What People Mean When They Say They Love God

“I love God.”

It may be the most frequently spoken sentence in the history of religion — and the least often inspected. Ask the speaker what, exactly, the sentence contains, and the conversation usually ends in gestures. People do not know what they feel toward God, because they have never opened the feeling up to look. I include religious people in this. I include, on many days, myself.

In the tradition closest to me, the Vaiṣṇava tradition of India, the phrase often points at a very particular experience: the melting tenderness one feels before the Deity — the fragrance, the flame, the beautiful form on the altar, the moisture in the eyes. Is that love? There is certainly a portion of love in it; I would never say otherwise. But a portion is not the thing, and the tradition itself — precisely because it values love above everything else in existence — refuses to leave the word undefined. What follows is the definition, stated as plainly as I can manage. It will feel dry for exactly three sections. Then it will feel like the opposite of dry.

The sentiment test

Begin with an honest observation about when people say the sentence. “I love God” is reported most often when life has just improved — health returned, income grew, the family flourished, the community approved. The feeling is real, but watch what it is indexed to: comfort and respect, the two currencies of the material machine. A sentiment built on rising comfort is a financial instrument: it tracks the market. And when the market falls — the diagnosis arrives, the money goes, the mercy that looks like ruin begins — the sentiment falls with it, and yesterday's lover of God is auditing Him today.

The tradition knew this failure mode so well that it built the stability test directly into its definition of the highest dharma. Look at the two adjectives:

sa vai puṁsāṁ paro dharmo yato bhaktir adhokṣaje |
ahaituky apratihatā yayātmā suprasīdati ||

“The highest dharma for humans is that from which is born devotion to the Transcendent — causeless and unbreakable — by which the soul comes to complete satisfaction.” — Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.2.6

Ahaitukī — without external motive: not running on the comfort-respect circuit at all. And apratihatā — “uninterruptible, which nothing can cut short”: indexed to nothing the world can take away. The verse is a specification, and most of what circulates under the label “love of God” fails it on both clauses — it has a motive (keep the good times coming), and it breaks (the moment they stop). What fails that test is not love. It is a mood with a religious vocabulary.

The definition

So what is love? Here this series has already done the heavy lifting, and I will compress it to three sentences. God is the Puruṣa — the one being whose desires are His own. The soul is prakṛti — energy, a fulfiller of desires, constitutionally incapable of generating either desires or bliss. And between them runs the circuit: He desires; the soul fulfills; from the fulfilled desire bliss is born in Him — and floods back into the soul that did the fulfilling. Shared bliss, circulating between the Desirer and His fulfiller: that — precisely that, and nothing vaguer — is what this tradition calls love. Love is a connection of a particular kind: the connection that runs on the true nature of both parties. He is what He is (the enjoyer); I am what I am (His energy); the current flows.

The Caitanya-caritāmṛta compresses the whole science into two lines that work like a laboratory instrument (outside the library; standard edition):

ātmendriya-prīti-vāñchā — tāre bali 'kāma' kṛṣṇendriya-prīti-icchā dhare 'prema' nāma

“The desire to please one's own senses — that is called kāma. The desire to please the senses of Kṛṣṇa — that bears the name prema.” — Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Ādi 4.165

One question separates lust from love: whose senses is this for? The verse before it adds the metallurgy: kāma and prema differ “as iron differs from gold” — same shape, same shine to an untrained eye, different substance entirely. Hold the instrument up to anything: a marriage, a friendship, a prayer, the tears at the altar. Whose pleasure is the transaction actually serving? The answer is the assay.

Why the covered cannot love

Now the uncomfortable middle of the argument — the part that explains why the definition matters and sentiment fails.

The scriptures say the soul in this world is wrapped: a subtle body of mind, intelligence and false ego, sheathed in a gross body of flesh — coverings through which we cannot see our own nature:

dhūmenāvriyate vahnir yathādarśo malena ca |
yatholbenāvṛto garbhas tathā tenedam āvṛtam ||

“As fire is covered by smoke, a mirror by dust, and an embryo by the womb, so is the living being's consciousness covered.” — Bhagavad-gītā 3.38

And the covering does not sit passively, like a coat. It runs the show, through the two pronouns this series has been tracking: aham and mama — “I” and “mine.” “I” — the false verdict about what I am; “mine” — the false inventory of what belongs to me. While consciousness is administered by those two clerks, every relationship it builds — including the one labeled “God” — is built by the costume, for the costume.

Watch what that does to religion. If I believe the lie — that I am this body-person and that a great deal belongs to me — then I need God for two jobs: security for “mine” and expansion for “me.” Guard my assets; upgrade my comfort; endorse my standing. This is the entire theology of the lever, the one the Bhāgavatam throws out on its second verse — and notice now why it must be thrown out. Not because wanting things is naughty. Because the whole arrangement is transacted between two fictions: a self that does not exist as advertised, negotiating protection for property that was never its own. You cannot build a relationship with the Absolute Truth out of materials that are false. Relations with God are built on truth or they are not built at all — what gets built instead, however sincere, however moist-eyed, is what the tradition bluntly calls a fantasy of the mind.

That is why the Bhāgavatam — the book of love of God, the most rapturous text in the canon — opens not with rapture but with this:

satyaṁ paraṁ dhīmahi

“We meditate on the highest Truth — …in whom deception is cast off forever, by His own radiance.” — Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.1.1

The first word of the love story is truth — and its portrait of the Beloved specifies nirasta-kuhakam, “free of all counterfeit.” The truth it demands of the lover is the one this series has been assembling all along: I am not this body, not this résumé, and nothing — not one object in the inventory — is mine; I am a tenant living on an allotment, an energy of the Blissful One, built for the circuit and starving outside it. That truth is not the reward of loving God. It is the prerequisite — the load-bearing ground the connection stands on.

The five flavors

Once the connection stands on truth, it is not one-size-fits-all. The tradition maps five great forms of it — five rasas, five flavors of the same current, catalogued in the library's own commentaries and elaborated in Rūpa Gosvāmī's Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu (outside the library; standard edition): śānta — stilled reverence, the awe of the contemplative; dāsya — service, the joy of the trusted servant; sakhya — friendship, shoulder to shoulder, the audacity of equals; vātsalya — parental care, where the soul feeds and protects God as its child; and mādhurya — the love of the beloved, the deepest and most dangerous flavor, source of every love song this world has ever plagiarized.

Five relationships, as different as a monk, a valet, a best friend, a mother and a bride. But look underneath: all five are the same machine. In every one, the desires of the Desirer arrive — delivered into the consciousness by His internal energy, yoga-māyā — the soul fulfills them in its own key, His pleasure flares, and the pleasure is shared. The flavors differ; the circuit is one. The friend fulfills His desire for play, the mother His desire to be small and cared for, the beloved His desire for beauty answered — and each of them tastes, in return, the exact register of bliss their form of the connection carries.

Say it plainly: love is for enjoyment

And now the point I refuse to leave implicit, because centuries of pious mumbling have buried it. Love exists for the sake of enjoyment. That is not a scandal; it is the specification. Love is the arrangement by which two — or more — persons unite to experience a pleasure neither can generate alone; remove the enjoyment and you have removed the point. The Gītā's own portrait of those who have reached the goal is not a portrait of austere endurance — it is tuṣyanti ca ramanti ca: “they are satisfied, and they delight” — conversing about Him, feeding each other light, enjoying loudly and together.

So when someone teaches that the essence of our relationship with God is giving up enjoyment — that wanting to relish is “selfishness” and the devotee's badge is wanting nothing — I will say it as flatly as the scriptures permit: this is foolishness, and the śāstra contradicts it on every floor of the building. The Supreme is made of bliss; His energy shares the constitution; the desire to rejoice, to relish, to be happy lives identically in the most exalted soul and the most fallen one — it is the single universal appetite, and no scripture anywhere orders it removed. What the tradition corrects is never the appetite. It is the address and the mechanism: the private flare of consuming versus the shared current of the loop. We do not come to God to stop enjoying. We come to God to enjoy at an amplitude that has no rival — the pleasure the Bhāgavatam's first definition called suprasīdati, complete satisfaction, and the essay on false renunciation called looking fed. The saint's face is the advertisement; read it.

The pocket test

So return, one last time, to the sentence we started with — “I love God” — and notice that it now has checkable content. Run the assay from Ādi 4.165: whose senses is this for?

The tenderness at the altar: is it “this is sweet to me” — the fragrance, the music, the feeling of being spiritual? Then it is kāma in its Sunday clothes — iron, prettily painted; a beginning, perhaps, a door — but not yet the thing. Or has it begun, even in flashes, to invert — is He enjoying this flame, this song, this banana? Is this arrangement sweet to Him? That inversion — from my senses to His, from the costume's inventory to the Owner's pleasure — is the entire pilgrimage, compressed into the grammar of a single question. Gold begins exactly there.

Love of God is not a feeling that visits when the market is up. It is a connection with a wiring diagram: truth for its foundation, His desire for its signal, your nature for its conductor, and a bliss that circulates — ahaitukī, needing no reason; apratihatā, breakable by nothing; growing, as the unmixed current does, with every pass through the loop. The sentiment was never the enemy. It was the postcard from a country you had not yet entered.

Still ahead in this series: the planets and their assignments, the forms of the guru — and the crossing: how matter becomes spirit.