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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So this talk will be the fifth and final of the talk on compassion.

So this talk will be the fifth and final of the talk on compassionate action.

And that kind of the focus of the talk is compassionate action for its own sake.

Compassion, that action is often considered to be focused on the welfare of others.

Sometimes there's self-compassion and sometimes there's caring for oneself as one has compassionate care for others.

It's possible to have compassionate action care for both self and others.

And have an open hearted, open vision of how to be in this world that we wish that everyone benefit, everyone be free.

Not just the parties involved or something.

And there's a fifth kind of way of compassionate action that for some Buddhist traditions is considered to be the highest pinnacle of compassion.

And that is where there was so involved, so engaged in the compassionate action that there's a self-forgetting.

And not sacrificing our own well-being, but because we know how to care in a healthy way for the world and ourselves, it's appropriate.

It's a beautiful thing to then do in that healthy way of being, to give ourselves over to it completely, so that you have self being the agent of the activity kind of falls away.

In some Buddhist traditions they talk about the oneness of the compassionate person, the recipient of compassion, and the act itself of compassion.

That there's a cycle, there's a unit of inseparable, or it has no division, or somehow we are immersed in it, so we don't have so much the thoughts of it's me being compassionate, we're helping another person.

And even the idea that this is a compassionate action can fall away.

Once we have decided that this is the right thing to do, we give ourselves over to it fully.

And there's a simplicity and a freedom in the action then. And this is true for anything we do.

If you wash dishes in the sink, and certainly there can be a lot of self preoccupation, like I don't like doing the dishes, I wish I didn't have to do it, I'm always doing it, it's not fair.

Or I have important things to do, let's get this over quickly because I have to get to do something that I really want to do.

So there's a lot of self-concerns of different types there. It might be concerns about being the best dishwasher in the neighborhood and trying to prove yourself to everyone knows that you're a good dishwasher.

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