Swami Prakashanand Saraswati explains the essence of Divine-love-consciousness, where the soul aspires to unite with God by developing true selfless love. Unlike material love, which involves give-and-take, spiritual love is pure, existing solely to give without expectation.
According to Swami Prakashanand Saraswati:
Divine love consciousness is a consciousness of the mind where your self is either trying to become one with Divine love or is one with Divine love.
The words Divine and love we all know. Love is a feeling of affinity that you experience. Love in the material sense is actually a giving and taking business. Apart from that, there are moments when you feel selfless love. Just like when a mother sometimes feels very closely for her child, “Oh, I want to love my child.” The child cannot give any love to her because he is very young, but she feels an oneness between herself and the body of her child. She feels, “This child is a part of me.” People experience something like this at times. That is selfless love.
True love is always selfless, and selfish love is a business or bargain. You give something, you take something; it is a give-and-take business.
When there is no self-interest, just giving to give and not to receive, that is called love in a spiritual sense.
Love means to give. To give and to take is a business. True love is the same emotion and the same affinity that comes from the bottom of your mind, soul, and heart, with just one intention, one desire, to give your love to someone.
Selfless love is also in your heart but you don’t realize. That feeling can be directed towards the Godhead Personality Who is Divine. Why am I saying Godhead Personality instead of God? Because there is a difference.
For instance, when you say ‘sweet’ and ‘chocolate’, chocolate is sweet, but just any sweet may not be chocolate. There is a great difference. You can say both ‘sweet’ and ‘chocolate’ for the chocolate, but you cannot say ‘chocolate’ for just any sweet. ‘Sweet’ is an abstract expression, but chocolate has a definite shape. For this reason, in the world, you cannot buy a sweet, but you can buy chocolate, toffee, or anything specific.
Suppose you go to a candy shop and ask the sales girl to give you a sweet. She will ask, “Please tell me what kind of sweet is it that you want. We have fifty kinds of sweets. Tell me which one and I’ll give it to you.”
It means you cannot buy ‘sweet’ because sweet only exists in abstract form. It is similar to ‘God’ and ‘Godhead Personality’. ‘God’ exists as an energy, not a perceivable energy, but it exists. But when you say ‘Godhead Personality’, it is like saying ‘chocolate’, you can perceive and enjoy.
Conclusion:
True love finds its highest expression when directed toward the Divine in a personal form. Swami Prakashanand Saraswati emphasizes that just as ‘sweet’ is an abstract concept while ‘chocolate’ is tangible, God as energy is abstract, but His personal form allows us to experience and reciprocate love.