In our meditation, we are discovering the innate buddha that has been hidden within our minds and bodies all along, a great capacity of unconditional love and pure awareness that discerns and resonates with the corresponding capacity that is hidden within all others. This is the dawning of pure perception.

The path to enlightenment uncovers our hidden relationship to all others, revealing our “innate bodhicitta,” our innate capacity for all-inclusive care. We are dependent on innumerable beings for all that we are and all that we will become through spiritual practice. All others are like ourselves in their causes of suffering, their wish to be happy, and their potential for enlightenment. Ultimately, all are undivided from us in the nature of mind. As the path reveals our profound relation to all others, it also reveals our connection to spiritual teachers who preceded us in awakening and have held the way open for us. Because such vast relatedness is given in the very ground of our being, our most basic need is to realize and embody it in love and compassion.

The path of enlightenment releases the mind from its constricted self-grasping to the infinite openness of its basic nature, which is pervaded by awareness and compassion like the open sky is pervaded by the rays of the sun. The path to enlightenment involves a fundamental reorientation, from identifying ourselves with the narrow, self-centered, and shifting thoughts of the moment to the all-inclusive, abiding nature of enlightened wisdom and love. This path is the opening of the mind to the vast expanse that includes all phenomena without discrimination and to the vast love that includes all beings without discrimination.

Only our inmost goodness can sense so directly the essential purity and goodness of others. We let our buddha nature, our primordial capacity for wisdom and love know others in their buddha nature, their intrinsic worthiness and holiness. We learn to “see” beings from the depth of our heart, rather than through ego-grasping consciousness.

As love and wisdom inform each other through the distinct sections of our meditation, the pure perception they bring out is not just a love for beings in their intrinsic worthiness. It is also a penetrating wisdom that senses the perfection of every aspect of experience in its soft, radiant, and insubstantial nature, beyond the reductive thinking of self-centered mind.