When there is no ideology in your caring - you don't want to make your child a Christian, you don't want to make your child this or that, communist or fascist, you don't want your child to become a businessman or a doctor or an engineer.... You don't have any ideas for your child. You say, "I will love, and when you grow up, you choose - and be whatsoever is natural for you to be. My blessings... whatsoever you are, my blessings. "And whatsoever you will be, from my side you are accepted and welcome. Not that only when you become the president of the country will I love you and if you become just a carpenter then there will be no love, then I will feel ashamed of you. Not that only when you bring a gold medal from the university will there be a welcome and if you come a failure I will be ashamed of you. Not that only when you are good, virtuous, moral, this and that, will you be my child and otherwise I am not related to you, you are not related to me."

The moment you bring any idea, you bring poison in the relationship. Care is beautiful, but when care has some idea, then it is cunningness, then it is a bargain, then it has conditions. And all our love is cunning, hence this misery in the world, this hell. Not that care is not there - care is there, but it is with too much cunningness. The mother cares, the father cares, the husband cares, the wife cares, the brother, the sister - everybody is caring. I'm not saying that nobody is caring - people are caring too much, but still the world is hell.Something is wrong, something is fundamentally wrong.

What is that fundamental wrong? Where do things go wrong? Caring has conditions in it: "Do this! Be that!" Have you ever loved anybody with no conditions? Have you ever loved anybody as he or she is? You don't want to improve, you don't want to change; your acceptance is total, utter. Then you know what care is. You will be fulfilled through that care, and the other will be helped immensely.

And remember, if your care has no business in it, no ambitions in it, the person you cared about will love you forever. But if your care has some ideas in it, then the person you cared about will never be able to forgive you. That's why children are incapable of forgiving their parents. You go and ask the psychiatrists, the psychoanalysts - all the cases that come to them are the cases of children whose parents cared too much. But their care was businesslike; it was cold, it was calculated. They wanted some of their ambitions to be fulfilled through the child.

Love has to be a free gift. The moment there is a price tag on it, it is no longer love.