Thoughts are the radiant expression of our mindʼs clear, quiescent, and infinitely spacious nature. They arise from that nature and dissolve into it. Our job is not to struggle with them or to try to stop them, but merely to allow them the freedom to self- dissolve into their own radiant, empty ground, like ocean waves dissolving back into their own wateriness.

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.

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.

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.

To sum up, the practice of Dzogchen allows the fundamental nature of oneʼs mind, the boundless expanse of pure awareness and openness, to attain stable self-recognition. That is enlightenment: the enduring recognition of all experience as the radiant expression of primordially pure awareness. This realization cuts through the self- imposed limitations of oneʼs mind to unleash tremendous liberating powers of love, compassion, joy, and creativity from the ground of oneʼs being, which can inspire and uplift many others. It is also the foundation of a wise equinimity that senses all others as essentially undivided from oneʼs self, making oneʼs love and compassion unconditional, all-inclusive, and inexhaustible.