Consider no one a stranger. Learn to feel that everybody is akin to you.
Interpretation
Recognize the interconnectedness of all people and treat everyone with kindness and compassion.
This quote by Paramahansa Yogananda encourages individuals to embrace a sense of unity and compassion towards all of humanity. By understanding that everyone shares a common experience and is related in some way, we can cultivate empathy, reduce feelings of isolation, and foster more harmonious relationships with others.
In practice
In a speech about community and togetherness, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of compassion.
Man is important in one sense only. He was made in the image of God: That is his importance. He is not important for his body, ego, or personality. His constant affirmation of ego-consciousness is the source of all his problems.
When, by meditation, we withdraw restless thoughts from the lake of the mind, we behold our soul, a perfect reflection of Spirit.
It is wisest to be impartial. If you have health, but are attached to it, you will always be afraid of losing it. And if you fear that loss, but become ill, you will suffer. Why not remain forever joyful in the Self?
From joy people are born; for joy they live; in joy they melt at death. Death is an ecstasy, for it removes the burden of the body and frees the soul of all pain springing from body identification. It is the cessation of pain and sorrow.
It is better to meditate a little bit with depth than to mediate long with the mind running here and there. If you do not make an effort to control the mind it will go on doing as it pleases, no matter how long you sit to meditate.
Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.
Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal.
Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.
Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.
Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then ... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.
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