IS THERE SUCH A THING AS SOUL MATES or TWIN FLAMES?

Question for Missy:   

I've been watching YouTube videos about this and reading books about it too. Do you personally think there is such a thing as a soul mate, someone who a person has lived many lives with, that a person deeply connects with? Or how about a twin-flame, your perfect partner who you were once united with as one and will be with again and again through lives? 

Should I hold out until I meet one of them?

Roger

Minnesota

Answer from Missy:

Hi Roger.  

Actually I do think having a soul mate or twin flame is possible, but rare. My understanding is that a person can have many soul mates over a life time but only one twin flame in eternity. No, you should not hold out (avoid relationships) until you meet one of them. You could wait a lifetime. Rather, know yourself well, know what you want, what you need, what you're willing to compromise on, what you are willing to go without. I don't think any one person can fulfill all of that for one long life-time, but in relationships we continue to get to know another person as well as ourselves, and life brings us surprises, including finding ourselves in love at times with someone we could have never guessed would be attractive!

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GOT TO HAND IT TO YOU

 

NATHANIEL BRANDON'S AFFAIR OF HIS OWN - EVENTUALLY HE ENLISTS HIS WIFE TO KEEP THIS SECRET FROM RAND

Nathaniel Brandon and Patrecia Gullison agreed to keep their affair a secret and he thought that their affair would end and not mean much.

Excerpt page 345: ...She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him.  He learned "to lie expertly," he wrote, "As I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office."  .... In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife (Barbara Branden) permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. He didn't reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand.

Missy here:  Despite almost flaunting it, Barbara took a while to catch on that her husband was having an affair with Patrecia.  But in the summer of 1965, she asked Nathaniel for a separation. From 1964-1966, Rand was still counseling the couple in order to help heal their relationship. To me this is all so convoluted. Ayn Rand may have had a philosophy - a theory - that could be applied to therapy but she was not at all qualified just based on her personal involvement with these people.  When the separation was announced, she may have hoped this would be when Branden turned to her, but it was not to be.

Excerpt page 347: Brandon stood on a precipice.  Should he tell the truth, risking Rand's anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand's lover?  He chose a third way, finding other but real incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand's history of rebuking him, depression, "a sense of (emotional) deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her," and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again.....

***

But, he was happy with Patrecia, perhaps more happy that he had ever been.  Ayn, perhaps as predicted, tried to find a way to analyze the relationship he had with Patrecia into oblivion. 

Excerpt page 349:  Gradually, his evasions, inconsistencies, and "drift" became intolerable to the woman for whom logic was tantamount to truth.  They began to have explosive arguments.

... The news of the Branden's impending divorce sent shock waves through the concentric circles of Rand's New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, and Chicago organizations...

***

They denied others were involved in the decisions the couples made to divorce. It took three years into the affair, until 1966, that Nathaniel and Patrecia admitted to Barbara that they were going to start having sex! To me, this is a testimonial to the fear of Ayn Rand that Nathaniel must have felt. He seems to have been greatly confused about his feelings.

Perhaps Ayn had also had enough. When there are so many shades of grey, one sometimes starts to see thinks in black or white. Ultimately, but with tremendous anger, she did break with Nathaniel. It was an excommunication.

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AYN RAND : OUT OF DEPRESSION - WISHING TO RENEW HER AFFAIR WITH BRANDEN BUT HE'S FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A YOUNGER WOMAN

Although Ayn Rand got back to work - and business - and she - and Nathaniel Branden had lectured and created a following of Objectivists, in the early sixties she continued a long-held pattern of accepting others as friends and then discarding them. Her demands and expectations could be too much yet some of them were hurt. She wanted what - and who - she wanted. Though through her depression she and Nathaniel had gone without sex, now, at fifty-eight to his thirty-three, she wanted sex again.  They were collaborators on many a business venture and that included monthly newsletters, promotions, tours, publications and speaking engagements. He was considered to be her intellectual heir. He had worked hard.  But Nathaniel was no longer the twenty-four year old who had met his literary and philosophical heroine. By 1963 the Brandens, still married after all, moved into the same building as Ayn Rand and Frank O'Connor. But Branden did not want to go back to having an affair with Ayn but initially he agreed they would. Some of her followers would turn against him.

Excerpt pages 340-341: Those who took his side pointed out that he had dedicated himself to her and her ideas from is freshman year in college, was intensely protective of her self-image, and was naturally frightened of her volcanic temper and allegiance to a black-and-white moral universe.  In any case, he later admitted that he didn't love her, not in the romantic sense she meant, and hadn't since before the publication of Atlas Shrugged. (Fall of 1957)  If he appeared to forget her original horror of being "an old woman pursuing a younger man" and was maneuvering to get what she wanted, he was procrastinating. He also told her something that was true: that she was the most important person in the world to him.  He said he needed time to work out the problems in his ten year marriage to Barbara before resuming a romantic relationship with her.  During that early conversation she replied, sighing, "I don't feel fully ready yet, either.  I was just testing your attitude for the future." She offered to counsel the unhappy couple.  He accepted.  For the moment, he was off the hook.

He knew, if she didn't. that it was far too late to begin again.  During the years of her depression, he had behaved toward her as a good son behaves to an ailing mother, except that they occasionally slept together. Yet he had also distanced himself from her. ...

Excerpt page 344: What she didn't now was that, beginning in late 1963, Branden was juggling a new romantic triangle, or rather a parallelogram. As just about the time she decided that she was fully ready to resume sleeping with him, he fell in love with a younger woman - a willowy twenty-three year old fashion model and aspiring actress named Patrecia Gullison.

***

Missy here.  Yes Patrecia Gullison was married.  Branden had attended her wedding a year or so earlier. She was youthful but also had attended one of his lectures and was also a bit of a devotee.

Excerpt page 344: Unlike Rand and Barbara, she didn't ask hum to check his premises or overcome his flaws. Unconditional female admiration was a thrilling new experience for him, and he was starving for an extraphilosophical experience of sex.  She was "what Nathan had never had in his life," said Barbara in 2005, "someone who wasn't trying to save his soul."

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AYN RAND : A LITERARY AUTHOR WHOSE BOOKS STILL SELL LIKE CRAZY

And the oldest published books are collector's items 

and can be found on-line selling for thousands.

Two of the best known.

Ayn put in significant time as a Hollywood screenwriter as well.

TWENTY FOUR YEAR OLD NATHANIEL BRANDEN IS SEDUCED BY FORTY-NINE YEAR OLD AYN RAND

 

Missy here.  I wish I could think of Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, as her creative muse, but it seems he fulfilled another role in her life, one of unending support - the unselfish one. Nathaniel Branden, though intelligent, educated, and heading for a career as a psychologist, seems to have fallen under Ayn's spell.

Excerpt page 256:  Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery.  The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, "the image (of myself) I saw reflected (in her eyes) was that of a god," he later wrote.  "I am in love with you, " he said aloud.  It was a fiction that would last fourteen years.

It wasn't a conscious fiction, not at first.  That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.

That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses.  Rand suggested that the affair would be "nonsexual" in the ultimate sense," meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse.  Brandon agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled.  As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they also prepared to present the fact to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask permission to meet by themselves twice a week....

***

And actually, they all four met.  Ayn and Nathaniel claimed that this did not mean they did not also continue to love their spouses. So, as I see it, they altered their relationships and were now in Open Marriage.  A couple months later they revamped the agreement to include full sexuality.  Barbara also felt that her frustrating sex life with her husband was part of the reason.  But Barbara was not well, suffering nightmares and panic. Nathaniel, who was enrolled in a master's degree program at NYU began to play therapist with his wife - and others - using Rand's theories.  Evolved a whole language of ideas about a person's psychological state.  By my way of thinking, what this all amounted to is psychological abuse of Barbara. If she could not find this change in her relationship with her husband acceptable then she was blamed.  Objectivists could not also be Emotionalists, like Barbara.

By the fall of 1958 Ayn herself was depressed despite increasing wealth and being in demand as a speaker and lecturer. She was also having to face literary criticism and took to secluding herself. She remained depressed until early 1961. She smoke and drank coffee. She had also begun using stimulants by prescription and may have used the drugs to lift her mood, loose weight, or get wired.  Frank O'Connor didn't desert his wife, but he also withdrew.

Missy

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WOODEN NICKLES

THE FOUNTAINHEAD NOVEL BECOMES A FILM and NATHANIEL BRANDEN COMES INTO THE LIFE OF AYN RAND and HUSBAND FRANK O'CONNOR

Page 211 Excerpt:  (Regarding The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand's novel, which she had worked long and hard on, not being hoped for literary hit or the well received film, which premiered in Hollywood in June 1949 and was seen in Warner Brother's theaters after that.)

But the larger explanation for the disparity lies within Rand's character. She would not admit that she had written a flawed script.  From adulthood, if not before, she positively refused to consider that she bore significant responsibility for any of the conflicts, failures, or disappointments of her life.  "In all the years I knew her, I never heard her say anything remotely to the effect that she had acted badly, mistakenly, or unfairly," recalled a former friend. As her fame increased and she became conscious of her own iconic stature with readers and audiences, she tended increasingly to fuse her life with the lives of her characters, whose mistakes, if any, arose from ignorance of other's bad intentions and not from a lack of objectivity, diplomacy, or wisdom. She remembered obstacles and disappointments less as ordinary, if infuriating, setbacks than as episodes in a tug of war --- like Roark's *a character who appears to be her idealized man), like Equality 7-2521's - with evil. People and events appeared as black or white. She minimized to the vanishing point the help she had received, failed to mention thinkers who had influenced her, and presented herself as a wholly self-created soul. ..."

Page 219 Excerpt: Of all the readers and viewers of The Fountainhead, however, only one had personal meaning for her, she later said. This was a nineteen year old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal.  A few years after meeting her, he would legally change his name to Nathaniel Branden.

***

Book Review/Report:

Nathaniel Brandon had read the novel for the first time at age fourteen... In the fall of 1949, when the Canadian, who was also of Russian-Jewish heritage, was in his first semester at UCLA, he wrote Ayn Rand and began a correspondence with her. Husband Frank suggested she call the young man and she did, inviting him to visit her at the couple's ranch. She was forty-five and a woman of power and he was a college freshman. They talked for nine and a half hours - all night long - about her philosophy and how to make sense of the world. He was invited to come by again. Ayn considered him to be a genius.

Romantically, Nathaniel Brandon was involved with Barbara Weidman, who was also Canadian and of Jewish heritage, also read and loved The Fountainhead, and also was a student at UCLA. He brought her along to meet and talk with Ayn on the next visit. She too was intellectually stimulated by the conversation and Ayn as an example of an intellectual woman. Meanwhile Frank occupied himself with farming enough to have a somewhat successful business of it.  Ayn and Frank had welcomed so many visits from Nathaniel and Barbara that they began to regard them as, and call them "the children."

I wonder, especially because of reports that Frank never initiated sex with Ayn, if Ayn had ever wanted children.

***

Excerpt page 230:  Most intriguing to them was her marriage.  O'Connor, who could have posed for an Esquire ad and who exuded warmth, gentility, and wisdom, was unresponsive to philosophical discussion and even to most books, yet Rand, who usually placed the highest premium on analytical intelligence and self-assertion, called him her "top value."  Seated, she would glance around to be sure he was nearby; she continuously touched him and held his hand.  "Frank is my rock," she told Barbara.  To Nathaniel, she said, "He believed in me when no one else did." and "We have the same sense of life." He was silent because he was "Too disgusted with people to share what he is with the world," she told them...."

In the fall of 1950, Rand began touching Nathaniel, too. She sometimes held his hand as they strolled the grounds and talked about their ideas and her work.  Barbara saw nothing odd in the older woman's affections for Nathaniel.....

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AYN : MRS. FRANK O'CONNOR and FRANK O'CONNOR : MR. AYN RAND : FAME AND FINANCIAL SUCCESS LEAD TO A DIFFERENT LIFESTYLE

Missy here!

In 1926, Ayn Rand first sighted Frank O'Connor, born in Ohio in 1897, and then twenty-nine, when he was a background actor. He had two brothers settled in Hollywood before he came. He eventually moved into some speaking roles.  They were married in 1929, about the time that her Visa was to expire.

Excerpt pages 66-67: There is no doubt that Ayn Rand did stalk Frank O'Connor.... She ambled over to his side, stuck out her foot, and tripped him. He apologized for stepping on her toes, and they exchanged names... Later that day, she waited for him on the weekly parole line, and they spoke to each other again. And then he disappeared for nine long months...

Rand was heartbroken, and obsessed....

She saw him again in the Hollywood branch of the public library, in May 1927...  Ayn and Frank began to see each other in the evenings and on weekends... Perhaps for the first time in her life, Rand was transparently, completely happy....  O'Connor probably gave her her first kiss; he was her first and, for a long time, only lover...

***

After some financial success due to her screenplay and authorship, in particular her novel The Fountainhead, which kept selling briskly, and after living in a cramped apartment, the couple moved to a house in the San Fernando Valley - Chatsworth - thirteen acres of farmland. The house had been designed for director Josef von Sternberg and his mistress Marlene Dietrich in 1935, a then modern steel and glass design!  Frank became a gentleman farmer while they could afford a cook, maid, and handyman. However, despite this new lifestyle, despite having her own office on the studio lot at Paramount where she wrote screenplays, Ayn considered New York City to be her spiritual home, They traveled there on business trips. She was famous now and her confidence was at an all time high. She began to attract young men as friends, was socializing and entertaining politically conservative friends.

In 1951 she told friends they were moving to New York. Soon they were driving cross-country to the city, where a rental apartment had been arranged for them. Maybe Frank believed it was temporary when he left his beloved farm in the care of others - perhaps five years, or seven, but they would never live in California again. Nathaniel Branden and his wife, Barbara, lived in New York.

Excerpt  page 237:  No one who knew O'Connor believed that he willingly left the San Fernando Valley ranch.  "That property was his business and his world," said Hill. "Ayn knew it.  There was no way she didn't know how badly she was hurting Frank."

***

Frank began working at a florist and took up painting...  By 1957 Ayn and Nathaniel were neighbors, spending time with each other two to three times a week, holding hands and hugging good-bye, though they were both married.  They were telling others they were "soulmates."  It took a while, since these actions were often in front of their spouses, but Nathaniel's wife Barbara finally realized that Ayn was in love with her husband and said so.

Excerpt page 255: ...Now at the height of her mental and emotional power (he was twenty-four and she was forty-nine), she had been rehearsing just such a moment of triangulated passion for at least half her life.  Branden, as flattered and incautious as he may have been, was out of his depth.  For all his flirtatiousness, he had never really contemplated an actual affair with his literary and intellectual idol, he later said...

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