everyone is the other, and no one is himself

   

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Just as the great texts say, you will begin to make a distinction between existence and inherent existence through your own experience. The great texts challenge us to avoid both the extreme of exaggerating the nature of persons and things and the opposite extreme—that people and things do not exist at all. They definitely do exist; how they exist is the issue.

When you advance toward understanding that people and things cannot be found under analysis but take to mind that they do indeed exist, you may begin to feel the impact of the statement that they exist through the power of thought.

This, in turn, will challenge you to consider further how people and things appear to your mind and will undermine your confidence in the goodness or badness of these appearances, which you previously automatically accepted as intrinsic to the objects. You will begin noticing how you assent to the appearance of objects and how you latch on to them.

In this way, meditation is a long journey, not a single insight or even several insights. It gets more and more profound as the days, months, and years pass. Keep reading, and thinking and meditating.

—the Dalai Lama
How to See Yourself
As You Really Are

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The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window, less or more light enters the world.


—Aziz Nasafi

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Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. 

The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein (existence), is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.


—Martin Heidegger
Being and Time
Joan Stambaugh version

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