O mighty-armed Arjuna, the three guṇas born of material nature–goodness, passion and ignorance–bind the immutable living entity who dwells within the body
Bhagavad-gītā, 14.5
The meaning of life is to love, its highest purpose is to love God.
If every drop of love that dwells in our hearts emanates from the divine soul within us, then it is also the nature of that love to return to its source. This is our most natural tendency: to love our way back to God, driven by a loving energy that is equally divine.
In the tradition of Vaiṣṇavism this love is called prema, pure love of God, and the energy that carries its to through the lives of ordinary souls and beyond is called hlādinī-śakti, pleasure-giving potency.
This cosmic circle of love is realised through Bhakti-yoga, the practice of loving devotion. For bhaktas, divine love is not experienced as an unmoving, hardened object for our admiration. Divine love, love of the divine, is not worshipped, it is practiced, it is made living, made real.
This is done by devoting ourselves to the loving relation of Rādhā and Mohan, God-the-lover and God-the-beloved, by directing our feelings of love, through service, to their feelings of love.
Our feelings of love are expressions of our soul, of our own divine nature. Our spiritual path is therefore not an outer quest, but an inner quest. We week to uncover our own divine nature, the pure love lying with us, so that it can be released freely and completely in the service of the divine lovers.
And yet, born into material existence, we are bound by our attachment to our material qualities through the ropes of the guṇas: bound to qualities of goodness, passion, and ignorance.
The guṇas are a form of consciousness. They are the expression of our awareness of our attachment to material illusion. The guṇas do not bind us to a material nature itself, they bind us to the illusion that we are material.
The more we realise the guṇas, the more we understand that they bind us to unreal experience, the closer we come to our soul consciousness, our pure loving position, our constitutional position, our svarūpa.
Because the guṇas affect our the relation to our soul, they affect our relation to other souls as well. Since love flows from the soul and is felt by the soul, all loving relations we may have with others, be they friendly, familial or conjugal, are affected by the guṇas.
All love passes from soul to soul. But since all living entities are imperfect, still on a path to realising their souls, and since all paths to realising the soul are influenced by the gunas then all relations are shaped by the guṇas.
The guṇas form our capacity to give love and receive love, they govern the way we give and receive love: our moods and feelings, our tastes and passions, our hopes and fears, our eagerness and our hesitation.
To love someone means to love their soul, this is simple. But it also means to see and care for the path of soul realisation being travelled by both that soul and our own, by both the lover and the beloved. It is to realise that in material life we give love incompletely and feel love incompletely. But by realising the guṇas, by understanding our attachments to material life, they will fade away into the mist of our minds, and we gradually complete what is incomplete.
Our path to pure love is a material one. The purpose of our material lives is to experience this path, to perfect our love by loving the the soul and the path, both our own and that of the beloved.
Material life is a training-field for the heart, an exercise in seeing the guṇas, and by seeing them, realising the love we have.
In this way, by purifying our hearts through our devotional practice, we help to purify the hearts of those we love. By loving others purely, they will help us to experience pure love.