LET US EXPLORE the first of the Four Bardos, the natural bardo of this life, and all its many implications; then we will proceed to explore the other three bardos in the appropriate time and order. The natural bardo of this life spans the whole of our lifetime between birth and death. Its teachings make clear to us why this bardo is such a precious opportunity, what it really means to be a human being, and what is the most important and only truly essential thing for us to do with the gift of this human life.
The masters tell us that there is an aspect of our minds that is its fundamental basis, a state called “the ground of the ordinary mind.” Longchenpa, the outstanding fourteenth-century Tibetan master, describes it in this way: “It is unenlightenment and a neutral state, which belongs to the category of mind and mental events, and it has become the foundation of all karmas and ‘traces’ of samsara and nirvana.”1 It functions like a storehouse, in which the imprints of past actions caused by our negative emotions are all stored like seeds. When the right conditions arise, they germinate and manifest as circumstances and situations in our lives.
Imagine this ground of the ordinary mind as being like a bank in which karma is deposited as imprints and habitual tendencies. If we have a habit of thinking in a particular pattern, positive or negative, then these tendencies will be triggered and provoked very easily, and recur and go on recurring. With constant repetition our inclinations and habits become steadily more entrenched, and go on continuing, increasing, and gathering power, even when we sleep. This is how they come to determine our life, our death, and our rebirth.
We often wonder: “How will I be when I die?” The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that’s what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change. This is why it is so absolutely important to use this lifetime to purify our mindstream, and so our basic being and character, while we can.
How is it that we come to be alive as human beings? All beings who have similar karma will have a common vision of the world around them, and this set of perceptions they share is called “a karmic vision.” That close correspondence between our karma and the kind of realm in which we find ourselves also explains how different forms arise: You and I, for example, are human beings because of the basic common karma that we share.
Yet even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual karma. We are born in different countries, cities, or families; we each have different upbringings, education, influences and beliefs, and all this conditioning comprises that karma. Each one of us is a complex summation of habits and past actions, and so we cannot but see things in our own uniquely personal way. Human beings look much the same, but perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique and separate individual worlds. As Kalu Rinpoche says:
If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.2
Our human existence is not the only kind of karmic vision. Six realms of existence are identified in Buddhism: gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hells. They are each the result of one of the six main negative emotions: pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed, and anger.
Do these realms actually exist externally? They may, in fact, exist beyond the range of the perception of our karmic vision. Let’s never forget: What we see is what our karmic vision allows us to see, and no more. Just as we, in the present, unpurified, and unevolved state of our perception, can only be aware of this universe, an insect might see one of our fingers as a whole landscape in itself. We are so arrogant that we believe only “seeing is believing.” Yet the great Buddhist teachings speak of innumerable worlds in different dimensions—there may even be many worlds very like, or just like ours—and several modern astrophysicists have developed theories about the existence of parallel universes. How can we possibly say definitively what does or does not exist beyond the bounds of our limited vision?
Looking at the world around us, and into our own minds, we can see that the six realms definitely do exist. They exist in the way we unconsciously allow our negative emotions to project and crystallize entire realms around us, and to define the style, form, flavor, and context of our life in those realms. And they exist also inwardly as the different seeds and tendencies of the various negative emotions within our psychophysical system, always ready to germinate and grow, depending on what influences them and how we choose to live.
Let’s look at how some of these realms are projected into and crystallized in the world around us. The main feature of the realm of the gods, for example, is that it is devoid of suffering, a realm of changeless beauty and sensual ecstasy. Imagine the gods: tall, blond surfers, lounging on beaches and in gardens flooded by brilliant sunshine, listening to any kind of music they choose, intoxicated by every kind of stimulant, high on meditation, yoga, bodywork, and ways of improving themselves, but never taxing their brains, never confronting any complex or painful situation, never conscious of their true nature, and so anesthetized that they are never aware of what their condition really is.
If some parts of California and Australia spring to mind as the realm of the gods, you can see the demigod realm being acted out every day perhaps in the intrigue and rivalry of Wall Street or in the seething corridors of Washington and Whitehall. And the hungry ghost realms? They exist wherever people, though immensely rich, are never satisfied, craving to take over this company or that one, or endlessly playing out their greed in court cases. Switch on any television channel and you have entered immediately the world of demigods and hungry ghosts.
The quality of life in the realm of the gods may look superior to our own, yet the masters tell us that human life is infinitely more valuable. Why? Because of the very fact that we have the awareness and intelligence that are the raw materials for enlightenment, and because the very suffering that pervades this human realm is itself the spur to spiritual transformation. Pain, grief, loss, and ceaseless frustration of every kind are there for a real and dramatic purpose: to wake us up, to enable and almost to force us to break out of the cycle of samsara and so release our imprisoned splendor.
Every spiritual tradition has stressed that this human life is unique, and has a potential that ordinarily we hardly even begin to imagine. If we miss the opportunity this life offers us for transforming ourselves, they say, it may well be an extremely long time before we have another. Imagine a blind turtle, roaming the depths of an ocean the size of the universe. Up above floats a wooden ring, tossed to and fro on the waves. Every hundred years the turtle comes, once, to the surface. To be born a human being is said by Buddhists to be more difficult than for that turtle to surface accidentally with its head poking through the wooden ring. And even among those who have a human birth, it is said, those who have the great good fortune to make a connection with the teachings are rare; and those who really take them to heart and embody them in their actions even rarer, as rare, in fact, “as stars in broad daylight.”
As I have said, how we perceive the world depends entirely on our karmic vision. The masters use a traditional example: six different kinds of being meet by the banks of a river. The human being in the group sees the river as water, a substance to wash in or to quench his thirst; for an animal such as a fish, the river is its home; the god sees it as nectar that brings bliss; the demigod as a weapon; the hungry ghost as pus and putrid blood; and the being from the hell realm as molten lava. The water is the same, but it is perceived in totally different, even contradictory, ways.
This profusion of perceptions shows us that all karmic visions are illusions; for if one substance can be perceived in so many different ways, how can anything have any one true, inherent reality? It also shows us how it is possible that some people feel this world as heaven, and others as hell.
The teachings tell us that there are essentially three kinds of vision: the “impure, karmic vision” of ordinary beings; the “vision of experience,” which opens to practitioners in meditation and is the path or medium of transcendence; and the “pure vision” of realized beings. A realized being, or a buddha, will perceive this world as spontaneously perfect, a completely and dazzlingly pure realm. Since they have purified all the causes of karmic vision, they see everything directly in its naked, primordial sacredness.
Everything that we see around us is seen as it is because we have been repeatedly solidifying our experience of inner and outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. In fact, as we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or matter or even ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call “heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up. As Blake says:
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
Everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.3
I shall never forget when Dudjom Rinpoche, in a moment of intimacy, leaned toward me and said in his soft, hoarse, slightly high-pitched voice: “You know, don’t you, that actually all these things around us go away, just go away . . .”
With most of us, however, karma and negative emotions obscure the ability to see our own intrinsic nature, and the nature of reality. As a result we clutch onto happiness and suffering as real, and in our unskillful and ignorant actions go on sowing the seeds of our next birth. Our actions keep us bound to the continuous cycle of worldly existence, to the endless round of birth and death. So everything is at risk in how we live now, at this very moment: How we live now can cost us our entire future.
This is the real and urgent reason why we must prepare now to meet death wisely, to transform our karmic future, and to avoid the tragedy of falling into delusion again and again and repeating the painful round of birth and death. This life is the only time and place we can prepare in, and we can only truly prepare through spiritual practice: This is the inescapable message of the natural bardo of this life. As Padmasambhava says:
Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me,
I will abandon laziness for which life has no time,
Enter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing, reflection and contemplation, and meditation,
Making perceptions and mind the path, and realize the “three kayas”: the enlightened mind;4
Now that I have once attained a human body,
There is no time on the path for the mind to wander.
I sometimes wonder what a person from a little village in Tibet would feel if you suddenly brought him to a modern city with all its sophisticated technology. He would probably think he had already died and was in the bardo state. He would gape incredulously at the planes flying in the sky above him, or at someone talking on the telephone to another person on the other side of the world. He would assume he was witnessing miracles. And yet all this seems normal to someone living in the modern world with a Western education, which explains 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 spiritual training for the natural bardo of this life, which gives you the essential vocabulary, the ABC of the mind. The bases of this training are what are called the “three wisdom tools”: the wisdom of listening and hearing; the wisdom of contemplation and reflection; and the wisdom of meditation. Through them we are brought to reawaken to our true nature, through them we uncover and come to embody the joy and freedom of what we truly are, what we call “the wisdom that realizes egolessness.”
Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and her mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. Such a grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear.
So long as we haven’t unmasked the ego, it continues to hoodwink us, like a sleazy politician endlessly parading bogus promises, or a lawyer constantly inventing ingenious lies and defenses, or a talk show host talking on and on, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all.
Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.
Ego plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: “I should really let go of ego, I’m in such pain; but if I do, what’s going to happen to me?”
Ego will chime in, sweetly: “I know I’m sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what’s going to happen to you? Who will look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I’ve done all these years?”
And even if we were to see through ego’s lies, we are just too scared to abandon it, for without any true knowledge of the nature of our mind, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and again we cave in to its demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate.
To end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we go on the spiritual path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost infinite and it can at every stage sabotage and pervert our desire to be free of it. The truth is simple, and the teachings are extremely clear; but I have seen again and again, with great sadness, that as soon as they begin to touch and move us, ego tries to complicate them because it knows it is fundamentally threatened.
At the beginning, when we first become fascinated by the spiritual path and all its possibilities, ego may even encourage us and say: “This is really wonderful. Just the thing for you! This teaching makes total sense!”
Then when we say we want to try meditation practice, or go on a retreat, ego will croon: “What a marvelous idea! Why don’t I come with you? We can both learn something.” All through the honeymoon period of our spiritual development, ego will keep urging us on: “This is wonderful—it’s so amazing, so inspiring . . .”
But as soon as we enter what I call the “kitchen sink” period of the spiritual path, and the teachings begin to touch us deeply, unavoidably we are faced with the truth of our selves. As the ego is revealed, its sore spots are touched, and all sorts of problems will start arising. It’s as if a mirror we cannot look away from were stuck in front of us. The mirror is totally clear, but there is an ugly, glowering face in it, our own, staring back at us. We begin to rebel because we hate what we see; we may strike out in anger and smash the mirror, but it will only shatter into hundreds of identical ugly faces, all still staring at us.
Now is the time we begin to rage and complain bitterly; and where is our ego? Standing staunchly by our side, egging us on: “You’re quite right, this is outrageous and unbearable. Don’t stand for it!” As we listen enthralled, ego goes on to conjure up all sorts of doubts and demented emotions, throwing fuel on the fire: “Can’t you see now this is not the right teaching for you? I told you so all along! Can’t you see he is not your teacher? After all, you are an intelligent, modern, sophisticated Western person, and exotic things like Zen, Sufism, meditation, Tibetan Buddhism belong to foreign, Eastern cultures. What possible use could a philosophy made up in the Himalayas a thousand years ago be to you?”
As ego watches us gleefully become more and more ensnared in its web, it will even blame all the pain, loneliness, and difficulties we are going through as we come to know ourselves on the teaching, and even on the teacher: “These gurus don’t care anyway, whatever you’re going through. They are only out to exploit you. They just use words like ‘compassion’ and ‘devotion’ to get you in their power . . .”
Ego is so clever that it can twist the teachings for its own purposes; after all, “The devil can quote scriptures for his own ends.” Ego’s ultimate weapon is to point its finger hypocritically at the teacher and his followers and say: “No one around here seems to be living up to the truth of the teachings!” Now ego poses as the righteous arbiter of all conduct: the shrewdest position of all from which to undermine your faith, and erode whatever devotion and commitment to spiritual change you have.
Yet however hard ego may try to sabotage the spiritual path, if you really continue on it, and work deeply with the practice of meditation, you will begin slowly to realize just how gulled you have been by ego’s promises: false hopes and false fears. Slowly you begin to understand that both hope and fear are enemies of your peace of mind; hopes deceive you, and leave you empty and disappointed, and fears paralyze you in the narrow cell of your false identity. You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the sway of ego has been over your mind, and in the space of freedom opened up by meditation, when you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature. You realize that for years, your ego, like a crazy con artist, has been swindling you with schemes and plans and promises that have never been real and have only brought you to inner bankruptcy. When, in the equanimity of meditation, you see this, without any consolation or desire to cover up what you’ve discovered, all the plans and schemes reveal themselves as hollow and start to crumble.
This is not a purely destructive process. Alongside an extremely precise and sometimes painful realization of the fraudulence and virtual criminality of your ego, and everyone else’s, grows a sense of inner expansiveness, a direct knowledge of the “egolessness” and interdependence of all things, and that vivid and generous humor that is the hallmark of freedom.
Because you have learned through discipline to simplify your life, and so reduced the opportunities for ego to seduce you; and because you have practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. As you listen more and more to the teachings, contemplate them, and integrate them into your life, your inner voice, your innate wisdom of discernment, what we call in Buddhism “discriminating awareness,” is awakened and strengthened, and you begin to distinguish between its guidance and the various clamorous and enthralling voices of ego. The memory of your real nature, with all its splendor and confidence, begins to return to you.
You will find, in fact, that you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. Your guide can also be a continual, joyful, tender, sometimes teasing presence, who knows always what is best for you and will help you find more and more ways out of your obsession with your habitual responses and confused emotions. As the voice of your discriminating awareness grows stronger and clearer, you will start to distinguish between its truth and the various deceptions of the ego, and you will be able to listen to it with discernment and confidence.
The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are. Gradually you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the dark emotions that have ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the greatest miracle of all. Tertön Sogyal, the Tibetan mystic, said that he was not really impressed by someone who could turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion.
More and more, then, instead of the harsh and fragmented gossip that ego has been talking to you all your life, you will find yourself hearing in your mind the clear directions of the teachings, which inspire, admonish, guide, and direct you at every turn. The more you listen, the more guidance you will receive. If you follow the voice of your wise guide, the voice of your discriminating awareness, and let ego fall silent, you come to experience that presence of wisdom and joy and bliss that you really are. A new life, utterly different from that when you were masquerading as your ego, begins in you. And when death comes, you will have learned already in life how to control those emotions and thoughts that in the states of death, the bardos, would otherwise take on an overwhelming reality.
When your amnesia over your identity begins to be cured, you will realize finally that dak dzin, grasping at self, is the root cause of all your suffering. You will understand at last how much harm it has done both to yourself and to others, and you will realize that both the noblest and the wisest thing to do is to cherish others instead of cherishing yourself. This will bring healing to your heart, healing to your mind, and healing to your spirit.
It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called “egolessness.”
The way to discover the freedom of the wisdom of egolessness, the masters advise us, is through the process of listening and hearing, contemplation and reflection, and meditation. They advise us to begin by listening repeatedly to the spiritual teachings. As we listen, they will keep on and on reminding us of our hidden wisdom nature. It is as if we were that person I asked you to imagine, lying in the hospital bed suffering from amnesia, and someone who loved and cared for us were whispering our real name in our ear, and showing us photos of our family and old friends, trying to bring back our knowledge of our lost identity. Gradually, as we listen to the teachings, certain passages and insights in them will strike a strange chord in us, memories of our true nature will start to trickle back, and a deep feeling of something homely and uncannily familiar will slowly awaken.
Listening is a far more difficult process than most people imagine; really to listen in the way that is meant by the masters is to let go utterly of ourselves, to let go of all the information, all the concepts, all the ideas, and all the prejudices that our heads are stuffed with. If you really listen to the teachings, those concepts that are our real hindrance, the one thing that stands between us and our true nature, can slowly and steadily be washed away.
In trying to really listen, I have often been inspired by the Zen master Suzuki-roshi, who said: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”5 The beginner’s mind is an open mind, an empty mind, a ready mind, and if we really listen with a beginner’s mind, we might really begin to hear. If we listen with a silent mind, as free as possible from the clamor of preconceived ideas, a possibility will be created for the truth of the teachings to pierce us, and for the meaning of life and death to become increasingly and startlingly clear. My master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said: “The more and more you listen, the more and more you hear; the more and more you hear, the deeper and deeper your understanding becomes.”
The deepening of understanding, then, comes through contemplation and reflection, the second tool of wisdom. As we contemplate what we’ve heard, it gradually begins to permeate our mindstream and saturate our inner experience of our lives. Everyday events start to mirror and more and more subtly and directly to confirm the truths of the teachings, as contemplation slowly unfolds and enriches what we have begun to understand intellectually and carries that understanding down from our head into our heart.
The third tool of wisdom is meditation. After listening to the teachings and reflecting on them, we put into action the insights we have gained and apply them directly, through the process of meditation, to the needs of everyday life.
Once, it seems, there was a time when an exceptional master could give one teaching to an exceptional student, and the student could attain liberation. Dudjom Rinpoche used to tell the story of a powerful bandit in India, who after countless successful raids, realized the terrible suffering he had been causing. He yearned for some way of atoning for what he had 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 philosophies, or anything that is done in simple goodwill or with an innocent heart.
The Buddha summons us to another kind of doubt, “like analyzing gold, scorching, cutting, and rubbing it to test its purity.” For that form of doubt that really would expose us to the truth if we followed it to the end, we have neither the insight, the courage, nor the training. We have been schooled in a sterile addiction to contradiction that has robbed us repeatedly of all real openness to any more expansive and ennobling truth.
In the place of our contemporary nihilistic form of doubt, then, I would ask you to put what I call a “noble doubt,” the kind of doubt that is an integral part of the path toward enlightenment. The vast truth of the mystical teachings handed down to us is not something that our endangered world can afford to dismiss. Instead of doubting them, why don’t we doubt ourselves: our ignorance, our assumption that we understand everything already, our grasping and evasion, our passion for so-called explanations of reality that have about them nothing of the awe-inspiring and all-encompassing wisdom of what the masters, the messengers of Reality, have told us?
This kind of noble doubt spurs us onward, inspires us, tests us, makes us more and more authentic, empowers us, and draws us more and more within the exalting energy field of the truth. When I am with my masters, I ask them again and again the questions I need answers to. Sometimes I don’t get clear answers, but I do not doubt them or the truth of the teachings. Sometimes I may doubt my own spiritual maturity or my ability to really hear the truth in a way that I could fully understand, and more often I press on asking and asking, until I do get a clear answer. And when that answer comes, and rings strongly and purely in my mind, and my heart responds to it with a shock of gratitude and recognition, then a conviction is inspired in me that the derision of a world of doubters could not destroy.
I remember one winter, when I was driving with one of my students from Paris down to Italy on a clear and moonlit night. She worked as a therapist, and had undergone many different kinds of training. What she had realized, she told me, was that the more knowledge you have, the more doubts it gives rise to, and the subtler the excuses for doubting whenever the truth begins to touch you deeply. She had tried many times, she said, to run away from the teachings, but finally she realized that there was nowhere to run to, because what she was really trying to run away from was herself.
I told her that doubt is not a disease, but merely a symptom of a lack of what we in our tradition call “the View,” which is the realization of the nature of mind, and so of the nature of reality. When that View is there completely, there will be no possibility for the slightest trace of doubt, for then we’ll be looking at reality with its own eyes. But until we reach enlightenment, I said, there will inevitably be doubts, because doubt is a fundamental activity of the unenlightened mind, and the only way to deal with doubts is neither to suppress nor indulge them.
Doubts demand from us a real skillfulness in dealing with them, and I notice how few people have any idea how to pursue doubts or to use them. Isn’t it ironic that in a civilization that so worships the power of deflation and doubt, hardly anyone has the courage to deflate the claims of doubt itself, to do as one Hindu master said: turn the dogs of doubt on doubt itself, to unmask cynicism and to uncover the fear, despair, hopelessness, and tired conditioning it springs from? Then doubt would no longer be an obstacle, but a door to realization, and whenever doubt appeared in the mind, a seeker would welcome it as a means of going deeper into the truth.
There is a story I love about a Zen master. This master had a faithful but very naive student, who regarded him as a living buddha. Then one day the master accidentally sat down on a needle. He screamed, “Ouch!” and jumped into the air. The student instantly lost all his faith and left, saying how disappointed he was to find that his master was not fully enlightened. Otherwise, he thought, how would he jump up and scream out loud like that? The master was sad when he realized his student had left, and said: “Alas, poor man! If only he had known that in reality neither I, nor the needle, nor the ‘ouch’ really existed.”
Don’t let us make the same impulsive mistake as that Zen student. Don’t let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness, or let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or “philosophical,” but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the chance slowly to mature and ripen.
Don’t be in too much of a hurry to solve all your doubts and problems; as the masters say, “Make haste slowly.” I always tell my students not to have unreasonable expectations, because it takes time for spiritual growth. It takes years to learn Japanese properly or become a doctor: Can we really expect to have all the answers, let alone become enlightened, in a few weeks? The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning and purification. When you know this, you become humble. There is a famous Tibetan saying: “Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.” And Milarepa said: “Do not entertain hopes for realization, but practice all your life.” One of the things I have come to appreciate most about my own tradition is its down-to-earth, no-nonsense practicality, and its acute sense that the greatest achievements take the deepest patience and the longest time.