WHAT IS TRUST?
What is trust? Is it a belief? No, because belief belongs to the mind. Trust is a rapport. You simply put aside all your defense measures, your armor; you become vulnerable. You listen to something, and you listen so totally that the feeling arises in you as to whether it is true or not. If it is untrue, you feel it; if it is true, you feel it—why does this happen? It happens because truth resides in you. When you are totally nonthinking, your inner truth can feel wherever truth is—because the same always feels the same, it fits. Suddenly everything fits, everything falls into a pattern and the chaos becomes a cosmos. The words fall in line, and a poetry arises. Then everything simply fits.
If you are in rapport, and the truth is there, your inner being simply agrees with it—but it is not an intellectual agreement. You feel a tuning. You become one. This is trust. If something is wrong, it simply falls from you—you never pay it a second thought, you never look at it a second time: there is no meaning in it. You never say, “This is untrue.” It simply doesn’t fit, and you move on! If it fits it becomes your home. If it doesn’t fit, you move. Through listening comes trust.
FIRST, TRUST IN YOURSELF
Be receptive, be loving, and trust nature that has given birth to you. You are its extension, you are not separate from it. It cares for you; it protects you, in life and in death. It is your security, the only security there is. Feel secure, at ease, relaxed, and one day when the mind is completely silent truth happens. It simply comes like a ray of light into the darkness of your existence, and all is revealed.
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TRUST IS POSSIBLE ONLY IF FIRST YOU TRUST IN YOURSELF. The most fundamental thing has to happen within you first. If you trust in yourself you can trust in me, you can trust in people, you can trust in existence. But if you don’t trust in yourself, then no other trust is ever possible.
The society destroys trust at the very roots: it does not allow you to trust yourself. It teaches all other kinds of trust—trust in the parents, trust in the church, trust in the state, trust in God, ad infinitum, but the basic trust is completely destroyed. And then all other trusts are phony—are bound to be phony! Then all other trusts are just plastic flowers; you don’t have real roots for real flowers to grow.
The society does it deliberately, on purpose, because one who trusts in himself is dangerous for the society—a society that depends on slavery, a society that has invested so much in slavery. A person trusting himself is independent. You cannot make predictions about him, he will move in his own way; freedom will be his life. He will trust when he feels, when he loves, and then his trust will have a tremendous intensity and truth in it. Then his trust will be alive and authentic. And he will be ready to risk all for his trust—but only when he feels it, only when it is true, only when it stirs his heart, only when it stirs his intelligence and his love, otherwise not. You cannot force him into any kind of believing.
This society depends on belief; its whole structure is that of autohypnosis. Its whole structure is based in creating robots and machines, not men. It needs dependent people—so dependent that they are constantly in need of being tyrannized, so dependent that they are searching and seeking their own tyrants, their own Adolf Hitlers, their own Mussolinis, their own Joseph Stalins and Mao Zedongs. This earth, this beautiful earth we have turned into a great prison. A few power-lusty people have reduced the whole of humanity into a mob. Man is allowed to exist only if he compromises with all kinds of nonsense.
Now, to tell a child to believe in God is nonsense, utter nonsense—not that godliness does not exist, but because the child has not yet felt the thirst, the desire, the longing. He is not yet ready to go in search of the truth, the ultimate truth of life. He is not yet mature enough to inquire into the reality of God. That love affair has to happen someday, but it can happen only if no belief is imposed upon him. If he is converted before the thirst has arisen to explore and to know, then his whole life he will live in a phony way, he will live in a pseudo way. Yes, he will talk about God because he has been told that God is. He has been told authoritatively, and he has been told by people who were very powerful in his childhood—his parents, the priests, the teachers. He has been told by people and he had to accept it; it was a question of his survival. He could not say no to his parents, because without them he would not be able to live at all. It was too risky to say no, he had to say yes. But his yes can’t be true.
How can it be true? He is saying yes only as a political device, to survive. You have not turned him into a religious person, you have made him a diplomat, you have created a politician. You have sabotaged his potential to grow into an authentic being. You have poisoned him. You have destroyed the very possibility of his intelligence, because intelligence arises only when the longing to know arises. Now the longing will never arise—because before the question has taken possession of his soul, the answer has already been supplied! Before he was hungry, the food has been forced into his being. Now without hunger, this forced food cannot be digested; there is no hunger to digest it.
That’s why people live like pipes through which life passes like undigested food.
One has to be very patient with children, very alert, very conscious not to say anything that may hinder their own intelligence from arriving. Not to convert them into Christians, Hindus, and Mohammedans. One needs infinite patience. One day that miracle happens when the child himself starts inquiring. Then too, don’t supply him with ready-made answers. Ready-made answers help nobody, ready-made answers are dull and stupid. Help him to become more intelligent. Rather than giving him answers, give him situations and challenges so that his intelligence is sharpened and he asks more deeply—so that the question penetrates to his very core, so the question becomes a question of life and death.
But that is not allowed. Parents are very much afraid, the society is very much afraid: If children are allowed to remain free, who knows? They may never come to the fold the parents belonged to, they may never go to the church—Catholic, Protestant, this or that. Who knows what is going to happen when they become intelligent on their own? They will not be within your control. This society goes into deeper and deeper politics to control everybody, to possess everybody’s soul.
That’s why the first thing they have to do is to destroy trust—the trust of the child in himself, the confidence of the child in himself. They have to make him shaky and afraid. Once he is trembling, he is controllable. If he is confident he is uncontrollable. If he is confident he will assert himself, he will try to do his own thing. He will never want to do anybody else’s thing. He will go on his own journey, he will not fulfill somebody else’s desires for some trip. He will never be an imitator, he will never be a dull and dead person. He will be so alive, so pulsating with life that nobody will be able to control him.
Destroy his trust and you have castrated him. You have taken his power. Now he will always be powerless and always in need of somebody to dominate, direct, and command him. Now he will be a good soldier, a good citizen, a good nationalist, a good Christian, a good Mohammedan, a good Hindu. Yes, he will be all these things, but he will not be a real individual. He will not have any roots; he will be uprooted his whole life. He will live without roots, and to live without roots is to live in misery, is to live in hell.
Just as trees need roots in the earth, man is also a tree and needs roots in existence or else he will live a very unintelligent life. He may succeed in the world, he may become very famous …
Just the other day, I was reading a story:
Three surgeons, old friends, met on holiday. On the beach, sitting under the sun, they started boasting. The first said, “I came across a man who had lost both of his legs in the war. I gave him artificial legs, and it has been a miracle. Now he has become one of the greatest runners in the world! There is every possibility that in the next coming Olympics he is going to win.”
The other said, “That’s nothing. I came across a woman who fell from a thirty-story building: her face was completely crushed. I did a great job of plastic surgery. Now just the other day I came to know through the newspapers that she has become the world beauty queen.”
The third was a humble man. They both looked at him and asked, “What have you done lately? What’s new?”
The man said, “Nothing much—and moreover, I am not allowed to say anything about it.”
Both his colleagues became more curious. They said, “But we are friends, we can keep your secret. You need not be worried, it will not leak out.”
So he said, “Okay, if you say so, if you promise. A man was brought to me: he had lost his head in a car accident. I was at a loss to know what to do. I rushed into my garden just to think what to do, and suddenly I came across a cabbage. Finding nothing else, I transplanted the cabbage in place of the head. And do you know what? That man has become the prime minister of India.”
You can destroy the child, still he can become the prime minister of India! There is no inherent impossibility of becoming successful without intelligence. In fact it is more difficult to become successful with intelligence, because the intelligent person is inventive. He is always ahead of his time; it takes time to understand him. The unintelligent person is easily understood. He fits with the gestalt of the society; the society has values and criteria by which to judge him. But it takes years for the society to evaluate a genius.
I am not saying that a person who has no intelligence cannot become successful, cannot become famous—but still he will remain phony. And that is the misery: you can become famous, but if you are phony you live in misery. You don’t know what blessings life is showering on you, you will never know. You do not have enough intelligence to know. You will never see the beauty of existence because you don’t have the sensitivity to know it. You will never see the sheer miracle that surrounds you, that crosses your path in millions of ways every day. You will never see it, because to see it you need a tremendous capacity to understand, to feel, to be.
This society is a power-oriented society. This society is still utterly primitive, utterly barbarous. A few people—politicians, priests, professors—a few people are dominating millions. And this society is run in such a way that no child is allowed to have intelligence. It is a sheer accident that once in a while a Buddha arrives on the earth—a sheer accident. Somehow, once in a while, a person escapes from the clutches of the society. Once in a while a person remains unpoisoned by the society. That must be because of some error, some mistake of the society. Otherwise the society succeeds in destroying your roots, in destroying your trust in yourself. And once that is done, you will never be able to trust anybody.
Once you are incapable of loving yourself, you will never be able to love anybody. That is an absolute truth, there are no exceptions to it. You can love others only if you are able to love yourself.
But the society condemns self-love. It says it is selfishness, it says it is narcissistic. Yes, self-love can become narcissistic but it is not necessarily so. It can become narcissistic if it never moves beyond itself, it can become a kind of selfishness if it becomes confined to yourself. Otherwise, self-love is the beginning of all other loves.
A person who loves himself sooner or later starts overflowing with love. A person who trusts himself cannot distrust anybody—even those who are going to deceive him, even those who have already deceived him. Yes, he cannot even distrust them, because now he knows trust is far more valuable than anything else. You can cheat a person—but in what can you cheat him? You can take some money or something else from him. But the man who knows the beauty of trust will not be distracted by these small things. He will still love you, he will still trust you. And then a miracle happens: if a man really trusts you, it is impossible to cheat him, almost impossible.
It happens every day in your life, too. Whenever you trust somebody it becomes impossible for him to cheat you, to deceive you. Sitting on the platform in a railway station, you don’t know the person who is sitting by your side—a stranger, a complete stranger—and you say to him, “Just watch my luggage, I have to go to purchase a ticket. Please, just take care of the luggage.” And you go. You trust an absolute stranger. But it almost never happens that the stranger deceives you. He could have deceived you if you had not trusted him. Trust has a magic in it. How can he deceive you now that you have trusted him? How can he fall so low? He will never be able to forgive himself if he deceives you.
There is an intrinsic quality in human consciousness to trust and to be trusted. Everybody enjoys being trusted. It is respect from the other person, and when you trust a stranger it is more so. There is no reason to trust him, and still you trust him. You raise the man to such a high pedestal, you value the man so much, it is almost impossible for him to fall from that height. And if he falls he will never be able to forgive himself; he will have to carry the weight of guilt his whole life.
One who trusts himself comes to know the beauty of it—comes to know that the more you trust yourself the more you bloom. The more you are in a state of let-go and relaxation the more you are settled and serene, the more you are calm, cool, and quiet. And it is so beautiful that you start trusting more and more people, because the more you trust the more your calmness deepens, your coolness goes deeper and deeper to the very core of your being. And the more you trust the more you soar high. One who can trust will sooner or later know the logic of trust. And then, one day, he is bound to try to trust the unknown.
Start trusting yourself—that is the first thing. That’s what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in you about yourself.
Start trusting yourself—that is the first thing. That’s what my work here is: to destroy the distrust that has been created in you about yourself, to destroy all condemnation that has been imposed on you, to take it away from you and to give you a feeling that you are loved and respected, loved by existence. God has created you because he loved you. He loved you so much that he could not resist the temptation to create you.
When a painter paints, he paints because he loves. When a poet composes a song it is because he loves it. God has painted you, sung you, danced you. God loves you! And if you don’t see any meaning in the word God don’t be worried—call it existence, call it the whole.
Existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here.
Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole.
Existence loves you, otherwise you would not be here.
Relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole. That’s why the whole goes on breathing in you, pulsating in you. Once you start feeling this tremendous respect and love and trust of the whole in you, you will start growing roots into your being. You will trust yourself. Only then can you trust me; only then can you trust your friends, your children, your husband, your wife. Only then can you trust the trees and the animals and the stars and the moon. Then one simply lives as trust. It is no longer a question of trusting this or that; one simply trusts. And to trust is simply to be religious.
That’s what sannyas is all about. Sannyas is going to undo all that the society has done. It is not just accidental that priests are against me, politicians are against me, parents are against me, the whole establishment is against me—it is not accidental. I can understand the absolutely clear logic of it. I am trying to undo what they have done. I am sabotaging the whole pattern of this slave society. My effort is to create rebels, and the beginning of the rebel is to trust in oneself. If I can help you to trust in yourself, I have helped you. Nothing else is needed, everything else follows of its own accord.
DOUBT IS YOUR FRIEND
Inquiry is a risk. It is moving into the unknown. One does not know what is going to happen. One leaves everything that one is acquainted with, is comfortable with, and one moves into the unknown, not even perfectly certain whether there is anything on the other shore, or even whether there is another shore.
So people cling either to theism, or those who are a little stronger, intellectual, the intelligentsia—they cling to atheism. But both are escapes from doubt. And to escape from doubt is to escape from inquiry—because what is doubt? It is only a question mark. It is not your enemy. It is simply a question mark within you which prepares you to inquire.
Doubt is your friend.
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FAITH IS AFRAID OF DOUBT—afraid because it has repressed it. Whatever you repress you will remain afraid of, because it is always there deep inside you waiting to take revenge, and whenever the opportunity arises it is going to explode in you with vengeance. Your faith sits on an earthquake, and every day the doubt becomes stronger because every day you have to repress it. Sooner or later it is more than you can repress, it is more powerful than your faith. Then it simply throws your faith away.
But trust is not afraid of doubt because trust is not against doubt. Trust uses doubt, trust knows how to use the energy contained in doubt itself. That’s the difference between faith and trust. Faith is false; it creates a pseudo kind of religion, it creates hypocrites. Trust has a sublime beauty and truth about it. It grows through doubt, it uses doubt as manure, it transforms doubt. Doubt is a friend, doubt is not the enemy.
Doubt is a friend, doubt is not the enemy.
And unless your trust has moved through many doubts, it will remain impotent.
And unless your trust has moved through many doubts, it will remain impotent. From where will it gather strength, from where will it gather integration? If there is no challenge it is bound to remain weak. Doubt is a challenge. If your trust can respond to the challenge, can befriend your doubt, it will grow through it. And you will not be a split person, deep down doubting and just on the surface faithful, believing. You will have a kind of unity, you will be an individual, undivided. And that individuality is what is called “soul” in the old religions.
The soul is arrived at through doubt, not through believing. Belief is just a mask: you are hiding your original face. Trust is a transformation: you are becoming more illumined. And because you are using doubt as a challenge, as an opportunity, there is never any repression. Slowly, slowly, doubt disappears because its energy has been taken by trust.
Doubt, in fact, is nothing but trust growing. Doubt is trust on the way. Always think of doubt in such a way: that doubt is trust on the way. Doubt is inquiry, and trust is the fulfillment of the inquiry. Doubt is the question and trust is the answer. The answer is not against the question—there will be no possibility of any answer if there is no question—the question has created the occasion for the answer to happen.
All the so-called religions exist on your guilt, they don’t exist on the existence of God. They have nothing to do with God, and God has nothing to do with them. They exist on your guilt.
So, please, never feel guilty around me. I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Guilt is absolutely wrong. But it has been used by the priests and the politicians and the puritans down the ages, for centuries. Guilt is a strategy, a strategy to exploit people, to make them feel guilty. Once you have succeeded in making them feel guilty, they will be your slaves. Because of the guilt they will never be integrated enough. Because of the guilt they will remain divided. Because of the guilt they will never be able to accept themselves, they will be always condemning. Because of the guilt they will be ready to believe in anything just to get rid of guilt. They will do anything, any nonsense ritual they will perform just to get rid of the guilt. Down the centuries the priest has made people guilty. All the so-called religions exist on your guilt, they don’t exist on the existence of God. They have nothing to do with God, and God has nothing to do with them. They exist on your guilt.
You are afraid, you know that you are wrong: you have to seek the help of somebody who is not wrong. You know that you are unworthy: you have to bow down, you have to serve those who are worthy. You know that you cannot trust yourself, because you are divided. Only an undivided person can trust himself, his feeling, his intuition. You are always shaking, trembling inside; you need somebody to lean on. And once you lean on somebody, once you become dependent on somebody, you remain childish, you never grow. Your mental age remains that of a child. You never attain to any maturity, you never become independent. And the priest does not want you to become independent. Independent and you are lost to him; dependent and you are his whole marketplace, his whole business.
I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Remember it always: if you start feeling guilty about something around me, then you are doing it on your own. Then you are still carrying the voices of your parents, the priests within you; you have not yet heard me, you have not yet listened to me. I want you to be totally free of all guilt.
Once you are free of guilt, you are a religious person. That’s my definition of a religious person. Use doubt—doubt is beautiful, because it is only through doubt that the trust attains to maturity. How can it be otherwise? It has to be beautiful; it is only through doubt that the trust becomes centered. It is only through doubt that the trust flowers, blooms. It is the dark night of doubt that brings the golden morning closer to you. The dark night is not against the dawn, the dark night is the womb for the dawn. The dawn is getting ready in the very being of the dark night.
Think of doubt and trust as complementary: just as man and woman are, just as night and day, summer and winter, life and death. Always think of those pairs in terms of inevitable complementariness, never think in terms of opposition. Even though on the surface they seem to be opposed, deep down they are friends, helping each other. Think of a person who has no trust: he will not have any doubt either, because he has nothing to doubt about. Just think of a person who has no trust at all—how can he doubt, what has he to doubt? Only a man of trust has something to doubt. Because you trust, hence you doubt. Your doubt proves your trust, not otherwise. Think of a person who cannot doubt—how can he trust? If he is even incapable of doubt, how can he be capable of trust?
Trust is the highest form of the same energy as doubt. Doubt is the lowest rung of the ladder, and trust is the highest rung of the same ladder. Use doubt, use it joyfully.
Trust is the highest form of the same energy as doubt. Doubt is the lowest rung of the ladder, and trust is the highest rung of the same ladder. Use doubt, use it joyfully. There is no need to feel guilty at all. It is perfectly human and natural to feel great doubts about me sometimes, and great doubts about what is going on here. It is perfectly human, there is nothing extraordinary in it. If it doesn’t happen, then something seems to be abnormal. But remember that one has to reach to the trust. Use doubt, but don’t forget the goal, don’t forget the highest rung of the ladder. Even if you are standing on the lowest, look at the highest. You have to reach there. In fact, doubt is pushing you toward that because nobody can feel at ease with doubt.
Have you not watched it? When there is doubt there is uneasiness. Don’t change that uneasiness, don’t interpret that uneasiness as guilt. Yes, uneasiness is there because doubt means you are uncertain of the ground you are standing on. Doubt means you are ambiguous, doubt means you are not yet a unity. How can you be at ease? You are a crowd; you are not one person, you are many persons. How can you be at ease? There must be great noise inside you, one part pulling you in this direction and another part in that direction. How can you grow if you are pulled in so many directions simultaneously? There is bound to be unease, tension, anguish, anxiety.
Nobody can live with doubt and in doubt. Doubt pushes you toward trust. Doubt says, “Go and find a place where you can relax, where you can be, totally.” Doubt is your friend. It simply says, “This is not the home. Go ahead, search, seek, inquire.” It creates the urge to inquire, to explore.
Once you start seeing doubt as a friend, as an occasion not against trust but pushing you toward it, suddenly guilt disappears. There is great joy. Even when you doubt, you doubt joyously, you doubt consciously, and you use doubt to find trust. It is absolutely normal.
FAITH IS GIVEN, TRUST IS A GROWTH
The so-called religious people have never trusted human nature. They talk about trust, but they have never trusted existence. They trust rules, laws; they never trust love. They talk about God, but the talk is just empty talk. They trust in the police, in the courts. They trust in hellfire. They trust in creating fear and in creating greed. If you are saintly and good and moral, you will have heaven and all the pleasures of paradise, firdaus. Or, if you are not moral, then you will suffer hellfire—and eternally, remember, forever and forever.
These are fear and greed. They have been manipulating the human mind through fear and greed. They want you to become free of fear and greed—and their whole teaching is rooted in it! They don’t trust.
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BELIEF IS FROM THE HEAD, TRUST IS FROM THE HEART. Their qualities are different, altogether different, diametrically opposite. Never become part of a belief system: never become a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Jaina or a Buddhist. When you become part of a belief system, you are becoming a slave.
Doubt and belief are not different; they are two sides of the same coin. This has to be understood first, because people think that when they believe they have gone beyond doubt.
Belief is the same as doubt because both are mind concerns. Your mind argues, says no, finds no proof to enable you to say yes—so you doubt. Then your mind finds arguments to say yes, proof to say yes, and you believe. But in both cases you believe in reason; in both cases you believe in arguments. The difference is just on the surface: deep down, you believe in the reasoning.
Trust is dropping out of reasoning. It is mad, it is irrational, it is absurd!
And remember, trust is not faith. Trust is a personal encounter. Faith is again given and borrowed, it is a conditioning. Faith is a conditioning that your parents, your culture, and your society give you. You don’t bother about it, you don’t make it a personal concern. It is a given thing—and that which is given, which has not been a personal growth in you, is just a façade. It is a false face, a Sunday face. On six days you are one way, and then you enter church and you put on a mask. See how people behave in church—so gently, so humanly … the same people! Even a murderer comes to church and prays, and you can see his face: it looks so beautiful and innocent, and this man has killed people. In church you have a proper face to use, and you know how to use it. It has been a conditioning. From the very childhood it has been given to you.
Faith is given, trust is a growth.
When you cannot understand, when you are ignorant, the whole society says, “Have faith.” I will say to you that it is better to doubt than to have a false faith. It is better to doubt, because doubt will create misery. Faith is a consolation; doubt will create misery. And if there is misery, you will have to seek trust.
This is the problem, the dilemma that has happened in the world. Because of faith, you have forgotten how to seek trust. Because of faith, you have become trustless. Because of faith you carry corpses—you are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, and you miss the whole point. Because of faith you think you are religious. Then the inquiry stops.
Honest doubt is better than dishonest faith. If your faith is false … and all faith is false if you have not grown into it, if it is not your feeling and your being and your experience. All faith is false!
Your faith is false: doubt is hidden deep down; just on the surface, a whitewash of faith is there.
Be honest—doubt, suffer. Only suffering will bring you to understanding. If you suffer truly, one day or another you will understand that it is doubt that is making you suffer. And then the transformation becomes possible.
Your faith is false: doubt is hidden deep down; just on the surface, a whitewash of faith is there. Deep down you are doubtful, but you are afraid to know that you are doubtful so you go on clinging to faith; you go on making gestures of faith. You can make gestures, but through gestures you cannot attain to reality. You can go and bow down in a shrine—you are making the gesture of a person who trusts—but you will not grow, because deep down there is no trust, only doubt. Faith is just superimposed.
It is just like kissing a person you don’t love. From the outside everything is the same, you are making the gesture of kissing. No scientist can find any difference. If you kiss a person, the photograph, the physiological phenomenon, the transfer of millions of germs from one lip to another, everything is exactly the same whether you love or not. If a scientist watches and observes, what will be the difference? No difference, not even a single iota of difference—the scientist will say both are kisses and exactly the same. But you know that when you love a person, then something of the invisible passes between you that cannot be detected by any instrument. When you don’t love a person, then you can give the kiss but nothing passes between you. No energy communication, no communion happens.
The same is with faith and trust. Trust is a kiss with love, with a deeply loving heart, and faith is a kiss without any love.
So, from where to begin? The first thing is to inquire into the doubt. Throw out the false faith. Become an honest doubter, sincere. Your sincerity will help, because if you are honest how can you miss the point that doubt creates suffering? If you are sincere, you are bound to know. Sooner or later you will come to realize that doubt has been creating more misery: the more you go into doubt, the more misery. And one grows only through misery.
When you come to a point where misery becomes impossible to tolerate, intolerable, you drop it. Not that really you drop it; the very intolerability becomes the drop. And once you have suffered through it and there is no doubt, you start moving toward trust.
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WHENEVER YOU ARE TRUSTING, YOU WILL BE RELAXED. And whenever you allow any doubt, you will become tense in the heart—because the heart relaxes with trust and shrinks with doubt.
Ordinarily people are not aware of it. In fact they continuously remain shrunken and contracted at the heart, so they have forgotten how it feels to be relaxed there. Knowing no opposite, they think that everything is okay. But out of one hundred persons, ninety-nine live with a contracted heart.
The more you are in the head, the more the heart contracts. When you are not in the head, the heart opens like a lotus flower … and it is tremendously beautiful when it opens. Then you are really alive, and the heart is relaxed. But the heart can only be relaxed in trust, in love. With suspicion, with doubt, the mind enters. Doubt is the door of the mind.
It is like bait—you go fishing and you put out bait—doubt is the bait for the mind. Once you are caught in doubt, you are caught with the mind. So when doubt comes, it is not worth it.
I’m not saying that your doubt is always wrong; that I’m not saying. I’m the last person to say that. Your doubt may be perfectly right. But then too it is wrong, because it destroys your heart. It is not worth it.
For example, you are staying in a strange room with somebody, a stranger, and you have doubts as to whether he is a thief or unreliable. Is it okay to sleep with this man in the room? Even if he is a robber or even if he is a murderer, then too the doubt is not worthwhile. It is better to die in trust than to live in doubt. It is better to be robbed in trust than to become a millionaire in doubt. A person who robs your riches robs nothing. But if you doubt, you lose your heart.
It is better to be robbed in trust than to become a millionaire in doubt. A person who robs your riches robs nothing. But if you doubt, you lose your heart.
So when I say trust, I don’t mean that trust will always prove right; I’m not saying that. Many times trust will put you into many difficult situations, because the more you trust, the more vulnerable you become. And the more you trust, the more you become a victim of people who are ready to deceive. They want trusting people, otherwise they will not be able to deceive anybody. But still, I say, be deceived. That is not as costly as being doubtful. If one has to choose, and there are only two alternatives—to be deceived or to be doubtful—it is better to be deceived. Once this is decided, then doubt cannot catch you.
Doubt is powerful because it gives you cleverness. Doubt is powerful because it says to you, “You will be unprotected—I will protect you.” The doubt says, “I am not against trust—trust, but first observe. First be doubtful, and then trust. When you are convinced that there is no possibility of being deceived, then trust.”
Doubt never says, “I am against trust.” No, doubt always says, “In fact I am trying to help you to find someone to trust. I am just a servant to you. If you listen to me, you will be able to find somebody whom you can trust.” But you will never find the right person, because once you have become accustomed to doubt, it is a chronic thing. Even if you come face-to-face with God you will continue doubting. It has nothing to do with the person outside—it is just that you have a habit. You cannot relax it immediately. If you have been protecting it and watching it and feeding it for your whole life, you cannot just put it aside.
Many times trust will create very insecure situations, will lead you on dangerous paths. You will become more vulnerable, will be easily cheated and deceived. But still I say that whatsoever the cost, trust is the only treasure to be protected. And when you understand this, your heart will immediately show you if something is going wrong with your system. You will be able to feel trust and doubt, and their impact on you.
Whenever you feel that something is contracting in the heart, immediately look inside—doubt has arisen somewhere. Somewhere, you have lost contact with your trust. Somewhere you are no longer in tune with life; you have become separate. Doubt separates—trust unites. And when you are united the heart flows well, in a rhythm, harmonious.
That’s what I call being holy. To be in the heart, and the heart flowering, that’s what a holy man is. To be in the head—calculating, clever—is to be unholy.
TRUST CANNOT BE CULTIVATED
The hypocrite is the most immoral person there is, because he pretends one thing and he is something else. He has a face to show to people and a different reality hiding behind. He lives through masks. He has destroyed the natural, the spontaneous, because he believes in cultivation, in “civilizing.” He believes that people should be forced to be good.
Now, there is no way to force anybody to be good. In fact, if you force anybody to be good you are forcing him to be bad—if he has any guts he will rebel against you. If he has any intelligence he will react against you, he will become just the opposite of what you wanted him to be.
Unless obedience comes from your inner being, out of love and trust, it is ugly. But when it comes from within your heart, it is not obedience at all—you are not following anybody else, you are following yourself.
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A CULTIVATED TRUST WILL NOT BE TRUST; it will be false, it will be insincere. It will just be on the surface; it will never touch your center. Whatsoever is cultivated remains superficial, because whatsoever is cultivated remains of the mind. Trust cannot be cultivated, just as love cannot be cultivated: you can’t teach people how to love. Dangerous will be the days when people are taught how to love, because they will learn the lesson, they will repeat it accurately—it will be technological but it will not be of the heart.
Anything that belongs to the depth has to come out of its own accord. Then what to do? The only thing that can be done is to remove hindrances. Trust cannot be brought out; hindrances can be removed. When there is no hindrance, it comes, it flows. Trust cannot be cultivated; doubts can be dropped.
So one has to understand the doubting mind, the very mechanism of doubt, why you doubt. One has to see through and through why one doubts, because doubt is the hindrance. When doubt disappears, suddenly trust is there. It has always been there. Only a rock was hindering the path, and the fountain could not flow. You come with trust. Every child is born with trust, every child is trusting, so trust need not be cultivated. That’s how everybody is born: it is inbuilt. You are trust.
But by and by, the child learns how to doubt. We teach, in fact—the society, the family, the school, the university, they all teach how to doubt. Because unless you doubt, you cannot be very clever and cunning; unless you doubt, you cannot be left in this great world of competition: you will be destroyed. So doubt has to be learned; and once you learn it, by and by, trust is forgotten. It remains deep within you, but you cannot reach to it—too many obstacles. You cannot cultivate it; it cannot be taught. The only thing is, you have to reverse the process—you have learned doubt, now unlearn it.
Trust was there, trust is there, trust will be there. All that has to be done is to be done with doubt; nothing is to be done with trust. Why do you doubt? Why are you so afraid?—because doubt means fear. Whenever you love somebody, you don’t doubt, because fear disappears. Whenever there is love, fear is not. But when you don’t love, you doubt; when you don’t know a person, you doubt more—a stranger, then you doubt even more; unfamiliar, unknown, then you doubt more. Whenever there is fear, there is doubt. Deep down, doubt is fear. If you go still deeper, doubt is death, because you are afraid of death. And it seems that everybody is trying to kill you—fighting, everybody competitive, everybody trying to push you aside, dethrone you. Doubt is death.
The whole mechanism has to be understood. Then what to do? Why is one afraid of death? You have never known death. You may have seen somebody else dying, but you have never seen death. When somebody is dying, do you really know that he is dying, or is he simply disappearing into some other world? Doubt is without base; fear is without base—it is just an assumption of the mind. When somebody dies, do you think he is dying, or simply disappearing into another world, moving to another plane of life, or to another body? You will have to know it in deep meditation. When thinking stops, suddenly you see that you are separate from the body.
I teach meditation, because meditation doesn’t require trust as a basic necessity. Meditation is a science, not a superstition.
So I don’t say trust first; I say meditate first. That is the difference between meditation and prayer. People who teach prayer, they say, “Trust first, otherwise how can you pray?” Trust is needed as a basic condition, otherwise how can you pray? If you don’t trust God, how can you pray? I teach meditation, because meditation doesn’t require trust as a basic necessity. Meditation is a science, not a superstition. Meditation says you experiment with your mind—it is too full of thoughts; thoughts can be dispersed, the clouds can be dispersed, and you can attain to an empty sky of your inner being. And it needs no trust—just a little courage, a little effort, a little daring, a little persistence and perseverance, a little patience, yes, but no trust. You don’t believe in God? That is not a hindrance to meditation. You don’t believe in a soul? That is not a hindrance in meditation. You don’t believe at all? That is not an obstacle. You can meditate, because meditation simply says how to go withinward: whether there is a soul or not doesn’t matter; whether there is a God or not doesn’t matter.
One thing is certain: that you are. Whether you will be after death, or not, does not matter. Only one thing matters: right this moment, you are. Who are you? To enter into it is meditation: to go deeper into your own being. Maybe it is just momentary; maybe you are not eternal; maybe death finishes everything: we don’t make any condition that you have to believe. We say only that you have to experiment. Just try. One day it happens: thoughts are not there, and suddenly when thoughts disappear, the body and you are separate, because thoughts are the bridge. Through thoughts you are joined with the body; it is the link. Suddenly the link disappears—you are there, the body is there, and there is an infinite abyss between the two. Then you know that the body will die, but you cannot die.
Then it is not something like a dogma; it is not a creed, it is an experience, self-evident. On that day, death disappears; on that day, doubt disappears, because now you are not always to be defending yourself. Nobody can destroy you; you are indestructible. Then trust arises, overflows. And to be in trust is to be in ecstasy; to be in trust is to be in God; to be in trust is to be fulfilled.
I don’t say cultivate trust. I say experiment with meditation.
So I don’t say cultivate trust. I say experiment with meditation. From another angle try to understand it. Doubt means thinking. The more you doubt, the more you can think. All great thinkers are skeptical—have to be. Skepticism creates thinking. When you say no, then thinking arises; if you say yes, finished—there is no need to think. When you say no, then you have to think. Thinking is negative. Doubt is a basic necessity for thinking. People who cannot doubt, cannot think; they cannot become great thinkers. So, more doubt means more thinking, more thinking means more doubt. Meditation is a way to come out of thinking. Once the clouds of thoughts are not there, and the process of thinking ceases, even for a single moment, you have a glimpse of your being.
One of the greatest thinkers in the West, Descartes, has said, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. And Descartes is the father of modern Western philosophy: “I think, therefore I am.” Just the opposite has been the experience in the East. Buddha, Nagarjuna, Sankara, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, they will laugh, they will laugh tremendously when they hear Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am”; because they say, “I don’t think, therefore I am.” Because when thinking ceases, only then does one know who one is. In a nonthinking state of consciousness one realizes one’s being, not by thinking, but by nonthinking. Meditation is nonthinking; it is an effort to create a state of no-mind. Doubt is mind. In fact, to say “doubting mind” is wrong, it is repetitive. Mind is doubt; doubt is mind. When doubt ceases, mind ceases; or when mind ceases, doubt ceases. And then self-evident truth arises within, a pinnacle of light, eternity, timelessness; and then there is trust.
Right now how can you trust? Right now you don’t know who you are—how can you trust? And you ask, “Can trust be cultivated?” Never. Never try to cultivate it. Many have done that foolishness. Then they become false, inauthentic, pseudo. It is better to be a naysayer, but sincere, because there is at least a possibility, through sincerity, that someday you may become an authentic yea-sayer. But never say yes until it arises from within and overwhelms you.
The whole world is full of pseudo-religious people: churches, temples, gurdwaras, mosques full of religious people. And can’t you see the world is absolutely irreligious? With so many religious people, and the world is so irreligious, how is this miracle happening? Everybody is religious, and the total is irreligiousness. The religion is false. People have cultivated trust. Trust has become a belief, not an experience. They have been taught to believe; they have not been taught to know—that’s where humanity has missed. Never believe. If you cannot trust, it is better to doubt, because through doubt, some day or other, the possibility will arise … because you cannot live with doubt eternally. Doubt is disease; it is an illness. In doubt you can never feel fulfilled; in doubt you will always tremble, in doubt you will always remain in anguish and divided and indecisive. In doubt you will remain in a nightmare; so one day or other you will start seeking how to go beyond it. So I say it is good to be an atheist rather than a theist, a pseudo-theist.
All beliefs are borrowed; others have given them to you. They are not your flowerings. And how can a borrowed thing lead you toward the real, the absolutely real?
You have been taught to believe. From the very childhood, everybody’s mind has been conditioned to believe: believe in God, believe in the soul, believe in this and believe in that. Now that belief has entered into your bones and your blood, but it remains a belief: you have not known. And unless you know, you cannot be liberated. Knowledge liberates; only knowing liberates. All beliefs are borrowed; others have given them to you. They are not your flowerings. And how can a borrowed thing lead you toward the real, the absolutely real? Drop all that you have taken from others. It is better to be a beggar than to be rich, rich not by your own earning but rich through stolen goods; rich through borrowed things, rich through tradition, rich through heritage. No, it is better to be a beggar but to be on one’s own. That poverty has a richness in it because it is true, and your richness of belief is very poor. Those beliefs can never go very deep; they remain skin-deep at the most. Scratch a little, and the disbelief comes out.
You believe in God. Then your business fails, and suddenly, the disbelief is there. You say, “I don’t believe, I cannot believe in God.” You believe in God, and your beloved dies, and the disbelief comes up. You believe in God, and just by the death of your beloved the belief is destroyed? It is not worth much. Trust can never be destroyed—once it is there, nothing can destroy it; nothing, absolutely nothing can destroy it.
So remember, there is a great difference between trust and belief. Trust is personal; belief is social. Trust you have to grow in; belief you can remain in, whatsoever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop beliefs. The fear will be there; because if you drop belief, doubt arises. Each belief is forcing doubt somewhere, repressing doubt. Don’t be worried about it; let the doubt come. Everybody has to pass through a dark night before he reaches the sunrise. Everybody has to pass through doubt. Long is the journey, dark is the night. But when after the long journey and the dark night the morning arises, then you know it was all worthwhile. Trust cannot be cultivated. And never try to cultivate it—that is what has been done by the whole of humanity.
Cultivated trust becomes belief. Discover it within yourself, don’t cultivate it. Go deeper into your being, to the very source of your being, and discover it.
Copyright © 2017 by Osho International Foundation
