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.

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.

…[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.

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.

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.