The sage Yajnavalkya sat in a forest clearing at twilight, and around him, one by one, the lamps of evening were being lit — a lamp in a hut, a lamp at a shrine, a cooking fire, a firefly winking in the grass.

A young student named Aruni sat beside him, troubled.

"Teacher," Aruni said, "you tell us the same Self lives in everyone. But how can that be? Look — there is a deer at the edge of the trees, and there is a little child carrying water, and there is you, and there is me. We are all so *different*. A deer is not a child. You are not me. How can we all be one?"

Yajnavalkya did not answer in words. He pointed to a single small flame burning in a clay lamp at his feet.

"Take that flame," he said, "and light the lamp at the shrine."

Aruni tipped a thin reed into the flame and carried the fire to the shrine lamp. It caught and glowed.

"Now light the cooking fire. And the lamp in the hut. And that torch by the path."

One by one, Aruni carried fire from lamp to lamp until the whole clearing danced with light — a tall steady shrine flame, a low orange cooking fire, a small flickering hut lamp, a bright torch.

"Look at them," said the sage. "Are they not all different? One tall, one low, one steady, one trembling. One in clay, one in bronze, one in a heap of sticks. As different from each other as a deer from a child."

"Yes," said Aruni.

"And yet," Yajnavalkya said gently, "what is burning in every one of them?"

Aruni went very still. "The same fire," he whispered. "It all came from your one little flame. It's the *same fire* in all the different lamps."

"That is the Self," said Yajnavalkya. "The lamps are the bodies — the deer, the child, you, me, the tree, the stranger on the road. Each lamp has its own shape and its own place, and we are right to love each one. But the light burning inside them all is one and the same. When you truly see that — when you see the one Self shining in every being, and every being held in that one Self — then wherever you look, you will see the same light. And you will never again be able to call anyone a stranger."

Aruni looked around the clearing at all the little fires, and for the first time they did not seem like many lights at all. They seemed like one light, smiling at itself from a hundred windows.