The one in all

Why should I try to be considerate and warm towards the bank teller or the supermarket cashier? After all, she is only a stranger who I will never get to know. Nevertheless, isn't she just like me and all the people I do know? Wouldn't I like to have been friendly towards the people I now know, when I did not yet know them? Aren't people, therefore, deserving of consideration and warmth, irrespective of whether I happened to know them or not? After all, everyone is someone's friend or acquaintance. Thus, perhaps, the mystic's vision of "the one in all" -- or, as some of them would say, the vision of the friend in all; through such a vision, the artificial duality of friend and foe, and hence that of I and he, dissolves into a unified vision of all humanity, and perhaps later into a universal vision embracing own life, and eventually the entire cosmos; the latter may perhaps be accomplished by thinking of the cosmos as a part of what I am, rather than an "it".