The Woman the World Loves
Every person carries whithin his or her heart a blueprint of the one he loves. What seems to be 'love at first sight' is actually the fulfillment of desire, the realization of a dream. Plato, sensing this, said that all knowledge is a recollection from a previous existence. This is not true, as he states it, but it IS true if one understands it to mean that we already have an ideal in us, one which is made by our thinking, our habits, our experiences, and our desires. Otherwise, how would we know immediately, on seeing persons or things, that we loved them? Before meeting certain people, we already have a pattern and mould of what we like and what we do not like; certain persons fit into that pattern, others do not.
When we hear music for the first time, we either like it or dislike it. We judge it by the music we have already heard in our own hearts. Jittery minds like distracting, excited and well, jittery music. Calm minds like calm music; the heart has its own secret melody and one day, when the score is played, the heart answers: "This is it." So it is with love.
Some go through life without ever meeting WHAT THEY CALL their ideal. This could be very disappointing, if the ideal never really existed. But the absolute ideal of every heart does exist, and it is God. All human love is an initiation into the Eternal. Some find the ideal in substance without passing through the shadow.