The Distinction Between Kama and Prema

The Distinction Between Kama and Prema

[00:45] Puruṣārtha

In a recent podcast episode on the subject of Puruṣārtha, Puruṣārtha, Puruṣa and ārtha, Puruṣa is spelled P-U-R-U-S-H-A, puruṣa, ārtha, Ā-R-T-H-A. Puruṣa in general means humankind, and ārtha means the accumulation of all that is desirable. All desired things, ārtha, fulfillment. Puruṣārtha, the fulfillment of humankind.

And the Puruṣārtha, traditionally, is divided into four aspects. The first is a repetition of that word that’s in the title, ārtha, Ā-R-T-H-A. To experience a fulfillment and abundance in all things, not just things, but experiences, abundance of experience, ārtha.

The next one is kama. Not karma, not K-A-R-M-A, karma, but K-A-M-A, kama, kama. And we’ll come back to kama in a moment. We’re going to loop back onto that and zero in on it.

The next one is dharma, D-H-A-R-M-A, dharma. And the next one is moksha, M-O-K-S-H-A, moksha. Dharma is the dharma of The Universe, the bio-friendly universe whose intentionality it is to bring consciousness into being through the creation of nervous systems.

Starting with unicellular organisms, making the jump from atoms and molecules into actual things that eventually end up being able to stare at their iPhones and whatever else they do, look into space, take pictures of deep space with the trillions and trillions of galaxies.

And so, dharma of the individual, the individual personal outlet of that Universal Consciousness. The individuality being able to be the expression of Cosmic Intent. The individual being able to perform action in perfect attunement with what is needed for evolution, dharma.

And the final thing, moksha. Moksha just means liberation, that’s the most singular definition of it. Liberation from what? Liberation from the shackles of now irrelevant thinking, and now irrelevant molecules in the body, liberation from that, from accumulated stress of the past, and liberation of our fullest potential.

And so ārtha, kama, dharma, moksha.

Let’s look at kama for a moment. Because the word kama exists in a group of aphorisms, an aphorism is known in Sanskrit as a sutra. Sutra, S-U-T-R-A, sutra, the Kama Sutra. Kama Sutra. “Oh, Kama Sutra. What is that?” “Oh, lots of naughty, naughty pictures of people doing sex in a variety of ways. Put your hand over your mouth while you’re saying it.” The Kama Sutra. The idea of kama being purely sexuality, I’m going to declare it to be an illegitimate definition.

[04:35] Pleasure Experienced Through the Senses

If you reach down and rub your toes with your hand, and it feels good to rub your toes, you are causing kama to occur, you’re expressing kama. If you get a little tickle on the end of your nose and you reach your hand up and just brush the tip of your nose to satisfy that faint little itch, you are engaging in kama.

If you want some delicious cheese on buttered toast, and you have a desire for that, and you make it, and you mangia, mangia, and start chomping into that toasted cheese, whatever it is, then you are experiencing kama and giving expression to kama.

If you look up at the beautiful blue sky with a light little breeze blowing in the tree leaves and you smell the wood smoke of a cedar wood fire coming from someone’s fireplace nearby in the autumn and you hear a bird chirping, you’re engaging in kama.

So kama is the result of the senses, the five senses—taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound—these five senses coming into contact with their various objects in a way that causes a wave of pleasure. Anytime any one of the five senses, or all of them, symphonically come into contact and interact with elements of the world, the environment, in a way that creates a pleasant experience, this is kama. Kama.

And we’ll get down to a very gross level of it, what we might consider gross. If you feel like you have a bowel movement coming and you have a successful, final end point of the digestive process and you enjoy that final product of digestion happening and it’s all cleaned up and you’re ready to go, kama.

If you put on some nice clothes and they feel comfortable and good and then you look in the mirror and as an extra thing you feel you look like a dashing figure, this is kama.

So you see where I’m going with kama? Kama, the pleasure that comes from contact of any one of or any combination of our five senses with the objects that bring satisfaction, kama.

[07:19] Prema

Now people frequently ask me what is the distinction between kama and another Sanskrit word which is bandied about a lot worldwide. People are becoming amateur Sanskritists, and I think that’s a good trend, although it’s a little bit kindergarten still at the stage that it’s at, particularly in the Western world.

Prema, prema, P-R-E-M-A, prema. Prema is effectively the pleasure that is gained from discovering self in another. Wow. The pleasure that’s gained from experiencing self in another. “Hey, how would you like to go and watch the latest movie?” And the other says, “I would love that.”

Well, love is a very good word because that’s what you just now experienced—a unity point, love. And what’s the basis of the unity point? You just discovered that another human being is having the same experience that you are having. What is it you are loving about their response? Well, let’s create a hypothesis and create a contrast and say, what if you said, “Hey, what would you think about coming out with me? We go watch the latest movie?”

And they look at you and they say, “You have got to be kidding me. There is no way I would ever go to a theater and watch a movie with a bunch of people with memorized lines and faking it in front of cameras. And with you? Ha, dream on.”

Now are you experiencing Prema? My guess is no, you are not, because you haven’t discovered selfness or “selfiness” in the other.

When we experience self in another, we get a wave. It’s a wave of unity, and we may not realize it, but there’s something deep inside of us that’s saying, “You’re really kind of like me in disguise, aren’t you?” When somebody is rather you in disguise, thin disguise, they have a different body, different face, different history, but it just turns out that you have these matching points.

[09:58] Love is So Ill-Defined

You know the points of commonality of experience. If there’s a sufficient critical mass of this kind of phenomenon going on, we call it love. Love.

So prema is sometimes translated as the word love, but even love is meaningless because, “Hey, I love your shoes. Hey, I love pepperoni on pizza. Hey, I love that muzak that’s playing right now while we’re eating the pepperoni pizza and you’re wearing those shoes.”

Love, love, love, love, love, and then somebody quietly looks over at the other while they’re departing from the pizza bistro and says, “I love you.”

“Now, hang on,” says the other. “You love my shoes, you love pepperoni, you love the muzak, and you love me. Am I on the same level as all those things? What’s this word love anyway?

“And besides that, if I say I love somebody, it means there are certain behaviors that I do and I don’t do. And now I find that you said you love me and I say I love you, but you’re behaving in ways that don’t fit my definition of the word love.”

So to define prema as love is extremely problematic. Why? Because love is so ill-defined. You take one word which has become a bit of a garbage term, really—love, sad to say.

“All you need is love,” says the Beatles. So, all you need is pizza? All you need is fancy shoes? All you need is pepperoni? I mean, what is this love thing?

“Oh, I love it when that happens. Ah, love, love, love, love.” To say prema is love is to turn prema into a garbage term that’s lost all of its meaning. And so then, first of all, we have to understand what love is, then we can understand what prema is. The joy that comes from having unity points with a supposed “other.”

Supposed means, ostensibly, it means not quite true. “Other” is put in quotes here. The joy that comes from experiencing unity with a supposed “other.” Why do I say all this?

[12:35] Vedanta

According to the ultimate Vedic worldview, which is known as Vedanta—Veda, V-E-D-A, Anta, A-N-T-A, turns into one word, Vedanta, the final conclusion of the Veda.

And what is that? There’s actually only one indivisible whole oceanic consciousness that undulates as waves, therefore appears to be many, but actually is one. And so supposed other means one undulating wave—meaning you—is looking across at another undulating wave, meaning so-called other, and discovering some affinity of things that you appreciate and like to do.

And so these waves, what are they? They’re really actually nothing but localized undulating curvatures of the underlying oceanic field of Being. So, when Self recognizes Self, when my individuality has a unity point with your individuality, this is Beingness showing itself within individual status and structure.

When Beingness is able to demonstrate itself within individual status and structure, we call that sensation, that emotion, that good feeling that we get, we call that love. Love. So love is prema. Prema, P-R-E-M-A, prema. And kama is the joy of having our senses come into contact with the objects that bring the senses pleasure.

Kama, the pleasure gained by senses coming into contact with their objects. Prema, the discovery of oneness or unity with a so-called other. Wave experiencing wave with some kind of underlying sense of unity. Love, what we would call love—prema, kama.

[15:02] Prema and Kama: A Dynamite Package

So, these are two separate aspects, and they can, of course, be experienced in a way that’s combined.

If you love having your elbow rubbed with somebody else’s elbow, and if you happen to be experiencing unity points with them in other ways, and one of the unity points is that the kama, that is, the joy of your elbow tactile sense coming into contact with their elbow tactile sense, brings you tactile joy, then kama is combining with prema.

When kama combines with prema, then there can be a particular greater amount of joy. This is why we can’t carry on any serious kind of relationship on FaceTime or Zoom, or Skype, if anybody still has that. Why? Well, there’s not that much kama going on, and we like to combine our kama with our prema to whatever extent it’s possible and appropriate.

Kama and prema combined are a real dynamite package. But kama and prema are two separate things. They can be experienced completely separately from each other. It is kama if I drink some water right now—which I’m going to do in just a moment—and quench my thirst from hours of talking. That’s kama.

Water coming into contact with the tongue and the mouth and feeling that beautiful liquid refreshing the inside of the mouth before swallowing it and letting it go down and hydrate the rest of my body—that’s kama.

As a Westerner, I might say, “Oh, I love the sensation of water in my mouth and going down my gullet. Love.” Well, actually, we’re misusing the word love because I’m not having unity with the water. The water isn’t reflecting back to me a degree of kind of selfiness. I am having kama, on the other hand.

But if two people are slaking their thirst, sitting right next to each other, looking in each other’s eyes, and each of them are enjoying the kama of swallowing water simultaneously and they are really getting into the unity point of that, that’s prema. Prema is unity points caused by Self recognizing Self—love—and kama is the actual mechanics of the senses coming into contact with their object.

[18:05] The Crest Jewel of Discrimination

So, most of our kama does not involve prema. Scratch your nose—there’s no prema involved in that, but it is kama. Go for a walk and feel the air coming in and out of your lungs and feel your feet striding across the ground and the freedom of the movement as you swing your arms—that’s kama, but there’s not really prema involved.

And prema can also be without kama. We can have unity points and have a swelling of the heart when Self-ness is experienced in another without any kama involved. But generally speaking, after prema, some degree of kama appears. And prema and kama can also be outside of romantic or even potentially sexualized contexts.

The love of a parent for their child—there is prema, and there is an appropriate way of expressing that, maybe with hugs and patting the head or whatever else it is that’s within the appropriate range of contact of a parental consciousness state and a childlike consciousness state. There’s prema and kama going on there.

And so, this is why the Vedic worldview has this wonderful capacity for distinction—the crest jewel of discrimination. Discrimination, in this case, is not that pejorative thing of not liking people of a different skin color. 

Discrimination here means the ability of the mind to discriminate, to make a difference, to make distinct one thing and another thing that may appear to share some qualities but are actually quite separate things. To make distinctions between things.

So, the distinction: when we say in the West, “Oh, love,” well, it could mean any number of things. But in Sanskrit, kama and prema are two very distinct things, sometimes overlapping. There it is.

Jai Guru Deva.