In 1991, on the day of Kartika Poornima, when the moon is brightest, God gave me a very good idea. He told me, “Help your neighbours as I have helped you.” Then I had to consider, what does the word ‘neighbour’ mean? Is it a person who lives next door or close to my house? For a man whose heart is open, the whole world is his neighbourhood and everyone is his neighbour. One who has a small, closed heart thinks in terms of, ‘This is mine and that is yours.’ He makes a division between what is mine and what is yours, but I do not want to be limited by that thought. Rather, I believe that everything belongs to You, O God, because You have given it to me. You are the owner, the giver, the treasurer. You are the ocean of prosperity, grace, mercy and love. You gave everything to me so that I could give it to others.

–Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Rikhia: The Vision of a Sage, p. 43.

In Plato’s Republic, Polemarchus argues the tribal case. To be just is to benefit one’s friends and to harm one’s enemies. In-group treatment is thus diametrically opposed to out-group treatment.

The Axial Age takes a radical leap out of tribalism: various traditions begin to discover universality, and so it becomes possible to ask whether the one who is, at first blush, strange to me could, nonetheless, be my neighbor in a deep metaphysical sense. We do well to read the Parable of the Good Samaritan thus.

Satyananda dares us to follow this stunning Aufhebung. Can we? Can I let go of the tribal view according to which John is my neighbor while James is my enemy just because the former is real or fictional kin while the latter is not, and, by dint of letting go of this view, can I stretch, extend, and expand my understanding–felt as much as conceived–of “the neighbor” so that it’s possible for me to feel that anyone at all is “near and dear to me”? Is this really possible?

Satyananda’s question–“Who is my neighbor?”–could very well be turned on its head. Really, he’s goading us to ask, “Who isn’t my neighbor?” He wants us to see just where we’re stuck.

For once we ask that question, we have to reckon with our closed, small hearts. “This is mine,” such a heart feels, while “that is yours.” Stay away, for thou art nothing to me or mine. Be far from me; be dead to me.

Yet–what grace!–what if our hearts were to be opened? What then? Then “the whole world” would be my “neighbourhood” and “everyone” would become my “neighbour.”

I’d like to say that then I’d be friendly, in a robust sense, unto one and all. Then I’d be a friend unto one and all. And what would it mean, what would it be like to be such a friend to one and all? Truly, I would only know love since I would only be love. I could never know–not again–animosity, enmity, loathing, or greed. I’d cease cutting you in two. Indeed, “prosperity, grace, mercy and love” would abound, soar, flow, and then settle in all the low-lying places.