each other and separate from Himself:
He created superficial distinctions in their bodies and minds. When He made man, He used reason and feeling and cosmic energy, keeping reason uppermost and feeling hidden; that is why man's features manifest dispassionate reason. God made woman by using feeling, reason, and cosmic energy, keeping feeling uppermost and reason hidden; that is why her features express softness and call forth feeling. Reason, being aggressive, made man positive with positive sexual processes; and woman, with deep feeling, was negative and thus formed deep sexual recesses.

The ideal spiritual union between man and woman was ordained that man might bring out the hidden reason in woman, and that the woman might help man uncover his hidden feeling. By so aiding each other to develop a perfect balance of these pure divine soul qualities, they would transcend their delusive differentiation as man and woman and realize their true nature as inviolate souls. Liberation was to be
accomplished by their becoming united first to each other in divine friendship, the purest expression of God's love shared between two individuals; and then, thus perfected, ready for the ultimate union with God.

It is clear from Jesus' references to Genesis in these verses that he was citing the law of true soul mates, the immutable law of spiritual love, which should motivate all marriages. This was, as Jesus emphasized, the divine law "at the beginning": that for every true man there was a true woman, and each one who lived rightly on earth would automatically be drawn together in soul-companionship with a mate by
the operation and decree of this law. True marriage serves as a spiritual device for perfecting the full expression of souls and freeing them into God by proper union—a process of evolution through which souls projected away from God into creation would be brought back through restoration, realization, of their divine nature assisted by the companionship of the ideal helpmate."

"Thus man and woman are the two natures of God—reason (knowledge) and feeling (consciousness, emotional reaction)—expressed on the material plane in differentiated bodies. God gave the first human beings the power to commune with Him in spite of this delusion-imposed dual consciousness. He placed them in paradise—the unified consciousness of the soul manifesting in the awakened spiritual eye and the pure divine expression of the causal-astral body. In the original plan of creation, man and woman, ideal soul mates, were to lead a heavenly life by keeping their minds in the divine region of Bliss-Will in the forehead. Spiritual
marriage consisted in the feminine force or feeling uniting with the masculine force or reason and thus becoming whole in oneness with God.The souls that went out of God were to be brought back to God by the process of harmony in body, mind, and soul.

The harmonious balance of reason and feeling leads to intuitive perception and the ability to know what is Truth. Achieving this balance, men and women become gods. In the unbalanced human consciousness, the feminine quality, or feeling, loses its calm intuitive powers under the influence of the restlessness of body consciousness and emotional excitation; and the masculine attribute, or reason, loses its calm intuitive powers when it succumbs to the restlessness of body consciousness and egotistical self-sufficiency. The original man and woman fell from the awareness of their divine state by physical misuse of the sex force, forfeiting the heavenly union of reason and feeling and becoming identified with their material body rather than their
heavenly causal-astral consciousness with its faculty of intuitive perception of God and knowledge of their souls as one with Him.

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."

"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."

"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."

Credit:

- Excerpts from "The Second Coming of Christ, The Resurrection of the Christ Within You", A revelatory commentary on the original teachings of Jesus, Volume II, Paramanhansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi)

About Paramanhansa Yogananda:

Please visit http://www.yogananda-srf.org/py-life/index.html

Of particular interest:

On March 7, 1952, Paramahansa Yogananda's passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park testified: "No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death....This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one....Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability."