ET: There's a way of thinking about consciousness in Western philosophy that comes from Descartes and informs a lot of work in cognitive science. It's this idea that consciousness is something private and closed in on itself. This manifests in philosophical problems such as how do I know that you're really conscious, and so on.
We habitually see things in terms of intrinsic separate identity, such as I am me and you are you. We each have our intrinsic sense of I-ness. I think that way of thinking about things has the ground cut out from underneath it by the realization that human consciousness is empathetically structured at its very foundation. Empathy is the ability that I have and you have to understand someone else's experience, and you can see that different levels of empathy are possible.
Interbeing is a Buddhist term and is the sense that everything is inter-dependently linked, and so things aren't definable except in relation to each other. The basic idea is that everything is relationally inter-connected. Reflecting and meditating critically, philosophically, and in an experiential, psychological way on the interconnectedness of all things can be used to bring out the realization that the suffering of beings is interrelated, that my suffering is not just my suffering but the suffering of others, and the suffering of others is mine, also.
http://www.metanexus.net/essay/science-compassion—-talk-evan-thompson