Why it’s important to not assign magical qualities to unsavory people.
*** No offense FJM
I have had a bumpy history of only being attracted to men who look and behave like pirates. They are pretty striking, sometimes they wear a singular earring that they expose behind a tendril of greasy hair and combat boots that smell like burning man. Tattoo clad, well travelled. They talk romantically about the sea (seriously), roam aimlessly, only committed to their own unfixed ‘journey’, disappear randomly, and are often found drunk or high.
During my spiritual awakening, or as I like to refer to it as, ‘the melodramatic unfurling of every fucking thing I thought I knew’, the amount of synchronicities occuring in my life were almost excessive. I would think something, or say something, and it would play out on the world stage instantaneously. Sometimes beautiful, other times terrifying. It felt like I was in a video game of my own making. It is enough to make anyone feel insane, particularly if you are ‘waking up’, without ‘growing up’. Think chain smoking Malboro lights at 2 A.M, without a spiritual context to refer back to, only the myriad of mixed New Age trash on the internet. In these moments, it is natural to find people to share a journey with. Perhaps you have a particular person, or several, whom extraordinary circumstances seem to follow when you are both together. I was incredibly lucky to have Naomi.
Naomi, with her ferocious intelligence, always had the attitude of being divinely protected. She consistently did things that would terrify people, and seemed to be immune to a lot of the consequences of regular folk. She knew what she wanted, got what she wanted, and did so with a measure of ease that made you realize that she operated on another level. We had eerily similar life paths, and our mutual unfurling occured organically. We were there to fire one another up, to validate the mystical nature of our respective realities and keep each other sane. Naomi is my prime example of a soul connection without unhealthy attachment, our joint objective was always to support and encourage one another, to reflect on our own development and delve into esoterica with a fearless, chic, grace.
During one of our late night talks, huddled in her lush bungalow, we came across the phenomenon known as “Twin Flames” This concept that seemed reserved to fairy tales, but our lives, increasingly magical, were nothing short of the stuff of myths at this point, so it was not far out. If you haven’t heard of the Twin Flame concept, it is understood as another human being serving as the other half of your soul. A Twin Flame is your divine counterpart, the person who represents everything you are lacking and everything you are, in totality. They are the divine masculine to your divine feminine, or vice versa. You supposedly reincarnate with your Twin Flame, repeatedly seeking to conjoin with one another, and usually met by obstacles, until you get it right. When you meet your Twin Flame, there is a sense of deep recognition, a series of otherworldly occurrences and coincidences, and a runner-chaser dynamic. This means that one person, afraid of their own psyche, runs away from you. Or perhaps, you run away from them. This cycle repeats endlessly until both parties have reached a pinnacle of spiritual development, and voila, you are finally complete because you can be together.
There are countless Astrologers, Life Coaches and New Age Guru’s who digress on and subscribe to the Twin Flame narrative. It is a cybercult like no other.
Naturally, as my previous limiting belief systems were dismantling, and because I was ‘waking up’, my life was a seamless compilation of meaningful coincidences and otherworldly circumstance. This wasn’t limited to my experiences with other people, Naomi included. It followed our RESPECTIVE realities, and was only enhanced when we were together. But being the romantic I am, I was all over the Twin Flame rhetoric, particularly when it followed the intrusion of a Piratey man.
I naturally clung on to several of these pirate characters, and assigned meaning to every interaction. There were three (yes, three) men I thought must be my Twin Flame. It was incredibly easy to pick apart details and assign meaning to them, to interpret the synchronicity following me, through the narrow lens of codependency. I would assign elaborate stories to these unsavory individuals, and project them onto grandiose, disproportionate pedestals that contradicted their behavior. Yes, the sex was tantric and bizzare, there were moments of bliss and sometimes even U.F.O sightings. There were songs that seemed to tell our stories, coincidences, repeating family dynamics, hummingbirds that followed our coat tails and evenings glittering with possibilities, colored and enhanced by red wine. These pirate-men became my angels and effectively my damnation. In their presence I was enlightened, alive in euphoric ecstasy. In their absence I would follow a quick descent to hell. It made me apocalyptically volatile, seething and tortured. The “Twin Flame” phenomenon excused their shitty, moderately abusive behavior. It was away for me to seperate myself from the divine circumstances that ebbed out from life, not people. When they left, they had the power to take those meaningful moments with them, so I forgot the undefined, luminous material that lay within me.
If you look for the symbolism in things, it will always be there, because our world is comprised of symbols and metaphors. At each level of spiritual development we reel back, understanding more and more of these truths and their symbolic relevance. In hindsight, I see that the ‘other-half’, has always been me. Twin flame belief is disempowering, another symptom of the dualistic matrix we live in. We love to separate and compartmentalize things, but our soul does not do that. It is self-contained, sovereign and not lurking behind the Adderall eyes of a Pirate man-child in Silverlake.
I do not dispute the significance of karmic relationships. There have been countless individuals who have helped me evolve, who have shaped and shook me (Naomi, being a perfect example) and who have felt familiar from the moment I met them. However, when we analyze rather than experience, we rob ourselves of the serendipitous authenticity of these connections. Everyone we meet is a reflection of our own souls, our collective subconscious, so if you see yourself in someone, that’s beautiful. It’s a gift to be able to perceive this, but to label and amplify the stakes is a mistake. The Twin Flame archetype is inherently dysfunctional, and encourages feeble, desperation for love directed outwards, rather than inwards. I have seen it turn myself and countless others into deluded wrecks.
In conclusion, I leave you with this: seek your own divinity, love and healing emanating from within. The only union you need to look for is the one with yourself. And if he looks like Father John Misty, a Pirate, or a depleted extra from a Harmony Korine film, run.