In this year’s Krishna Aradhana, the theme is the word prem, which has been translated in English as the word love. This word draws a lot of attraction to it, people like it, yet they don’t know the meaning of the word love or prem. Sri Krishna has been called premavatara, an incarnation of love. What is the expression of love that we see in somebody who is the incarnation of it?

Our idea of love is mundane, material and gross, sensual and sensorial, intellectual and emotional, full of attachment and infatuation. It is filled with the purpose to please oneself and the thought of ‘I am loved’.

The whole understanding of love is totally self-orientated in a distorted manner, for the idea is to please oneself and to find safety and security in the thought that ‘somebody loves me’. These thoughts are only intellectual from your perspective, understanding, expectations and samskaras.

People have defined love in many different manners, yet those definitions have also been intellectual. Nobody has ever tried to look at the practicalities of love, the behaviours and actions of love which represent the actual projection of the purity one feels inside; and the projection of purity is the projection of love.

In yoga there is the concept of different bodies: annamaya kosha, pranamaya kosha, manomaya kosha, vijnanamaya kosha and anandamaya kosha.

These koshas go within – from annamaya kosha you go to pranamaya kosha, a more subtle aspect of yourself, from there you go to manomaya kosha, an even more subtle aspect of yourself, to vijnanamaya kosha, another more subtle aspect of yourself, to anandamaya kosha, the subtlest of the koshas. You are going in; through the koshas it is a journey within.

Then there is an expressive dimension too, which has been defined as the sundaram dimension, where you walk in the body of love, the premamaya kosha. Sundaram represents that awareness, saturation and merger with the pure feeling called love.

It is also an expression, for love is always an outgoing feeling, it is never a receiving feeling. The premamaya kosha is always giving out, it is radiating. Like the sun which is radiating light all the time, even at night, this love is also continuously radiating light in an outward projection. It is not a state, rather it is to be cultivated.

The premamaya kosha is a body by itself, it is not just an idea or ideological experience; it has a body. The body of love is identified with two legs, two arms and two eyes. From these two legs, two arms and through the two eyes love is realized.

When that love is expressed, it eventually becomes the final stage of bhakti, where love transcends the material and personal, and is connected to the higher self only.

August 2020, Ganga Darshan Vishwa Yogapeeth, Munger

From the book “Premamaya Kosha”, pg. 1-3, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati