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

THIS LIFE: THE NATURAL BARDO 127done, 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 askedhim 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 eventuallyadmitted: "Actually, there is one thing I have a talent for, andthat's stealing."The master chuckled: "Good! That's exactly the skill you'llneed now. Go to a quiet place and rob all your perceptions,and steal all the stars and planets in the sky, and dissolve theminto the belly of emptiness, the all-encompassing space of thenature of mind." Within twenty-one days the bandit had realizedthe nature of his mind, and eventually came to beregarded as one of the great saints of India.In ancient times, then, there were extraordinary mastersand students as receptive and single-minded as that banditwho could, by just practicing with unswerving devotion onesingle instruction, attain liberation. Even now, if we were toput our mind to one powerful wisdom method and workwith it directly, there is a real possibility we would becomeenlightened.Our minds, however, are riddled and confused with doubt.I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block tohuman evolution than desire and attachment. Our society promotescleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the mostsuperficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.We have become so falsely "sophisticated" and neurotic thatwe take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothingmore than ego's desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdomis deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge. Thisform of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara,served by a flock of "experts" who teach us not theopen-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us wasnecessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings,but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing tobelieve in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by.Our contemporary education, then, indoctrinates us in theglorification of doubt, has created in fact what could almost becalled a religion or theology of doubt, in which to be seen tobe intelligent we have to be seen to doubt everything, toalways point to what's wrong and rarely to ask what's right orgood, cynically to denigrate all inherited spiritual ideals and