We're All Just Walking Each Other Home
The Teaching
The most important thing you can do for another being is to help them remember who they are. Not fix them, not save them, not even heal them — but be with them in such a way that they are reminded of their own wholeness.
When you see me, you remind me of who I am. When I see you, I remind you of who you are. We are mirrors for each other.
I look back on my life and I see that every being I have ever encountered was my teacher. The terrible ones, the beautiful ones, the ones who hurt me, the ones I hurt. Every one of them showed me something I needed to see.
We are all just walking each other home. And home is not a destination. It is a recognition.
Commentary
This is the Bodhisattva vow in American English: the commitment to remain in the world, in relationship, not for one's own liberation but as a vehicle for the awakening of others. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva delays their own nirvana until all sentient beings are free. Ram Dass expressed the same conviction in the language of mutual recognition and love rather than formal vow.
'We are mirrors for each other' is Indra's Net made personal, every jewel reflecting every jewel. Every relationship is an encounter with the divine wearing a different mask. This is what Merton experienced at the corner of Fourth and Walnut: in a flash of recognition that everyone around him was luminous, the boundary between self and other was simply not there. The Sufi tradition carries the same teaching: the Beloved meets you through every face. Ram Dass received this from his guru in the devotional form: 'See God in everyone.' He translated it into the therapeutic and relational language of the West. The fruit is identical.
The phrase 'walking each other home' carries the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of the bardo, that we accompany one another not only through life but through dying. Ram Dass spent his final years doing exactly this: teaching on death and dying with the authority of someone who had been, in multiple senses, near the threshold.