Feel the consciousness of each person as your own consciousness. So, leaving aside concern for self, become each being.
- Two-part hinge: feel the other’s consciousness as yours / drop self-concern — these are one movement. As long as you remain the center, you can only infer others’ interiority (as you infer someone else’s headache); this technique works by actually feeling it. Dropping self-concern is the switch that makes the feeling possible.
- Prerequisite — the other must become a person, not a thing. You have been reducing others to means (I-it, not I-thou); they do the same to you; this mutual defensiveness is why you maintain a gap. You cannot dissolve into what you are exploiting. Let the other exist in their own right first.
- Start where fear is absent: trees, rivers, sky. Sit with a tree — feel the wind as your trembling, the rain’s satisfaction as yours, its moods as yours. Once that is real, try a loved person; once that is real, try anyone. Reserve at least one hour daily for this prayerful empathy. In the beginning it looks foolish; once you know the feeling the rest of the world looks crazy for missing it.
- Why love gives a glimpse: in a single moment of real love, two egos dissolve and oneness flows between two poles. This technique extends what love briefly gives with one person to every being, every moment — from love to meditation.
- Making the other the center — even once — collapses hell. The ego is the root of all misery. Even compassion and service go wrong when they are secretly self-serving (the missionary serving for his heaven). The moment the other is genuinely the center and you the periphery, misery dissolves. That shift is the technique.
- Q1 nuance — for innocent, uncalculating minds this is enough: the destination is already the case — you are not a seed to be grown but a hidden tree. An innocent, trusting mind needs only the suggestion and it is revealed. Modern calculating minds must un-calculate first: slow down, play like a child, stop being time-conscious. The preparation can be long, but the destination is here, waiting.