Through the meditation, potent energies of knowing and loving that had been hidden in our minds are unleashed. Indeed, it begins to dawn on us that, as we extend love, we are not just wishing for others to have well-being and joy, we are actually communing with the primordial well-being that already abides in the nature of their minds. Our buddha nature is communicating with theirs, below the radar of self-centered understanding.

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.

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.

Through non-conceptual meditation, we start to sense the vast nature of goodness that had been hidden by our ego-clinging. And we sense that this is equally true for all the others around us. Together we have been lost from our true nature and together have suffered for it. From this recognition flows tremendous loving compassion for all beings equally.

We practice to become receptive to the tremendous capacity of wisdom and love that is hidden in our being, to let the practice bring these qualities out with such force that they start to release us from the ego-centered causes of suffering in our minds, freeing us finally to become what we had most deeply intended-a real benefactor for this world.