Unconditional love requires (some version of) not caring. What?

Paradoxically, what we think of as caring about others is the very thing that gets us into trouble, is the thing that causes a whole hunk of the pain we carry. Here's why.

In each typical, ego-dominant interaction between two people, there are four stories: my story about myself, my story about you, your story about yourself, and your story about me. (Tolle, A New Earth has this somewhere.) Oh my gosh, just think of the layers and layers of fiction that can pop up even in those four story lines.

Even my story about myself, which one might think would have the highest likelihood of being true, isn't: I may behave as if my past is me, as if my outcomes are me, as if my stuff is me, as if my family is me, as if my friends are me. And each past story about me conditioned further by my hopes and fears about those forms for the future. And that's just about me. Never mind, my views of you, or your views of you or your views of me.

And then, there's the way I determined my story, how it was communicated -- talking to each other, in a hurry, in a mood, hungry, tired, excited, intimidated or whatever. Or we're on the phone, or it's email, or I see it on FaceBook or Twitter, in one particular language instead of another one, with that language sitting inside a particular culture. (Helen tells me there's no word for "fun" in Russian.) Or someone tells me what you (maybe) said, or I sense something in your face, manner, or body language. All those communication methods are just further obscuring the first basic forms, the first basic fictions.

But, now, the critical part: we take those four views, however communicated, not as objective facts that just lie there. Nope, we've got to form judgments about them; we decide whether they're good or bad. And, if I've decided that I love you, it can be more pernicious than if I haven't decided that. I make myself believe that it's all in your best interest that my judgment is being applied to figure out whether the stuff that I think is happening is good for you or not, and whether I should try to change it, to convince you to change it, or just to worry about it. My "love" is conditional on outcomes related to the story.

For most of us, we haven't inquired of ourselves as to whether this story is really true, we haven't figured out what pain it causes us to carry the story, nor what would happen to us if we were to drop it. (Byron Katie, of course.)

So layers and layers of fiction, communicated with imprecision (at best), judged as to whether it's good or bad, all under the assumption that I can know what's best. Basically it's me playing God.

Now, what if I'm able to see through that mess in real-time? What if I really love you? The only way for me to express that is to be present with you, to just be. Anything else is applying conditionality to the love, based on outcomes in the stories. Even when you do something that I judge good, and I tell you so, there's an implied dark side -- you'd better keep doing this kind of thing because that's what makes me love you.

Does this make sense? Unconditional love toward another shows up as complete lack of caring about form with respect to them -- what they own, do, or experience.