This is one direction of progress I have explained. There is another direction of progress, that is to see oneself reflected in another. When you are friends with another person, naturally your sympathy, love, friendship, makes you see in another yourself, and this gives a person the inclination to sacrifice. No one will make sacrifice for another except when he is oneself.

If this feeling develops, it extends further, not only with friend, with neighbour, but with stranger, with anyone, with the little beast and bird and insect, as Buddha has said that harmlessness is the essence of religion, [you can] not help being harmless, once in atonement with all living beings. And it gives you insight into another as much as the other person knows about himself. You know about him as much as he knows, or even more. This is the simplest phenomena of this consciousness, not to work wonders. It brings you a quick proof that about another person one knows as much as he knows himself.

But then there is another moral proof, that you become friends with the wise and foolish, with the virtuous and wicked more and more, like you attract them to you. You cannot help it. Sympathy is so powerful that even enemies sooner or later become melted.

It is not only a story when they say that Daniel was sent to the cave of the lions and the lions were calmed. But in order to see this phenomena, one need not go to the mountains; in this world there are worse than lions: good natures and bad natures, possible and impossible people, and if you can tame them, you have accomplished something;
for it required a greater power than calming lions.

One can think of the different ideas, agitated ones, antagonized ones, blunted ones, ignorant ones, drunken with falsehood or with jealousy, all sorts of poisons; there are many in this world. And it is only one power, the power of your sympathy, that assimilates all poisonous influences. It assimilates them; it takes away their poison, and it does not hurt you.
You sooner or later purify them, revivify them, melt them, mould them, and direct them toward their purpose of life.

The world seeks for complexity. If I were to give a lecture [about] how to get this magnetism in order how to make people listen to you, tamed by their piety, and in order to draw them to you, if I were to give twenty exercises to do these things, there can be a great success for me. But if I told you simple things like this, that is, the deepening of your sympathy, the wakening of that sympathetic spirit in you, which is every power and magnetism there is, and the expansion of which means spiritual unfoldment, then there will be few to understand. For human beings, they do not want simple teaching, they want complexity.