Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

To connect with what others are going through we have to become vividly and newly aware of what we ourselves are going through, in all layers of our being. If we donʼt have awareness of our own layers of struggle and fear and suffering, we canʼt establish a clear connection to what others are experiencing. To truly empathize with others, we must be able to sense from within the layers of suffering we all share. Not just in terms of what we are currently feeling but also on more subtle levels: our personal struggles to hold on to what is dear, to maintain security, to avoid loss and death.

The path to embodying unconditional love and wisdom is not some overwhelmingly difficult struggle to make ourselves into something alien to our nature. Quite the opposite. Unconditional love and wisdom dawn as we come home to what we most deeply are. Our deepest wish is already impartial love; our deepest knowing already intuitive wisdom beyond self-clinging. We just need to learn to relax our grip on ourselves enough to allow those capacities to awaken within us and shine forth.

Compassion that knows beings in all levels of their suffering motivates service for them on all levels of their need. Such service is not easily discouraged at disappointing temporal outcomes, because it holds others in their deepest potential of freedom, which is always present. In the course of such service, compassion also opens oneʼs mind to further qualities of awakening that benefit others by inspiration and example: joy in the meaningfulness of human life, reverence for each person, patience with self and others, gratitude, enthusiastic perseverance, and stability of mind in loving compassion.

…[T]he complete realization of enlightenment is experienced communally, embodied in joyous communion with many others through the wise love that wills deepest freedom for all. To be fully enlightened is to have fully unleashed the liberating power of such enlightened qualities, so that they spontaneously bless and evoke the corresponding goodness dormant in the hearts of many other beings.

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.