Hans Christian King on Soul Mates

Hans Christian King has spent a long career working one on one with people who come to him looking for insight into their lives. He describes what he does as channeling, listening to a kind of spiritual reality and passing along what he hears. Over the years he has appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, and the subject he keeps returning to is relationships, with soul mates near the center of it.

Asked about his background, he corrects a small detail first: this is his sixtieth year doing the work, not his fortieth, and that sixtieth year began the previous March. In that time he has sat with more than 60,000 people, each in a session lasting about an hour. What strikes him most is that he cannot point to a beginning. There was no sudden flash of understanding, no training, no teacher. As far back as his memory reaches, the ability was simply there.

Even as a child, he says, he moved through two dimensions at once. He would hear things people around him were not saying out loud, and he would repeat those things back to them. He does not treat this as a burden. He calls it a gift, and says he cannot imagine having spent his life doing anything else.

Relationships, in his experience, set off more internal reactions than almost anything else a person deals with. For decades a large part of his task has been sorting out what the word soul mate actually points to. In his understanding, a soul mate is someone you have been with or worked alongside in earlier lifetimes. The connection is a kind of recognition, one soul noticing another it already knows.

The common assumption gives him trouble. Most people hear soul mate and immediately think of romance, of the one great love, and he says that reading misses almost everything. Soul mates turn up in many forms. A parent can be a soul mate. So can a sibling. There is also what he calls a soul crossing, when two people who knew each other before happen to meet again, though in his view nothing about it is truly accidental; these encounters are arranged, and the people often act as mirrors and as partners in each other's growth.

That accounts for the feeling many people have described to him: the sense, on meeting someone, that they already know this person. According to Hans, that instinct is usually right. You do.