It is a useful elementary and preparatory exercise in learning detachment from one's own ego, to try to project it into someone else's from time to time. By imaginatively sharing in another's life and mind, situations and surroundings, so far as one can, by putting oneself into the point of evolution where the other stands, one gains more facility in extracting oneself from the inveterate self-centeredness of the ordinary man. It is a kind of mental histrionics, a play-acting which substitutes one kind of egoism for another and in the process loosens the replaced kind. For such a special exercise, it would be still more profitable to select somebody with whom one is normally unsympathetic, perhaps even an opponent or enemy. Other valuable qualities will then receive a stimulus. There is of course a danger in such a masquerade, the danger of becoming neurotically unstable to which so many actors and actresses are exposed. It can be avoided by practising the complementary and finishing exercise taken from the Short Path series of banishing both personalities in reverent self-identification with the Overself.
-- Notebooks Category 23: Advanced Contemplation > Chapter 6 : Advanced Meditation > # 119
