The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, for this fifth and last talk on aspirations that are

support or an aspect of compassion and manifestation of compassion,

that I want to emphasize the possibility that aspiration can arise out of a

peacefulness, out of peace.

And that peace is a wonderful reference point for the motivations that are

connected to being compassionate.

It's not a few people for whom who confuse compassion with distress,

compassion with their own discomfort around being in the presence of suffering.

And they confuse the motivation to be compassionate, to act compassionately,

with the motivations that flow from that discomfort and that distress.

And some of that has to do a lot with our attachments to self,

at all kinds of attachments we might have.

And so, even some of the most important kind of ways and things we can do to be compassionate

and caring for others, we carry with us something which is not peaceful,

something which is stressful, something which there's attachment and clinging as part of it,

a force and assertiveness, a tension.

And it's possible to do, have the aspiration to desire the motivation to be compassionate,

to be peaceful, peaceful, to arise kind of an easy, light way,

and where there's not a lot of self attachment, self concern that's entangled with that,

where it's coming from not from any sense of being distressed or being challenged

...