You Don’t Have to Like Everyone, But You Do Have to Love Them

There’s someone you don’t like. You already know who I mean. They live in your nervous system. The sound of their voice tightens your chest. Their energy scrapes against your skin like sandpaper. You brace when they enter the room, or even your mind.

And then, just when you think you’ve earned a little righteous distance, someone drops the spiritual mic: “Love everyone.”

Even them?

Yes. Especially them. But maybe not in the way you’ve been taught to understand love.

Let’s start with the obvious. Some people are terrible. Not in the cute, quirky way sitcoms try to redeem. In the real way. The kind that harms, manipulates, gaslights, or wounds without apology. The kind you wouldn’t dream of inviting back into your life. And when some bright-eyed spiritualist meets your pain with a serene, “Love them too,” your first reaction is probably, “Cool. You go first.”

That resistance is valid. Because here’s something we often forget: liking someone is involuntary. It’s chemistry, conditioning, and nervous system wiring. You don’t get to choose who feels safe or familiar to your body. You like who you like. You recoil from who you recoil from. That’s not a moral failure. It’s mammalian design.

But love, real love, isn’t about preference. It isn’t even about closeness. Love, in the truest spiritual sense, is not a feeling. It’s not affection, comfort, or emotional warmth. It’s not sentimental. It’s not even nice. It’s a kind of vision. Love is the choice to see through the layers of personality and pain and history, and remember what someone actually is beneath all that.

In the Upanishads, it’s called the Self. In the Gita, the soul. In Bhakti, it’s the spark of the divine — the atman clothed in ego and karma. You might call it light, being, or awareness. It doesn’t matter what name you use. What matters is that you don’t forget it, especially when it’s hardest to remember.

Because that’s what love is. Not liking. Not agreement. Not trust. But the refusal to collapse into hatred. The refusal to let someone else’s unconsciousness make you unconscious, too.

This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse. It doesn’t mean excusing cruelty or pretending your instincts are wrong. You still get to walk away. You still get to block the number, say no, draw a line. But what if you could do that without shutting your heart? What if boundaries weren’t walls, but thresholds? What if the strength of your boundary could coexist with the clarity of your love?

Because when we don’t make that distinction, we carry the poison. We think we’ve left the person behind, but they’ve set up shop in our chest. Their words replay. Their face lingers. Our nervous system tightens every time the memory comes near. Hate, it turns out, is never as contained as we think. It leaks. It shapes. It calcifies into bitterness. And before we know it, we’re living in reaction to the very thing we walked away from.

Neem Karoli Baba said, “Love everyone. Even the murderer. Even the thief. But don’t go spend the night in their house.” That’s the balance. Love doesn’t mean proximity. It doesn’t mean reconciliation. It means not forgetting who someone is, even when you never want to see them again.

The Bhagavad Gita puts it simply, “The wise see with equal vision a Brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and one who eats dogs.” That’s not a call for sameness. It’s a call for essence. Equal vision doesn’t mean equal behavior. It means seeing the same soul behind radically different expressions.

So no, you don’t have to trust everyone. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to feel peaceful or forgiving or spiritually evolved. But you do have to choose whether your heart becomes a mirror of their darkness or a reflection of what they’ve forgotten. Not because they deserve it. But because you do.

You deserve to live without poison. You deserve to stop rehearsing the wound. You deserve the dignity of not being shaped by someone else’s unconsciousness. And sometimes, that starts with a small act of clarity: a silent prayer, a breath of release, a whispered truth spoken just for yourself. “I see what you are. I still won’t let you in. But I see.”

That’s what love looks like when it grows up. Not naive. Not disembodied. But deeply grounded in the kind of vision that doesn’t blur boundaries, and doesn’t abandon the soul.

Because you don’t have to like everyone. But, if you want to be free, you’ll have to learn to love them anyway.

Republished from this Medium essay with permission from the author.

“Ajay” Anantadev Das is a meditation teacher, contemplative guide, and former monk whose work lives at the intersection of ancient wisdom and embodied modern life. After nearly a decade of monastic formation in the Bhakti tradition, he went on to lead InsightLA and serve as Managing Director of the Global Philanthropists Circle at Synergos. He teaches weekly meditation gatherings, offers private retreats and guidance, and is currently writing a contemporary rendering of the Bhagavad Gita for modern readers.