Happy Diwali — the festival of lights, the triumph of light over darkness, of knowledge over ignorance. It seems like the right moment to write about a word that has shaped how I try to live.
One of my core values is Namaste: the light in me honors the light in you.
It is a word most people in the West encounter in a yoga class, pressed between palms at the end of a session. But Namaste is more than just a greeting. It is a philosophical statement — one that carries within it an entire framework for how to see other people, and by extension, how to move through the world.
To understand what Namaste really means, you have to understand the tension between two ways of seeing reality that Indian philosophy has been working through for thousands of years: Dvaita and Advaita.
Dvaita: The World of Separation
Dvaita is duality — the perception of separation. It is the way we naturally experience the world: I am here, you are there. Subject and object. Creator and creation. Self and other. This is the realm of everyday experience, the world of name and form, where objects, people, and feelings all appear distinct and independent from one another.
Duality is not wrong. It is how we navigate life. We distinguish hot from cold, friend from stranger, joy from grief. Spiritual traditions have used duality as a powerful tool — in devotion, for instance, where the worshipper stands apart from the divine, reaching toward something greater. Or in the practice of viveka, discernment, where the seeker learns to distinguish the Self from everything that is not the Self. You have to see the difference before you can see past it.
Advaita: The World Beneath the World
Advaita is non-duality — oneness. It is the recognition that the apparent differences we perceive are not separate from some underlying, singular reality. The classic metaphor is the ocean and its waves. Each wave appears distinct — different in size, shape, speed — but no wave is separate from the ocean. The wave is the ocean, expressing itself in a particular form at a particular moment.
Advaita does not deny that things look different. It simply insists that they are not different in essence. The fingers on your hand appear separate, but they belong to the same hand. Or think of rays of sunshine. Each ray lands somewhere different — on a rooftop, a river, a face — and each feels distinct, warm in its own particular way. But follow any ray back to its source and you arrive at the same sun. At one level, there are a million rays. At a higher level, there is only one light. The traditions of Advaita Vedanta, articulated most famously by Adi Shankara in the eighth century, hold that Brahman — the ultimate reality — is all there is. The individual soul, the atman, is not a fragment of the divine. It is the divine, experiencing itself through the apparent limitations of a body and a mind.
The Bridge Between
Here is what fascinates me about these two perspectives: they are not enemies. Dvaita is where we start. Advaita is where the path leads. Every spiritual tradition, in its own language, describes this same arc — from the experience of separation toward the recognition of unity.
The Sufis describe it as fana, the dissolution of the self into the beloved. The Christian mystics speak of unio mystica, union with God. The Buddhists point to anatta, the absence of a fixed self, and the interdependence of all phenomena. The Taoists say the ten thousand things return to the One. Different fingers, same hand.
What Namaste Actually Means
When I say Namaste, I am not saying hello. I am saying: I recognize that the same light that animates me animates you. That beneath the surface — beneath our different names, roles, histories, opinions — there is something shared. Something that is not mine or yours but simply is.
This is not an abstraction. It is a practice. It changes how you listen to someone you disagree with. It changes how you treat the person serving your coffee or sitting across from you in a negotiation. If the light in me truly honors the light in you, then I cannot see you as merely an obstacle, or a resource, or a means to an end. I have to see you as another expression of the same reality I belong to.
Namaste is a core value and an aspiration for me. Because it is a daily reminder that duality — the world of you and me, us and them — is the source of our pain, our paralyzing analysis, our fear, our hate. And the more I can remember that there is more that we share in common than what makes us different, the better I tend to be at everything: caring, building, listening, leading, and simply being with the people around me.
The light in me honors the light in you.