Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.