Our society provides no curriculum or schooling on how to notice so much love or to recognize the many people who have transmitted its life-giving power. Most of us havenʼt been taught that to receive love deeply and transmit it wholeheartedly is a real human possibility, that it can be learned, and that to do so is the key to our deepest well-being, our spiritual life, and our capacity to bring more goodness into this world.

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.

Thoughts are the radiant expression of our mindʼs clear, quiescent, and infinitely spacious nature. They arise from that nature and dissolve into it. Our job is not to struggle with them or to try to stop them, but merely to allow them the freedom to self- dissolve into their own radiant, empty ground, like ocean waves dissolving back into their own wateriness.

…[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.

Compassion wishes beings to be free from their suffering. If we donʼt really believe that they can be free-that deep freedom, security, well-being, and joy is a real human possibility-our compassion tends to lapse into despair. Then it is not a liberating force for anyone. Compassion becomes a liberating force when we know the freedom that it wishes for beings to be real.