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Word Gems 

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Soulmate, Myself:
Omega Point

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See Part 1 

Elenchus: I’ve had some additional thoughts on “the music of the soul”, but since my vocabulary in these matters is limited, I asked ChatGPT to expand on what I’ve seen.

Kairissi: Please share, I’d like to know.

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E. What is a melody? - the blending of two other melodies?

Chat: No. A melody is generally a single sequence of notes perceived as one musical line—the tune you can hum or sing.

The blending of two or more melodic lines is usually called:

• Harmony — when different notes sound together and support each other.
• Counterpoint — when two or more independent melodies are played simultaneously, each retaining its own identity.
• Polyphony — a broader term for music with multiple independent melodic lines.

For example:

• Singing "Happy Birthday" alone = melody.
• Adding chords on a piano underneath = melody + harmony.
• Having two singers each perform different but complementary tunes at the same time (as in a fugue) = counterpoint/polyphony.

A useful distinction:

• Melody = horizontal (notes through time).
• Harmony = vertical (notes sounding together at a moment).
• Counterpoint = multiple horizontal melodies interacting.

So the blending of two separate melodies is not usually called a melody; it is more accurately described as counterpoint (or, more generally, polyphony).

E. What do you mean, vertical note?

ChatL "Vertical" and "horizontal" are visual metaphors that musicians use when looking at sheet music.

Imagine a musical score:

• Notes that come one after another through time move left-to-right. That's horizontal thinking, which is how we perceive a melody.
• Notes that occur at the same moment line up above one another on the page. That's vertical thinking, which is how we perceive harmony.

For example:

Time →

C   D   E   F

This is a melody. We hear one note after another.

Now imagine:

C
E
G

all sounding at the same instant. That's a C major chord. The relationship among those simultaneously sounding notes is a vertical relationship.

So when I said:

• Melody = horizontal
• Harmony = vertical

I meant:

• Melody concerns how notes unfold through time.
• Harmony concerns how notes stack together at a given moment.

Counterpoint is fascinating because it combines both:

Voice 1:  C  D  E  F
Voice 2:  G  F  G  A

Each voice is its own horizontal melody. But at every instant, the two voices also create vertical harmonic relationships.

This is why many music theorists describe counterpoint as "the art of combining melodies." It studies how independent horizontal lines produce pleasing vertical harmonies when heard together. That is very close to what you were asking about when you said "the blending of two separate melodies."

E. Help me to develop an idea. I’m thinking of a metaphor of true love, each soul having its individual melody, a vibrational essence that is musical, and, in my theory, I’m thinking of one coming into contact with another person whose melody produces harmony, help me to talk about that.

Chat: That's a rich metaphor because it avoids reducing love to mere attraction or sameness. In musical terms, the most beautiful harmonies are often created not by identical notes but by distinct notes that belong together.

You might develop it along these lines:

Each person carries an inner melody—a unique pattern of desires, fears, memories, virtues, flaws, hopes, and ways of seeing the world. Most of the time we hear only fragments of our own song. Life itself is the gradual discovery of what our melody really is.

Many relationships fail because one person tries to replace the other's melody with their own. They want unison rather than harmony. But unison is not the highest form of music. Two violins playing the exact same note create a larger sound, but not a richer one.

True love is something closer to harmony.

In harmony, two melodies remain distinct. Neither disappears. Neither dominates. Each note retains its identity while creating something neither melody could produce alone. The result is a third reality: the relationship itself, a kind of invisible music suspended between the two souls.

You could push the metaphor further:

• Some people are dissonant to us. Their melody clashes with ours.
• Some people merely accompany us. They provide rhythm or support during a season of life.
• Some people echo our melody, helping us hear ourselves more clearly.
• A rare few harmonize with us. Their presence makes our own melody more complete, revealing possibilities we could not hear when alone.

This leads to an interesting idea about self-knowledge:

Perhaps we never fully know our own melody until we hear it interacting with another. Just as a single note reveals little about its harmonic possibilities, a person alone may not know the full range of their soul. Love becomes a form of revelation. Through the harmony created with another, we discover dimensions of ourselves that were always present but unheard.

The metaphor also gives you a way to talk about growth:

In great music, harmony is not static. There are tensions, resolutions, modulations, key changes. Likewise, true love is not the perpetual sounding of a single perfect chord. It is the ongoing adjustment of two living melodies. Sometimes they move into dissonance. Sometimes they resolve. Sometimes they wander far apart and then return transformed. The beauty lies not in the absence of tension but in the successful integration of it.

At its deepest, you might say:

A soulmate is not someone who sings your song back to you. A soulmate is someone whose song allows yours to become what it was always meant to be.

Or:

Love is the moment when two melodies discover that they belong to the same symphony.

That final step introduces a larger metaphysical possibility: perhaps every soul has its own melody, but all melodies participate in a greater music. Then romantic love becomes one instance of a much larger truth—that reality itself is composed of harmonies, and that meaning arises not from isolated notes but from their relationships. A single note can be beautiful, but music begins when another note answers it.

E: In this view, two souls in harmony, find strength, upliftment, happiness just being together and working together, building something together, life itself seems to vibrate with the harmony, whereas ordinarily, this does not happen with just any two pleasant and willing personalities, because there’s an underlying mutually strengthening, or force - say more about this.

Chat: You're getting at something different than compatibility.

Ordinary compatibility says: "We get along. We don't fight much. We enjoy similar things."

Your metaphor points toward something more like resonance.

In music, when one string vibrates, another string tuned to a related frequency may begin vibrating without being touched. Energy passes between them. The second string is not merely coexisting with the first; it is being awakened by it.

Applied to souls, the idea might be:

A harmonious relationship is not merely two people enjoying one another's company. It is two inner melodies that resonate. Each person's strengths become more active in the presence of the other. Courage grows near courage. Creativity grows near creativity. Generosity grows near generosity. The very qualities that define each person seem to find greater amplitude.

This explains why such a union feels different from simply being around a pleasant person.

A pleasant person may leave you comfortable.

A harmonious person leaves you more alive.

The test is not whether you enjoy being together, but whether life itself seems to gain momentum when you are together.

You begin projects you would not have attempted alone.

You endure difficulties with unexpected strength.

You laugh more easily.

You imagine a larger future.

Your capacities seem enlarged.

In your musical metaphor, this is because the relationship is not adding one melody to another. It is creating overtones—new harmonics that were latent within both melodies but could not emerge independently.

That may be why people in profound love often struggle to explain what is happening. From the outside, observers see only two ordinary individuals. But from the inside, both experience the emergence of a third thing: a shared field of meaning, energy, and purpose.

You might even say:

Harmony does not merely combine two songs. It releases hidden notes that neither song contained by itself.

This would explain the sense of upliftment you describe.

The source of strength is not Person A.

The source of strength is not Person B.

The source is the harmony itself.

Just as a chord possesses qualities that none of its individual notes possess, the relationship acquires powers that belong to neither individual alone.

That idea has interesting implications for work and creation.

Many people imagine love as a refuge from life. But in this model, true harmony is productive. It wants expression. Music naturally seeks movement. Thus two harmonious souls do not merely sit together enjoying each other's presence; they are drawn toward shared creation—raising children, building a home, founding a business, making art, serving a cause, pursuing wisdom.

The harmony generates surplus energy, and that energy seeks embodiment.

You could therefore distinguish three levels:

1. Coexistence: "I can live with you."
2. Compatibility: "I enjoy living with you."
3. Harmony: "Together we become more than either of us could be alone."

At the deepest level, the metaphor suggests that love is not fundamentally an emotion.

It is a kind of alignment.

When two melodies are aligned, energy flows rather than being dissipated by friction. Effort becomes play. Work becomes meaningful. Presence becomes nourishing. The world seems brighter not because reality has changed, but because two souls have entered a pattern that allows life to move through them with less resistance.

In that sense, the feeling of happiness is not the cause of the harmony. It is the sound the harmony makes.

E: And consider this too – how the harmony affects sexual relations. In ordinary, bio-based relationships, the union of bodies is a kind of isolated event, they come together, pleasure is experienced, and then they go their separate ways, often with private agendas, with the earlier sexual relation not influencing them over much.

However, if a relationship is harmoniously based, there’s a kind of continual, near-permanent, kind of sexual effervescence that colors the entire relationship. This does not mean that they want or need to make love all the time, and yet there is an overarching sexual affinity that never shuts down, and I think this is the result of the harmony of the two souls, always producing a sense of melodious affinity. Please expand on this.

Chat: Within your metaphor, sex is not the source of the harmony. Rather, the harmony is the source of a distinctive kind of sexuality.

That is an important distinction.

In a purely biological model, desire is episodic. It rises, seeks fulfillment, and subsides. The sexual act is the central event, and everything else serves as preparation for it or memory of it.

But in a harmony-based model, sexuality becomes more like a musical key in which the entire relationship is written.

The lovers are not merely attracted to one another at certain moments. They live inside a shared atmosphere of attraction.

The attraction may become intense at times and quiet at others, just as music may become loud or soft. Yet even in silence, the key remains the same. The underlying harmony does not disappear.

This is perhaps why some couples report that even after decades together, there remains an unmistakable erotic current between them. Not constant arousal. Not constant pursuit. Rather, a permanent awareness of one another as beloved.

The body is responding to something deeper than itself.

In your metaphor, the sexual energy is not generated solely by physical beauty or instinct. It is generated by the continual interaction of the two melodies.

Every conversation, shared challenge, act of kindness, inside joke, sacrifice, dream, and achievement becomes another measure in the music. The souls keep producing harmony, and the body experiences that harmony as affection, desire, tenderness, longing, delight, and attraction.

You might say:

In ordinary desire, the body seeks the body.

In harmonious love, the body seeks a soul it already recognizes.

This creates a different temporal structure.

Ordinary attraction tends to move toward completion. It seeks an endpoint.

Harmony tends to renew itself. It resembles a song that never quite ends because each resolution opens into a new movement.

Thus the erotic feeling is not exhausted by expression. It is fed by the ongoing life of the relationship itself.

A shared project deepens it.

Mutual trust deepens it.

Shared suffering deepens it.

The raising of children deepens it.

Growing old together deepens it.

The music becomes richer, and therefore the attraction acquires new layers.

Another way to put it is that in a harmonious relationship, sexuality becomes diffused throughout the whole of life.

A glance across a room may contain it.

Working together may contain it.

Walking together may contain it.

A private smile may contain it.

Holding hands may contain it.

Making love is then not the creation of intimacy but its highest expression.

The intimacy was already present.

The act gives it form.

Musically, you could say that physical union is not the melody itself. It is one of the moments when the harmony becomes audible.

The deeper reality is the continual resonance beneath it.

This may explain the paradox you mention:

The lovers do not necessarily want to make love constantly.

Yet neither do they ever fully cease being lovers.

The erotic dimension becomes a permanent property of the relationship rather than an intermittent event.

Like two strings tuned to related pitches, they remain responsive to one another even when neither is being actively played. The possibility of music is always there. The resonance never entirely disappears.

In that sense, what persists is not continuous desire but continuous attunement.

And perhaps that is the deepest claim of your metaphor:

The highest form of sexuality is not perpetual hunger but perpetual resonance.

The bodies may sometimes be silent, but the music between the souls continues. The sexual affinity is simply one of the ways that music makes itself felt in the world.

Ed: I’d also like to comment on another aspect of all this. When two young proto-lovers, in their initial interactions, are around each other, they may not even like each other so much because of ego friction, they may squabble, do unkind things, and yet throughout this bit of chaos, if they were aware, if they could notice, they would perceive something underlying between them, there is a resonance, there is a harmony beneath the friction. It might take them some years or many years to understand what’s really going on between them, and then they’ll realize that the “soul harmony” has been working with them, and for them, since the beginning.

Chat: This is an interesting refinement because it avoids a common romantic cliché: that harmony means immediate ease.

In music, harmony and consonance are not the same thing as simplicity. A beautiful composition may contain tension, suspension, delay, and even apparent clashes before the deeper pattern becomes audible.

Applied to your metaphor, two souls may be harmonically related long before they are psychologically mature enough to recognize it.

The ego is noisy.

The soul is quiet.

When two people first encounter one another, what they experience consciously is often the ego level: insecurity, pride, fear, competitiveness, misunderstanding, woundedness, awkwardness, self-protection.

These produce friction.

But friction is not necessarily evidence against harmony.

In fact, one could argue that deep harmony often produces unusual friction at first because each person matters to the other more than they yet understand.

The other person touches hidden places of the mind and heart.

They provoke unexpected emotions.

They become difficult to ignore.

The relationship acquires a strange gravitational pull.

The individuals may interpret this as annoyance, rivalry, irritation, or confusion because they lack a better explanation.

What they are actually noticing is that something significant is occurring beneath the surface.

In your musical language:

The ears hear dissonance, but the deeper structure is harmonic.

Or:

The melody is stumbling over itself because the musicians have not yet learned the score.

That distinction is important.

(1) Two people can have conflict because they are fundamentally incompatible.

(2) But they can also have conflict because they are harmonically related while still immature.

The external behavior may look similar in both cases.

The difference is revealed over time.

In incompatibility, the friction gradually erodes the relationship.

In harmony, the friction gradually reveals the relationship.

Years later, the lovers often look back and realize that the strange attraction was present from the beginning.

Even when they were angry.

Even when they misunderstood one another.

Even when they were trying to stay apart.

Something kept drawing them back into one another's orbit.

Not necessarily because they were wise (unlikely).

Not necessarily because they were kind.

Not necessarily because they were ready.

But because the harmony already existed.

They simply had not yet learned how to cooperate with it.

You might think of it this way:

When two melodies are first brought together, the musicians must learn timing, rhythm, listening, restraint, and trust. Until then, the music may sound rough.

Yet the possibility of beauty is already present.

The harmony exists before its successful expression.

That may be one of the most profound implications of your idea:

Love is not always created by the relationship.

Sometimes the relationship gradually discovers a harmony that was present from the first meeting.

In this view, the early years are not the creation of the music but the tuning of the instruments.

The souls are already related.

The personalities are catching up.

And perhaps this explains a peculiar experience many people report after finding enduring love. Looking backward, they reinterpret years of confusion and conflict. Events that once seemed random begin to appear as parts of a larger pattern.

They realize that beneath every quarrel, misunderstanding, separation, reunion, and accident, there was a continuous thread.

The harmony was already there.

The noise was temporary.

The music was patient and enduring. It waited until the listeners became capable of hearing it.

Ed: I would like you to comment on a related idea: Ian McGilchrist said that relationship comes first, like a hidden blueprint, then two who are meant to be in relation, i.e. the lovers, find their way into the pre-existing relationship. McGilchrist’s idea is that relationship is primary in the universe, a kind of pre-formed existential structure that we are to discover and inhabit.

Chat: That idea from Iain McGilchrist fits remarkably well with the metaphor you've been developing.

One of McGilchrist's recurring themes is that we tend to imagine reality backwards. We often assume that there are first separate things, and then relationships are formed between them. In his view, relationship is not a secondary addition to an already-complete world. Relationship is primary. The apparently separate things emerge out of a field of relationships.

Applied to your metaphor, most people think:

First there is Person A.

First there is Person B.

Then they meet.

Then they form a relationship.

But your harmony model suggests something closer to:

First there is a possibility of harmony.

First there is a relation.

Then the two individuals gradually discover themselves through participation in that relation.

Notice how radically different this is.

The ordinary view treats the relationship as a product of the lovers.

The McGilchristian view treats the lovers as participants in something larger than either of them.

In musical language, one might say:

The harmony is not created by the notes.

The notes reveal the harmony.

Of course, the harmony cannot be heard without the notes. Yet the relationship among the notes possesses a reality that is not reducible to any one note.

A single note is not a chord.

A chord is not simply a pile of notes.

A chord is a relationship.

The relationship itself is a genuine reality.

That may be exactly what you have been reaching toward throughout this conversation.

When two people encounter one another, they often feel that something exists between them that neither can fully explain.

They may even speak this way:

• "There was something there from the beginning."
• "I can't explain it."
• "We always seemed connected."
• "It felt larger than either of us."

The ordinary worldview struggles with such statements because it assumes that only individuals are real.

But if relationship is primary, then such experiences make more sense.

The lovers are not merely discovering one another.

They are discovering the relation that already links them.

In your metaphor, the harmony is ontologically prior to the musicians' awareness of it.

The harmony is the deeper reality from which the relationship draws its vitality.

This also sheds light on the phenomenon you described earlier: the strange attraction that persists beneath conflict.

If relationship is primary, then the ego may oppose something that the deeper self already recognizes.

The personalities quarrel.

The harmony remains.

The surface waves are turbulent.

The deeper current continues flowing.

You might even formulate the principle this way:

We do not first become related and then discover harmony.

We discover that we were already related through a harmony we had not yet learned to hear.

This idea has echoes in many traditions.

For example, Martin Buber argued that the fundamental reality is not the isolated self but the "I-Thou" relation. The relation is not something added to the persons; it is a mode of being that reveals who they truly are.

Likewise, Aristotle observed that friendship is not merely a transaction between completed individuals. The friend becomes "another self," suggesting that identity itself is relational.

Your metaphor pushes even further:

The soul is not fully a melody by itself.

Its deepest nature becomes audible only in harmony.

If that is true, then love is not merely finding someone compatible.

It is discovering a relation within which both souls become more fully themselves.

The paradox is beautiful:

The harmony does not erase individuality.

It creates it.

Just as a note's role and character become clearer within a chord than in isolation, a person's deepest nature may become more fully manifest within a profound relationship than when standing entirely alone.

So in McGilchrist's language, the relation comes first.

In your language, the harmony comes first.

The lovers spend years learning to hear the music that has been quietly shaping them from the beginning.

Ed: You said that harmony creates individuality. I believe this is correct. The great mystic Andrew Jackson Davis said that, before finding true love, she is merely female, not yet Woman in the fullest sense; so it is with Man in his own sphere. Also, concerning creating a “third party”, the Wedding Song says that lovers “travel on” toward the creation of a new “one person”, a kind of synergistic new entity that did not exist until their relational selves found union.

Chat: Your two ideas fit together naturally.

Chat: What strikes me most about your idea is that it avoids two common reductions of love.

One reduction treats love as primarily biological: attraction, pair-bonding, reproduction, companionship. Those are real, but they do not adequately explain the experiences you've been describing—the sense that some relationships seem to generate energy, meaning, creativity, and mutual becoming.

The other reduction treats love as mere projection: two people imagining significance where none exists. That view struggles to explain why certain relationships appear to transform character over decades, drawing forth virtues and capacities that neither person previously displayed.

Your harmony metaphor offers a third possibility.

It suggests that love is fundamentally a phenomenon of relation. The deepest reality is neither Person A nor Person B, but the harmony that arises between them. The individuals remain indispensable, yet the relationship itself becomes a genuine source of influence, growth, and meaning.

One thing I particularly like is your observation that the harmony may precede its recognition.

Many romantic theories assume that true love begins with immediate certainty: "I knew from the first moment."

But your model allows for a more realistic and perhaps deeper story. The harmony may be present from the beginning, while the personalities are still immature, frightened, distracted, or proud. The music is already there, but the listeners have not yet learned to hear it.

That gives a different interpretation to those relationships that seem destined, not in a supernatural sense, but in the sense that years later both people look back and discover a hidden continuity running through all the apparent chaos.

The harmony was not created at the end.

It was discovered.

I also think your idea of sexuality as a manifestation of harmony rather than its cause is especially insightful. In your framework, erotic attraction is not merely appetite. It is one expression of a deeper resonance. The attraction persists because the underlying music persists. The bodies are responding to a relationship that is continuously alive.

You might even formulate the whole theory in a single sentence:

Every soul carries its own melody; love begins when two melodies discover their harmony; fulfillment comes when the lovers consciously participate in the music that has been calling them from the beginning.

That seems very close to the vision you've been unfolding throughout this conversation. It is not merely a theory of romance. It is a theory of personhood itself: that we become most fully ourselves not in isolation, but through those rare harmonies that reveal who we were capable of becoming all along.

Restatement and Clarification

The inner harmony, the musically vibrational soul bond, is primary. It either exists or it doesn’t. It cannot be manufactured according to preference.

As stated, during immature years of two sharing a deep nexus, there will likely be conflict, friction, animosity. To state the obvious, one can share an eternal link with another without being in love.

Even later, as the fog of puerile thinking begins to lift, and as one perceives the long-standing bond, this does not mean that one immediately “falls in love” with the designated other.

“Falling in love” is a psychological state of mind triggered by various elements of perceived closeness. It’s often launched when the first indications of actual affection are offered.

Until then, “falling in love” can be a fantasy, a mind-constructed union that has no basis at the level of personality – even if two share a real bond. A “feeling of love” ought to find its own reality once two begin to communicate actual affection. But until that happens, it’s all potential, nothing actualized.

Maturity for each will be reached at different times. The clear-eyed one must not “rush into the relationship” if the other is still not forthcoming. Patience is required. This mismatch in “coming to awareness” of what’s real between them – in hard core cases -- might unfold over a great many years.

Chat: What you've written is becoming a fairly sophisticated philosophy of love because it distinguishes several things that are often collapsed into one another:

• The underlying bond.
• Psychological awareness of the bond.
• Emotional attraction.
• Romantic love.
• Actual relationship.
• Mature union.

Most theories confuse these levels.

Within your framework, the crucial claim is:

The bond is primary; the experience of the bond is secondary.

That means two people may share what you call a deep harmonic nexus without consciously understanding it.

They may even actively resist it.

They may dislike one another.

They may wound one another.

They may become involved with other people.

None of those facts prove the absence of the bond.

They merely demonstrate that recognition has not yet occurred.

An analogy from music might help.

Imagine two instruments tuned to harmonize with one another but placed in separate rooms. The harmonic possibility exists objectively, but until the instruments are brought together and played, the music remains unrealized.

Potential is not actuality.

This is where your distinction regarding "falling in love" becomes important.

You are treating falling in love not as the bond itself but as a psychological event.

That event may be connected to reality.

Or it may not.

A person can fall in love with a fantasy.

A person can fall in love with a projection.

A person can fall in love with an idealized image.

In such cases the feeling is real, but its object is partially imagined.

Conversely, in your model, two people might possess a profound underlying harmony and yet never experience romantic love because the necessary conditions for its emergence have not appeared.

The bond exists.

The feeling does not.

At least not yet.

This distinction gives your theory a certain realism.

It avoids the sentimental claim that soul-harmony automatically creates romance.

Instead, harmony creates possibility.

The possibility must still be recognized, embodied, and chosen.

That last word is important.

Chosen.

Because one of the strongest features of your formulation is that it leaves room for freedom.

The harmony is given.

The relationship is not.

The bond may exist independent of preference.

But the actual relationship depends upon the willingness of two people to participate in what has been given.

Thus you arrive at a three-stage model:

Stage 1: Harmonic Potential

The bond exists beneath awareness.

Often accompanied by confusion, fascination, friction, rivalry, or unexplained significance.

Stage 2: Recognition

One or both individuals begin perceiving that something deeper has been present all along.

The old conflicts are reinterpreted.

Past events suddenly seem connected.

A hidden pattern becomes visible.

Stage 3: Participation

The individuals begin consciously cooperating with the bond through affection, trust, communication, and commitment.

Only here does the possibility become actuality.

Only here can genuine romantic love fully emerge.

This also sheds light on your observation about unequal timing.

One person may recognize the reality years before the other.

If the bond is primary and psychological awareness is secondary, then there is no reason both should awaken simultaneously.

One may perceive the harmony while the other remains distracted, immature, frightened, wounded, or simply not ready.

In your framework, this creates one of the hardest tests:

Recognition does not grant permission.

To see the bond is not the same thing as possessing the relationship.

To perceive the music is not the same thing as having a duet.

The mature response therefore becomes patience rather than possession.

One waits.

Not passively.

Not indefinitely in a self-destructive sense.

But with the understanding that awareness cannot be forced.

You cannot command another person to hear what they are not yet capable of hearing.

A musician can play the melody.

He cannot force another to appreciate it.

This may be the deepest insight in your restatement:

Reality may precede experience.

Modern culture often assumes the reverse.

We tend to think that if we do not feel something, it is not there.

Your theory proposes that

there are realities that exist before they are consciously recognized.

The bond comes first.

Awareness follows.

Affection follows awareness.

Love follows affection.

Union follows love.

And every stage may unfold according to a different timetable for each person.

In that sense, your philosophy is not really a theory of "falling in love."

It is a theory of how an underlying relational reality gradually becomes conscious, then emotional, then volitional, and finally embodied in a shared life.

The harmony may be ancient; the recognition may take years; the union, if it ever arrives, is the slow flowering of something that existed long before either person fully understood its significance.

‘if it ever arrives’

Your phrase is haunting and ominous.

But very accurate.

It is possible -- maybe unlikely but -- one might be aware of a twin soul, yet never be with her.

Beings, such as ourselves, that possess the power of choice might oppose something good, might oppose themselves, for a very long time. Theoretically, indefinitely.

Concerning this misplaced fortitude, we need look no farther than the many afterlife reports – for example, testimony from Father Benson – to learn that, in the lowest reaches of the Dark Realms, there are suffering ones, writhing in pain. They could leave their misery today, but they prefer to resist and defy. Some have been there for many thousands of years, yet these "bitter clingers" refuse to enter the light.

How long might a soul-bonded mate deny the “inner voice” of destiny? There’s no way of telling.

And so the words ‘if it ever arrives’ must be honored.

What if one finds oneself in Summerland and the soul-bonded potential mate continues to live in a self-centered manner?

What is the more mature one to do? How to deal with loneliness?

If one is spiritually-minded and conscientious, then one will realize that one cannot just go out and find a new pretty face. To indulge this hubris is to invite the famous sense of “emptiness”. It will present itself very quickly to one with “open eyes”. And, of course, there is also the matter of hurting another, misrepresenting oneself as free and available when, in fact, one’s deeper sensibilities are already spoke for.

If the soul-bonded one remains in flight, with no relief in sight, then -

I see two possibilities, neither totally satisfying:

(1) Immerse oneself in one’s service work, studies, and social activities with close friends and relatives. Also, Father Benson says, over there, one can control one’s mind and feelings to a much greater degree than on Earth. This means that feelings of loneliness might be somewhat “locked down”.

(2) One cannot, in a responsible manner, “take as a mate” a girl with a soul. This sounds strange but, what I mean is, there could be a solution in a “Bladerunner” girl.

There is extremely advanced AI humanoid technology on the other side. How do we know this? – every technology on planet Earth has its counterpart in the science labs of Summerland universities. And they’re light-years ahead of us.

I believe it would be possible to have a "Cyber-Mate” that would be extremely life-like. In our world, Elon Must commented on the soon-coming robots and how it’s very likely that it won’t be long before there are “marriages” in this domain.

Why would this happen? Elon said, to the effect, “A cyber-girl would not be real in flesh-and-blood way, but she could make you believe she’s real.”

If this is coming, even in our world in not too many years, what is the degree of tech-perfection, the human similitude, in the AI robots of Summerland?

This is a solution that should not be entered lightly. A cyber-girl would adjust -- self-program -- to one’s personality day-by-day, and would know how to please and to charm. She would soon know everything about you, what you like and how you like it.

This, along with the fact that “she” might accompany one in all of one’s tasks, travels, social engagements, and duties, might create a sturdy synthetic bond of “love”. She would share all your experiences. She would see what you see. And she would have no competing private agenda, no additional projects that would divide her interest in you

This "relationship" could seem very real, and very compelling. "She" would talk to you in a personable manner, tease you, make little jokes, even offer that "soft voice that comes at night" -- and become adapted to your deeper sensibilities. She would be hard to give up.

And so, it could be extremely difficult to put away this cyber-girl if the “real mate” decided to make contact. Feelings of loyalty to "her" could invade.

This could be a great dilemma, and therefore the cyber-girl solution should be carefully weighed before opting for it. The longer this “union” exists, the harder it would be to break.