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With a steady meditation practice under way, we are now able to see more clearly how identifying with our thoughts and emotions is what leads to suffering.  With a mind more steady and more able to remain undisturbed amidst the turmoils of life, we can now extend our practice to encompass others, not just ourselves.  

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Training the mind in loving-kindness and compassion allows us to realize that, just like our own sufferings, all beings are likewise struggling.  To extend the wish that all beings be free enables us to go beyond our self-cherishing, and expand into a broader, humanistic view of the path.  Joining this heart training with analytic meditations on the nature of causality, specifically seeing how all phenomena are in turn reduced to composites, allows us to see that there is no such thing as truly existing independent objects.  Rather, all objects and beings of the world, including ourselves, are the result of prior conditions, and in turn are the cause of future effects.  This allows us to see the inherent lack of solidity of our own being and phenomena, engendering a deeper understanding of the fluid and impermanent nature of reality.