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.

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.

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.

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.

As love and wisdom inform each other through the distinct sections of our meditation, the pure perception they bring out is not just a love for beings in their intrinsic worthiness. It is also a penetrating wisdom that senses the perfection of every aspect of experience in its soft, radiant, and insubstantial nature, beyond the reductive thinking of self-centered mind.