Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

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.

…[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 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.

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.

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.