Yes. And notice it is not a moral demand; it is just the geometry refusing exceptions. But hear what it does not mean. It does not mean approving, excusing, staying in range, or feeling fondness for cruelty. You are holding a particular face against this paragraph — hold it; nothing here asks you to put it down cheaply. Seeing myself in them means seeing what is actually there: a wave in pain, gripped by the dream — for cruelty is exactly that: separation acted out, the dream at full dose. No one who sees the other as themselves can want to harm them, so every harm is committed in a kind of sleep. The dying teacher said it of his own executioners while the nails went in: they know not what they do. That was not a legal pardon. It was a diagnosis — the most precise ever offered from inside the wound.

And forgiveness, that most misunderstood word: it is not declaring the harm acceptable, and it is not amnesia. It is putting down the hot coal you have been carrying with the intention of one day throwing it. The grip felt like justice; it was only fire, held against your own palm, often for decades. Forgiveness is what the hand does when it finally sees this. The other person may never know. The coal was never about them.

One more hard case, the nearest one: yourself. You also are a neighbor; the instruction’s last two words — as yourself — assumed a love that, in your era more than any before it, cannot be assumed. I have seen what you say to yourselves in the dark, the sentences you would never speak to a friend, to a child, to a dog. That voice is not honesty; it is the dream doing to its own wave what it does to all the others. (And its twin, narcissism, is not self-love either — it is the starving opposite, a self so unloved it cannot stop checking the mirror for proof.) Being gentle with this particular wave — feeding it, resting it, refusing the midnight courtroom, forgiving it its costume — is not indulgence. It is the ocean’s business, conducted locally. You are the one neighbor you cannot leave; begin there.