The concept of ‘God’ is deeply complex, spanning religion, philosophy, psychology, and language. Different traditions interpret it differently, making a single definition impossible. A grihast sant , Shyam Lal Saxena (Babuji Maharaj, Ghaziabad), once said, “Prem hi puja hai, prem hi Ishwar hai” – love is worship, love is God. If love is divine, then understanding love becomes essential for understanding God.
Yet, what we call love is rarely pure. It is often a shifting blend of need, fear, tenderness, and awareness. Few words are used as frequently, or examined as little, as ‘love’. It explains devotion and jealousy, sacrifice and possession, longing and loyalty. Popular culture portrays it as pure, transformative, and eternal.
But lived experience tells a different story. In everyday life, love often appears as a web of emotional needs. Control disguises itself as concern, dependency masquerades as intimacy, and fear of abandonment presents itself as care. Love is rarely untouched by ego or insecurity; it is layered, conflicted, and morally ambiguous. It is, therefore, more accurate to see love not as a single emotion, but as a spectrum, amovement through different states of consciousness. Kabir captures this paradox in “Prem gali ati saankari” , suggesting that the lane of love is so narrow that even the self cannot pass through it. True love may require dissolving the ego. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad adds another unsettling idea: we do not love others purely for their sake, but for the self-experience we find in them. Love, then, is never entirely innocent. It is entangled with desire, identity, and projection.
Seen this way, love is grey, unfolding in shades. The first shade is possession. At its most instinctive level, love seeks ownership. ‘You are mine’ may sound like devotion, but beneath it often lies fear of loss, replacement, or inadequacy.
The second shade is desire, the most celebrated form of love.
Desire brings intensity, excitement, and a heightened sense of life. It fuels poetry and obsession. But it is selective. It edits reality, projecting an imagined version onto the other person.
The third shade is dependency, often mistaken for depth. Modern romance glorifies incompleteness: ‘I need you’, ‘You completeme’. The beloved becomes essential for psychological stability. This is not healthy intimacy, but emotional survival wrapped in romantic language.
The fourth shade is sacrifice, where love appears to mature. People compromise, adjust, and give more. At its best, this reflects ethical care. But even sacrifice has its ego. One may take pride in being the one who suffers more or forgives more.
The fifth shade is awareness, perhaps the rarest. Here, love sheds its need for control. One no longer tries to possess, fix, or seek constant reassurance. Instead, one begins to see the other as they are, separate, complex, and not an extension of oneself.
The sixth and final shade is liberation. At this stage, love is no longer transactional. It does not depend on possession, reciprocity, or even relationship in the conventional sense. There is no fear of loss or need for validation. What remains is openness, a state of being. Mystics spoke of this love that resembles freedom.
This is prem as Ishwar.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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