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

120 THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYINGEnter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing, reflection andcontemplation, and meditation,Making perceptions and mind the path, and realize the "threekayas /7 : the enlightened mind; 4Now that I have once attained a human body,There is no time on the path for the mind to wander.THE WISDOM THAT REALIZES EGOLESSNESSI sometimes wonder what a person from a little village inTibet would feel if you suddenly brought him to a moderncity with all its sophisticated technology. He would probablythink he had already died and was in the bardo state. Hewould gape incredulously at the planes flying in the sky abovehim, or at someone talking on the telephone to another personon the other side of the world. He would assume he was witnessingmiracles. And yet all this seems normal to someoneliving in the modern world with a Western education, whichexplains the scientific background to these things, step by step.In just the same way, in Tibetan Buddhism there is a basic,normal, elementary spiritual education, a complete spiritualtraining for the natural bardo of this life, which gives you theessential vocabulary, the ABC of the mind. The bases of thistraining are what are called the "three wisdom tools": the wisdomof listening and hearing; the wisdom of contemplation andreflection; and the wisdom of meditation. Through them we arebrought to reawaken to our true nature, through them weuncover and come to embody the joy and freedom of what wetruly are, what we call "the wisdom that realizes egolessness."Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital aftera road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia.Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face andform, her senses and her mind are there, but she doesn't haveany idea or any trace of memory of who she really is. Inexactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity,our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we castaround and improvise another identity, one we clutch ontowith all the desperation of someone falling continuously intoan abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is "ego."So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who wereally are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, atall costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves,an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keepschanging and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.