Love, Eros and Soul Evolution

This article is focussed on exploring the deep soul-level dynamics of what happens when people fall in love, how souls use relationship as a path, how souls use eros to connect with others they can evolve and create with, and the tests and trials of this process.

Falling in Love

A lesson I have learned on my path is that love, or the feeling of being ‘in love’, is what happens when two or more souls recognise the opportunity to evolve their consciousness by being in relation with each other. 

This involves the souls involved recognising a particular quality in the other that it supports their growth to be in relationship with. Often it involves an attempt by the souls involved to integrate the other side of a polarity to fill out their own wholeness.

Whether in explicitly romantic contexts or not, this process often works through erotic energy, which gets activated between the souls in question.

Erotic energy often plays out through sexual energy between the people involved, but not always. Eros can also vibrate between people on other levels too. Two people can share an erotic connection around shared purpose, creativity, non-sexual love, etc.

Eros is always about relating polarities to bring them into union and birth new life, which is a way the souls involved attempt to harness the erotic force to energise their evolution.

Projection as a Vehicle for Growth (and Tension)

The thing is, what we see as attractive in each other is a projection outwards of our own as yet unrealised wholeness. Souls use this process to evolve, even though the nature of the process is often not clear to the soul’s incarnated being, who sees the qualities it is attracted to in another as genuinely outside itself and there begins the journey to becoming infatuated with a special other with whom all our dreams can be fulfilled.

Of course there must be some overlap between what a soul is projecting outwards onto another being and their own inherent qualities and character, otherwise the process wouldn’t work. I could not project my own unrealised erotically activated feminine on anyone. It would need to be a being who has some of this quality already alive and activated in them. However, as most of us will know, there is an inevitable tension that arises in relationship between our projection upon someone and the true nature of their actual character. We know this when some version of the feelings of, “why can’t you just be how I want you to be?”, come up.

This tension leads inevitably to the eventual need to own one’s projections, take them back, take responsibility for the cultivation of those qualities in oneself, and explore the degree to which we can actually love the other person for who they are rather than what we can gain from them.

This happens until the 4th initiation where the soul realises itself as deeper than and containing all polarities.

Prior to this point on the path, because the soul is anchored in the causal body, which is made of very subtle mental matter – which means it is still held in concepts – the soul experiences itself to be one side of a polarity more than another (more light or dark, consciousness or body, masculine or feminine, spiritual or animal…)

Conscious Relating

‘Conscious relating’ is to recognise that whenever we deeply attracted to someone, that is a sign that our soul has found a suitable being to project an aspect of our own unrealised wholeness onto that it desires to re-integrate and remember.

‘Conscious relating’ is to own that, and to be straight about it with ourselves and the person or people involved from the beginning. We inquire into what the unrealised piece or pieces of our own wholeness are that we are seeing in the other, and we are transparent about that with them.

When love and consent exists between the people involved, they can then choose to engage the relating in a way that can support each other to re-connect to and re-integrate the pieces involved, and to do this deliberately, consciously and purposefully.

Once this process arrives at a point of relative completion, the beings involved will feel the shift. Often the eros – the force of attraction – between them will die down, and they will need to feel together into whether their journey with each other is complete, or whether there is a new phase of their relating that wishes to open up.

If it does want to open up, that could be because there are further polarities or qualities to be integrated that can be shared, or it could be that enough integration has happened for the individuals involved for them to each step into the centre of their being, which is deeper than and the source of all polarities, and relate from there.

Should this be the case, the relating will no longer be based on the souls involved relying on the presence of the other to remember aspects of itself, but rather on a free sharing of love between two or more beings that are in touch with their own wholeness. This is the point where sacred union within each person becomes the foundation of relating. Then, each person is sharing the overflowing chalice of their own wholeness with the others they relate with, rather than seeking that wholeness in them.

How Souls Work Through Eros

When an individual offers up everything to their soul, including their eros, their soul will start to work through their eros.

The soul will start to bring into the individual’s life those other beings who it can grow with, journey with, create with and remember itself with. This will happen in the form of who we are attracted and erotically drawn to.

This instinct towards expansion will naturally challenge our drives for safety and structure in relationship. Every relationship has to balance the equation of freedom and connection, individuality and togetherness, and between our soul and animal nature. These equations can only be solved on the basis of love, an honouring of the healthy truths contained in each of these aspects, and a willingness to see our shadows.

There is no single ‘right‘ relating structure, whether monogamous, monogamish, or polyamorous. Some phases of life may call for individuals, dyads, triads or larger constellations to close their relating container so as to be fully available to how soul wants to land through them. Other phases may involve opening to connect more freely with others. These phases can be likened to the breath cycle of inhalation and exhalation. Both are needed for healthy life in their own right times.

Group Relating as a Vehicle for the Planetary Soul

If we remain open to the integration of our soul and our eros, and we can navigate the complexities of relating that this will bring into our life, it’s likely that we will start to find ourselves part of constellations - individuals drawn together into groups by streams of attraction, eros, love and solidarity.

Like molecules, where the atoms that compose them are held together by different bonds, the individuals in these relating constellations will be bonded in different ways, all equally valid as long as they are true to the impulse of the souls involved.

Some might be bonded in love and eros, some purely in love, and some in simply the commitment to be true to the connections that are there.

In the esoteric teachings it is said that it is through such constellations that parts of the planetary soul will start to be able to incarnate. As the bonds between the individuals making up these groups stabilise and their coherence with each other increases, they start to experience an intelligence of life, soul and presence start to move through them as a whole that is deeper than any particular individual or dyad.

They start to feel the one soul of Earth coming alive through their constellation, and incarnating through it as they provide it with a body to manifest. This is the beginning of a whole new phase of evolution. This is the promise of Aquarian group relating.