Sometimes music just pops into my head for no reason. I will not have heard the song recently and there is no apparent external prompt. This time it was “Getting to know you” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I”. The reason this is bizarre is because it is not a favourite of mine (although if you knew me then a show tune popping into my head would not surprise you).

I then thought carefully about the words and related it to the myriad of relating that is happening in my life. When we meet someone and immediately “click” with them we know them already. We often say that we recognise them from somewhere or that it is like we have known them all our life. They are easy to talk to and understand us like few others do, even though we have just met.

We then embark on a process of “getting to know” them: what work they do; where they live; are they married?; do they have children? Yet these things do not alter our perception of the other because we know them. I have to correct the last sentence: these things should not alter our perception of the other but sometimes they do. When we learn things about the other that make us uncomfortable, because they reflect something within ourselves, often our perception of them does change. I know that I can get very uncomfortable with people who are very much like me because of the very fact that I see a lot of me in them.

“Once I got to know them I realised they weren’t for me,” I’ve heard myself say on occasion. This isn’t entirely true because in hindsight I knew deep down that they were never for me right from the start. The ego just needed to work it out for itself. If you have ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” then you would see my point that in the very instant that we meet someone we already know whether we will get on with them, how special they could be in our life, and whether we would want to spend more time with them. Conversation is not necessary.

This is not to say that conversation is not important in a relationship of any kind. On the contrary, communication with the other is necessary and healthy but only to minimise confusion by the ego, the Soul does not need this communication. The Soul knows.

Also, please understand me when I say “they were never for me”. We can never make a wrong choice and there is never an experience that shouldn’t have happened but, in this case, the reason for the experience may have been purely for the ego.

Every day we are relating with someone very special in our lives; someone more important than anyone we will meet. That someone we call “me”. The same observations apply to this relationship: we already know who we are, why we are here, and everything we need to know in order to get there. The constant chatter to ourselves is our ego and this is what changes the perception of ourselves (only our perception of ourselves can change). However, we are so used to the ego as it is the very world around us (I’ll explain this in more detail in a future discussion) that we battle to hear our Soul or sometimes even choose not to hear it. Any internal voice that is justifying and analysing is ego; the Soul just knows and does not have to justify.

Listen to what you feel deep within. Listen carefully. You already know the people you meet. You already know you.