The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

THIS LIFE: THE NATURAL BARDO 127
done, and visited a famous master. He asked him: "I am a sinner,
I am in torment. What's the way out? What can I do?"
The master looked the bandit up and down and then asked
him what he was good at.
"Nothing," replied the bandit.
"Nothing?" barked the master. "You must be good at something!"
The bandit was silent for a while, and eventually
admitted: "Actually, there is one thing I have a talent for, and
that's stealing."
The master chuckled: "Good! That's exactly the skill you'll
need now. Go to a quiet place and rob all your perceptions,
and steal all the stars and planets in the sky, and dissolve them
into the belly of emptiness, the all-encompassing space of the
nature of mind." Within twenty-one days the bandit had realized
the nature of his mind, and eventually came to be
regarded as one of the great saints of India.
In ancient times, then, there were extraordinary masters
and students as receptive and single-minded as that bandit
who could, by just practicing with unswerving devotion one
single instruction, attain liberation. Even now, if we were to
put our mind to one powerful wisdom method and work
with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become
enlightened.
Our minds, however, are riddled and confused with doubt.
I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to
human evolution than desire and attachment. Our society promotes
cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most
superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.
We have become so falsely "sophisticated" and neurotic that
we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing
more than ego's desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom
is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge. This
form of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara,
served by a flock of "experts" who teach us not the
open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was
necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings,
but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing to
believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by.
Our contemporary education, then, indoctrinates us in the
glorification of doubt, has created in fact what could almost be
called a religion or theology of doubt, in which to be seen to
be intelligent we have to be seen to doubt everything, to
always point to what's wrong and rarely to ask what's right or
good, cynically to denigrate all inherited spiritual ideals and