Sustainable Compassion
Awakening Innate Love and Wisdom

In our meditation, we are discovering the innate buddha that has been hidden within our minds and bodies all along, a great capacity of unconditional love and pure awareness that discerns and resonates with the corresponding capacity that is hidden within all others. This is the dawning of pure perception.

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.

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.

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.

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.