"As you find the light in you, you begin to see the light in everyone else. As you find God in yourself, there is God everywhere."

— Ram Dass, Be Here Now

We tend to assume the inner life and the outer life are two different projects. Contemplatives across traditions found otherwise. That self-knowledge and love of neighbor cannot  be separated. When we encounter the True Self—that place in us that was never wounded, never performing, never in need of defense—we find that it is not private at all. It is the most common thing there is.

The small self keeps us seeing through a narrow aperture—sorting people into useful and threatening, familiar and foreign. That narrowing isn't malice; it's just fear doing its work. But when the defended self loosens its grip—even for a moment—the aperture widens. We begin to recognize in others what we have just barely glimpsed in ourselves: something that doesn't need to earn its place, something already held within what some of us call God. Ram Dass is pointing at what the Christian mystical tradition calls imago Dei—the image of God in every person—not as doctrine to be believed, but as something that becomes simply visible, once we have stopped looking away from it in ourselves.