Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

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.

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.

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.

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.