The Energy of Love

I almost didn’t write this because I wasn’t sure about the interest - most of us, and me included, are more interested in the emotional things we all struggle with. That said, language and ideas are also big deals because it is through these that much of how we experience something is created. How we think about something is how we feel about it. So …

I want to explore how we talk about the Ground in Dzogchen. The usual way is to say it's, ‘empty in essence, lucid in nature and its energy is compassion’. Now, I don’t know about you, but my mind reads these three attributes as a hierarchy. The empty essence – emptiness – is the basic or most essential element, this is then followed by its lucidity, and finally - almost like a poor relation – comes its energy which is compassion. However, the problem with this is that apart from being entirely wrong, because all three attributes are on the ‘same level’, it also starts off with the attribute of emptiness which for most of us is by far the more difficult to understand. It basically starts off with the almost incomprehensible. Which is a bad start!

So let’s do it differently. Let’s start with energy instead. This is a translation of a Tibetan word and like all Tibetan words it has lots of connected meanings - it does a lot of work. So we have a cluster of meanings around the compassionate heart and how this is one of the qualities of bodhisattvas and buddhas. But in the context of the Dzogchen non-dual teachings this changes to mean a dynamic energy, a potentiality, a creative power, the ground displaying itself as appearances, the quality of awareness to be inseparable from what it is aware of. However the element of compassion remains in the sense that the nature of the ground is responsive, we could almost say it ‘wants’ to take an infinitude of forms. Not in an emotional sense but the obvious thing that creative forms are all connected. The universe is all about connection. Something like that.

What comes out of this is something surprisingly similar to contemporary quantum mechanics that uses the equation E=M. Energy equals mass. It says more or less the same thing: energy is mass (form, matter, everything including ourselves) and mass is energy. They are one and the same thing. The grounds compassionate display. Now that just leaves the other two qualities of the Ground - its lucid nature and emptiness. So what is being said is that the whole of the manifest universe is aware - not that it has awareness or is permeated by awareness - but is awareness. And secondly that it is empty – which here means is in a perpetual state of change. Which if we think about it is exactly what can be observed. It's not really such a big mystery after all.

NW. 12 October 2026