Affinity

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.” (Kahlil Gibran)

There are instances in life that punctuate and illuminate our existence beyond our normal understanding; call them what you will . . . revelation, inspiration, deja vu, love at first sight, etc. Of a sudden something turns on our brain and we glimpse the wonderful.  This happened to me recently, totally unexpectedly, as it always is, and from an odd agency at that . . .

Whether it is an amazing sunset or sunrise (but they all are, aren't they?) or a painting of such beauty and grace; or the words of an author two hudred years removed who spoke and wrote in an language undecipherable to us yet who knew the deepest feelings of our hearts.  Or the glance and sparkle of a strangers eyes that somehow reveal, like the starry summer night sky, whole worlds to us.

How could this be? Limited by time and space perhaps we tend to think too much within those limits.

Now there are philosophies about the shared life force of the universe and the continuing existence of all that is living and has ever lived; possible, certainly if we assume a closed system and Newton's laws of energy, matter and thermodynamics.  

But what about thoughts and feelings, can they be explained merely as the chance recombination of electro-chemical processes that we theorize is thought?  Carl Jung postulated that all humanity had a collective consciousness, a communal intellectual set of understandings, unspoken yet understoood.

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

Freud called these "archaic remnants" - thoughts which could not be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be "aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind.'

Are we experiencing then the power of shared experience (which is after all always the best kind)? Maybe . . .

I understand "affinity" (my word of definition) more in the form of Vibratory Physics or wave resonace if you will, e.g., Keely's laws of harmonics. Briefly two vibrations at the same  frequency can under certain circumstances reinforce each other and create synchronous or sympathetic harmonics.  It is a synergystic effect.  Postulating that since we all have energy fields, then we all resonate at a certain wavelength and there could be times when we overlap with external energies (and there could be infinite sources for these which would account for variety) that, well, touch us . . . and we respond to it, in a sense by becoming more of ourselves.

It's as good an explanation as any . . . at any rate it is often quite wonderful!