Trust

I. #

I had just ended our Sunday sangha, and people were coming up to ask me questions they were not comfortable voicing in front of the whole group, when I noticed one yogi who was hanging back patiently waiting for everyone else to finish. She was a serious student of the dharma with lots of retreat experience but was new to the sangha. When we were finally alone, she explained that she had recently been betrayed in a relationship and kept getting upset with her lover about what had happened. She was also feeling distrustful of her boss who had a pattern of acting unfairly and was worried about her job. It was making her miserable. “I place a lot of importance on being able to trust someone,” she said, “but from a spiritual perspective isn’t trust just a disguised form of clinging?” She frowned, shook her head, and continued, “Aren’t I really just wanting people to behave in a certain way and using trust to hide how much I am clinging to future outcomes? Shouldn’t I stop caring so much if someone is trustworthy, if I truly want to learn nonattachment?” Her voice broke as she stood there waiting for an answer to her questions.

The yogi was asking herself an important dharma question, but she was jumbling together two separate perspectives on trust without realizing it. Her pain and confusion were the inevitable result. If you stop and reflect, you may discover you too lack clarity around issues of trust. You may have trouble trusting others in particular situations because of past disappointments, or you may not trust yourself in certain ways. Worse still, you may experience others not trusting you at times and may even recognize justification for this lack of trust. If you are like many people, you may go to great lengths to avoid facing your issues of trust because they are simply too unpleasant. Yet having a healthy, balanced sense of trust is bedrock for being truly alive, and when it is lacking, the ground of your existence is shaky.

This is what was so heartening about the yogi and her question–she was willing to face up to her uncertainty about trust, no matter how painful. In doing so she was embodying the first quality necessary for strengthening trust: courage, courage to be with your feelings just as they are without self-judgment or rationalization.

Finding Freedom In Trust #

In common usage, the word “trust” refers to relying on someone or something for a future action. The dictionary defines trust as having a confident dependence on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. From this perspective trust is a contingent emotional feeling, highly conditional in nature and subject to reappraisal. While the Buddha and other spiritual teachers did not reject this conditional view of trust, they also understood trust as a means for finding freedom from the endless cycle of fear and wanting. The Buddha taught that the only way “not to be assailed by past and future” was to be mindfully present moment-to-moment in your life, without attachment to the outcome of your actions. Living in this manner is to trust in the eternal now, and that is the one trust that matters most.

How this spiritual understanding of trust intersects with the issues of daily life is what was confusing the yogi. She trusted the dharma and wanted to apply the principle of nonattachment, but she had feelings about her lover and her boss to be reconciled. Were these feelings just illusions? Furthermore, how was she to act around each of these people? The same questions apply in your personal and professional relationships. You, like everyone else, have to navigate through the exchanges of life. For instance, if you go to a mechanic to have the brakes in your car repaired, how does trust fit in? You need to trust the mechanic to be reliable; otherwise, you and others could be injured or killed. What about price? Do you pay whatever the mechanic asks, trusting him to be fair? To resolve such questions, it is helpful to make distinctions in the kind of “trusting” you are doing in any situation.

Building Transactional Trust #

Trust usually refers to what might be termed “transactional trust,” in which you are counting on a future result to occur. Transactional trust is a time-centric, emotional view of the past and future. It is largely performance based, involves an agreed-upon exchange, and is measured by outcome.

When you take your car to the garage to have the brakes repaired, you are relying on the mechanic to genuinely fix them. If for some reason he does not, you are justifiably upset, and if he did not do so because of negligence, you have a valid reason for taking action to rectify the situation. It is also appropriate to be mindful of whether the price seems fair, and if not, to go elsewhere.

In engaging in transactional trust, you are participating in the building of community, which only works if there is a general feeling of trust, although such feelings need not be perfect. Transactional trust is based on mutual self-interest and involves acting according to common agreement. Life would be literally impossible without such trust, and it must come from the people in the community, as no government is strong enough to enforce it. You count on this trust for food, medicine, safety, and all the material necessities of life.

You also engage in transactional trust in personal relationships. I will do the dishes if you will put the baby to bed. We will share the checking account, but neither will abuse it. I will treat you with respect; you will treat me with respect. I can trust you with my secrets; you can trust me with yours. Transactional trust is the underpinning of personal life. The same is true in the workplace. Every company is dependent on trusting its employees, and employees need to be able to trust management.

Imagine that life at its core is a web formed of trust that we each rely upon for support and that each of us creates new strands of trust for the web throughout the day. When we fail to do so, the web that supports us weakens. Viewed this way, transactional trust itself becomes a spiritual practice, one of character building through intention and discipline, which refines our very being while joining us with others. However, the web of trust is delicate and easily torn. When this happens in a business or personal relationship, a community or a country, transactional trust is replaced by adversarial advantage seeking–the-dog-eat-dog, only-the-fittest-survive mind-set. When trust falls into shadow, there is little generosity, and the only restraint is that which is imposed by law.

Surrendering To Innate Trust #

Even when understood in its profoundest sense as character and community building, transactional trust itself does not lead to liberation. It does not bring ultimate clarity of mind and peacefulness of heart, although it is a necessary foundation for an inner sense of freedom. True transformation is only found when you commit yourself to what may be termed “innate trust.”

Innate trust is based on the understanding that if you live mindfully moment-to-moment and have the intention to act according to your values even in difficult or confusing situations, your life will unfold in the most harmonious manner possible. When the yogi asked her difficult questions, she was intuitively grappling with the possibility of this deeper understanding of trust. Innate trust is not based on the future performance of another. It is not measured in clock time, but in the eternal now that is referenced in many spiritual traditions. You surrender measuring your life by future outcomes, concentrating instead on how well you are able to be present in this moment.

Implicit in innate trust is the understanding that external conditions are in the end not a reliable source of happiness or meaning because they are always changing. You don’t get what you want, or you get it and then it goes away or you no longer want it, or else something happens to you and you can no longer enjoy it. Innate trust accepts the hard facts of life that things are always changing in this manner, the future is uncertain, and wants and fears are endless.

With innate trust you have the strength to stay with the experiences of your life whether or not you have a strong feeling of transactional trust. Take the previous example of the car mechanic scenario. Let’s suppose he intimidates you, or you feel that he may have overcharged you. With innate trust you have the strength to stay present despite feeling intimidated or uncertain. You speak and act appropriately, not out of fear of being cheated, but in seeking clarity and honesty. If in fact you were cheated, it does not ruin your day; rather, it is just a moment of unpleasantness you have to deal with. You have confidence in the “beingness” of your existence, even when the “doingness” of your existence is not going well.

This sense of being is the real basis for freedom in life. It is not that transactional trust is to be abandoned; you continue to function in this manner. But as your inner life matures, what matters more and more is how you are being with whatever life brings you. While you certainly don’t want to be betrayed by a lover or a friend or let down by a boss, what really matters is how you are inside. This is the distinction the yogi was grappling with in her examination of trust. She had realized that the manner in which she was approaching trust was somehow limiting her, choking her sense of aliveness and freedom. In her confusion she thought she might have to abandon trust, when in fact what she needed was more trust but of a different kind.

The poet T.S. Eliot captured the essence of innate trust in these lines from Four Quartets: “Love is most nearly itself when here and now ceases to matter.” He is not talking about indifference to the here and now but rather the willingness to be with life without attachment to outcome. It is important to understand that this does not mean caring less. You can afford to care more, to be vulnerable, and to meet difficulty in life directly because it is your ability to care, to love, and to manifest your values that matters to you, not the outcome. You want to show up for what matters in your life and do your best to bring happiness. These intentions are the underpinnings of your life, what you place your trust in. You acknowledge outcomes to be ultimately beyond your control and at times they seem even beyond your comprehension.

Innate trust is a crucial ingredient in feeling related to others, be it a lover, friends, or family members. It is innate trust that allows you to love unselfishly. It is not that you trust your loved ones never to hurt you, for hurt and disappointment are part of the human experience. Rather, you trust their core goodness. In fact, you celebrate it by extending your trust. This trust is not based on a transactional outcome. You simply trust that however the relationship unfolds; your vulnerability to the other is a worthy act. The occasional disappointment is the cost of having a healthy sense of trust. When you meet someone who extends innate trust to you, you feel deep unconditional acceptance. You in turn can learn to do this for others. Keep in mind that this does not mean you’re supposed to abandon common sense or in any way become a victim of another’s abuses.

When you first start to examine your relationship to transactional and innate trust, you may question, “What is there about life that can be trusted?” I submit that the nature of life itself is reliable and can be trusted. For instance, you can bet certain humans will be true to the nature of their species, which is unpredictable, ever changing, both generous and self-centered. You may like the positive aspects of human beings and hate the negative, but they exist together in all of us; accepting that all people are like this relieves the pressure of looking for perfection in others or measuring your own.

You can also trust that life in general is ever changing and that the mixture of what is pleasant and unpleasant constantly shifts. Again, this provides relief from the pressure of getting your life just right or feeling like a failure when bad things happen.

I also submit that you can trust relying on your intentions to orient you in life, even in those moments when you are feeling confused. Intentions have to do with how you want to be in the journey of life; goals have to do with what you would like to accomplish. Goals are great for organizing how you spend your time, but they are not nearly as reliable a source for innate trust as your intentions are. Your intention is how you live in your own heart and mind right now. Goals are conceptual, a hypothetical future.

Imagine you are walking to the top of a mountain: You can affect how you take the next step, but you cannot affect the mountaintop. Not understanding the difference between intentions and goals is one of the key problems in maturing your relationship to trust. It may seem like a simple distinction, but in the course of your daily life you may well be repeatedly confusing the two and having many trust issues as a result.

Falling Prey To False Trust #

There is another kind of trust, which is often a major hindrance to developing innate trust. It is what I call “false” or “demand” trust. You already know false trust through your life experiences. I trust you to meet my needs. I trust you not to change. I trust you to be some other way than you are. You may laugh as you read these statements, but they are not funny for either person in a relationship. Demand trust is a form of aggression. When this emotional state is predominant in a personality, it can come from excessive fear or neediness, or it can be the trickery of a manipulative personality.

Demand trust is trying to force what can only be freely given. Ironically, it is actually distrust disguised as trust. The yogi described her boss as a person whose insecurities were so strong that he pulled others into the whirlpool of his fears. He constantly second-guessed his staff while telling them how much confidence he had in them.

What makes demand trust so damaging is that it can undermine the possibility of innate trust. If you can recognize false trust for what it is when you first encounter it, then it is not so debilitating, and you can either remove yourself from the situation or insist on a transactional discussion.

If you become paralyzed with the inability to trust yourself, either you may be falling prey to your own demand trust to be perfect or else you have not developed the strength of innate trust that enables you to tolerate being present when your own fears and insecurities are strong. If others feel as though they cannot trust you, you might ask yourself if it is because you make false promises out of fear, which indicates a lack of innate trust. Or are you untrustworthy because of insufficient inner discipline, which signifies a problem with transactional trust, as does the lack of commitment to honor your agreements. The third possibility is that you repeatedly succumb to demand trust such that you make agreements to be other than who you are. To find peace in life, both transactional and innate trust must be reconciled in your behavior.

While it is easy to know the pain of being subjected to demand trust, it is not so easy to recognize when you have unconsciously become the perpetrator and used trust as a weapon because of your own vulnerability. This is something most of us do on occasion. During my conversation with the yogi about her trust issue, she came to see that she was being almost deliberately naive in regard to her lover who had disappointed her in a manner that was totally consistent with his personality.

She hadn’t trusted herself to stay present in the moment; therefore, she had missed all the signs indicating who he was. It was her lack of innate trust that had led her astray. Likewise with her boss–she was not trusting herself to be okay in those moments when he was manifesting his fears. Part of her unease with him stemmed from a hidden demand that his character be other than it is, which is like insisting that a mosquito not bite or a fly not buzz.

Each of these insights was a delight to the yogi. She began to taste freedom from the circumstances of her life and became very interested in cultivating innate trust, making it her meditation and practice for the year. The clarity she achieved did not come all at once but over a period of months in which she actively observed and reflected on what was true about herself.

Her hard work is an example of how intention unfolds in daily life. You identify the values with which you want to experience life, then when a challenging situation arises, you apply those values through the practice of intention. In doing so, you are trusting life, trusting yourself, and trusting in trust.

Source #

Author(s) || Phillip Moffitt

Website || dharmawisdom.org

Article || Trust Issues

Date || September 30th, 2002

Link

II. #

Question:

Why doesn’t trust arise out of the decision to trust?

Answer:

Trust is not a decision on your part. You cannot decide for it. When you are finished with doubting, when you have come to see doubt through and through and you are completely convinced of the futility of the doubt, trust arises. You have to deal with the doubt, you are not to do anything about trust. Your trust will not be of much importance because your trust, your decision, will always be against doubt. And trust is not contrary to doubt; trust is simply the absence of doubt. When doubt is not, trust is.

Trust is not the opposite, remember. Notwithstanding what the dictionaries say, trust is not opposite to doubt, just as darkness is not opposite to light. It appears opposite, but it is not – because you cannot destroy light by bringing darkness in. You cannot bring darkness in. There is no way to destroy light by throwing darkness on it. Darkness has never been able to destroy the small flame of a very small candle. The whole darkness of the existence is impotent before a small candle.

Why is it so? If darkness is opposite, inimical, antagonistic, then it should be capable sometimes to defeat light. It is sheer absence. Darkness is because light is not. When light is, darkness is not. When you put a light on in your room, have you watched what happens? Darkness does not go out of the room; it is not that darkness escapes out of the room. It is found simply not to be there. It never was – it is pure negativity.

Doubt is like darkness, trust is like light. If you have doubt, then you will decide for trust. Otherwise there is no need to decide for trust. Why decide for it? You must be having tremendous doubt. The greater the doubt, the greater the need is felt to create trust. So whenever somebody says, “I trust very strongly.” remember that he is fighting against a very strong doubt. That’s how people become fanatics. The fanaticism is born because they have created a false trust. Their doubt is alive, their doubt is not finished. The doubt has not disappeared, the doubt is there. And to fight with the doubt they have created a trust against it. If the doubt is very strong, they have to cling fanatically to their trust. Whenever somebody says that, “I am a staunch believer.” remember, deep down in his heart he is carrying disbelief. Otherwise, there is no need to be a strong believer. Simple trust is enough – why strong? If you say to somebody, “I love you very strongly.” something is wrong. Love is enough.

Love is not a quantity. When somebody says, “I love you very much.” something is wrong, because love is not a quantity. You cannot love less and more. Either you love or you don’t love. The division is very clear-cut.

Don’t repress doubt. Rather, just on the contrary, watch, look deeply into it, analyze it. Don’t leave any part of it unanalyzed, unknown. Become acquainted with all the layers of the doubting mind. That very acquaintance, that penetration into doubt, will dissolve doubt. One day suddenly you will awake one morning full of trust – not as your decision. It cannot be a decision because trust is something you are born with, doubt is a learned thing. Trust is tacit, inborn.

Every child trusts. As he grows, doubt arises. Doubt is learned. So trust is there always as an undercurrent in your being. You just drop doubt, trust will arise. And then trust has a tremendous beauty because it is pure. It is not against doubt, it is simply absence of doubt. The rock has been removed and the stream has come bubbling up, flowing.

So please, don’t try to make a decision about it. Your decision will be a delay; and the more you decide, the more you will find, deep inside, the worm of doubt increasing. Then you will be divided in two and you will never be at ease, and there will be continuous agony.

So many people believe in God, and deep down is doubt – throbbing, alive, waiting for its opportunity to destroy the trust. And the trust is bogus because the trust is on the periphery, and the doubt has reached almost to the very core of your being. Never decide about love, about trust, about God. These things are not your decisions. They are not arguments, they are not conclusions.

When doubt is no more there, trust is. It happens. It flows. It arises out of your innermost core, from the innermost shrine. You start listening to a new music of being, a new style of being, a new way of being. It is not of the mind, it is of the being.

Source #

Author(s) || Osho

Book || The Beloved, Vol 2

Chapter || (02) When Doubt Is Not, Trust Is

Date || July 2nd, 1976

Link

III. #

A man just got married and was returning home with his wife. They were crossing a lake in a boat when suddenly a great storm arose. The man was a warrior, but the woman became very much afraid because it seemed almost hopeless – the boat was small and the storm was really huge, and any moment they were going to be drowned. But the man sat silently, calm and quiet, as if nothing was happening.

The woman was trembling and she said, “Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! It doesn’t seem that we will be able to reach the other shore. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?”

The man laughed and took the sword out of its sheath. The woman was even more puzzled – what is he doing? Then he brought the naked sword close to the woman’s neck – so close that just a small gap was there, it was almost touching her neck.

He said, “Are you afraid?”

She started to giggle and laugh and said, “Why should I be afraid? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me.”

He put the sword back and said, “This is my answer. I know god loves me, and the sword is in his hands, and the storm is in his hands – so whatsoever is going to happen is going to be good. If we survive, good; if we don’t survive, good – because everything is in his hands, and he cannot do anything wrong.”

This is the trust one needs to imbibe. Such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your whole life! And only such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life – less than that won’t do.

Source #

Author(s) || Osho

Book ||

Chapter ||

Date ||

Link

IV. #

Question:

Can trust be cultivated?

Answer:

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. So what is to be done? I understand the question you are asking. 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 in-built. 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 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.

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 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 inwards: 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.

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.

Because when thinking ceases, only then does one know who one is. In a non-thinking state of consciousness one realizes one’s being, not by thinking, but by non-thinking. Meditation is non-thinking; 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 no-sayer, 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, 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.

You have been taught to believe – from the very childhood, everybody’s mind has been conditioned to believe: believe in God, believe in 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 towards 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 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.

Source #

Author(s) || Osho

Book || Come Follow to You, Vol 3

Chapter || (02) Accept Yourself as You Are, and Accept Totally, Unconditionally

Date || December 12th, 1975

Link

tags: [“evergreen”]

contributors: ["Phillip Moffitt", “Osho”]

Comments Section #