Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

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.

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.

When someone abides in a purer vision, their presence signals to us that our reductive labels are false, that all those around us are holy, precious beings, every single one. For anyone to abide in such vision is to make a tremendous offering to this world, for it holds the door open for many others to also come to recognition of their true selves.

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.

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.