November 27, 2005
NOBLE DOUBT
The Buddha summons us to a different kind of doubt, �like analyzing gold, scorching, cutting and rubbing it to test its purity.� For this form of doubt really exposes us to the truth if we follow it to the end, but 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 I would ask you to put what I call a �noble doubt,� the kind 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?
- Sogyal Rinpoche