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.

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.

Through non-conceptual meditation, we start to sense the vast nature of goodness that had been hidden by our ego-clinging. And we sense that this is equally true for all the others around us. Together we have been lost from our true nature and together have suffered for it. From this recognition flows tremendous loving compassion for all beings equally.

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.

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.