Question 1

Osho,

Why don’t I trust you?

 

 

Prem Prageeta, 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.

 

And 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 a man who trusts in himself is dangerous for the society—a society that depends on slavery, a society that has invested too much in slavery.

 

A man trusting himself is an independent man. 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.

 

And 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 much so that they are constantly in need of being tyrannized, so much so that they are searching and seeking their own tyrants, their own Adolf Hitlers, their own Mussolinis, their own Josef 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 God 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 some day, 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. And 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 arises to know. 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 readymade answers. Readymade answers help nobody, readymade 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. And 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 barbarian. 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.

 

A man 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 letgo 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.

 

A man 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. It is only when you can trust the unknown that you can trust a master, never before it, because the master represents nothing but the unknown. He represents the uncharted, he represents the infinite, the unbounded. He represents the oceanic, he represents the wild, he represents God.

 

Prageeta, you say: ‘Why don’t I trust you?’ It is simple: you don’t trust yourself. Start trusting yourself—that is the fundamental lesson, the first lesson. Start loving yourself. If you don’t love yourself, who else is going to love you?

 

But remember, if you only love yourself, your love will be very poor. A great Jewish mystic, Hillel, has said, ‘If you are not for yourself, who is going to be for you?’ And also, ‘If you are only for yourself, then what meaning can your life ever have?’—a tremendously significant statement.

 

Remember it: love yourself, because if you don’t love yourself nobody else will ever be able to love you.

 

You cannot love a person who hates himself. And on this unfortunate earth, almost everybody hates himself, everybody condemns himself.

 

How can you love a person who is condemnatory towards himself? He will not believe you. He cannot love himself—how can you dare? He cannot love himself—how can you love him? He will suspect some game, some trick, some trip. He will suspect that you are trying to deceive him in the name of love. He will be very cautious, alert, and his suspicion will poison your being.

 

If you love a person who hates himself, you are trying to destroy his concept about himself. And nobody easily drops his concept about himself; that is his identity. He will fight with you, he will prove to you that he is right and you are wrong. That’s what is happening in every love relationship—let me call it every so-called love relationship. It is happening between every husband and wife, every lover and beloved, every man and every woman. How can you destroy the other’s concept about himself? That is his identity, that is his ego, that’s how he knows himself. If you take it away he will not know who he is. It is too risky; he cannot drop his concept so easily. He will prove to you that he is not worth loving, he is only worth hating.

 

And the same is the case with you. You also hate yourself; you cannot allow anybody else to love you. Whenever somebody comes with loving energy around you, you shrink, you want to escape, you are afraid. You know perfectly well that you are unworthy of love, you know that only on the surface do you look so good, so beautiful; deep down you are ugly. And if you allow this person to love you, sooner or later—and it is going to be sooner than later—he will come to know who you are in reality.

 

How long will you be able to pretend with a person with whom you have to live in love? You can pretend in the marketplace, you can pretend in the Lions’ Club and the Rotary Club—smiles, all smiles. You can do beautiful acting and role-playing. But if you live with a woman or a man for twenty-four hours a day, then it is tiring to go on smiling and smiling and smiling. Then the smile tires you, because it is phony. It is just an exercise of the lips, and the lips become tired. How can you go on being sweet? Your bitterness will surface. Hence by the time the honeymoon is over, everything is over. Both have known each other’s reality, both have known each other’s phoniness, both have known each other’s falsity.

 

One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to put aside the role. And you know who you are: worthless, just dirt. That’s what you have been told from the very beginning. Your parents, your teachers, your priests, your politicians, all have been telling you that you are dirt, worthless. Nobody has ever accepted you. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed—that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same, that without you there will be a hole. Without you this universe is going to lose some poetry, some beauty: a song will be missed, a note will be missed, there will be a gap—nobody has told you that.

 

And 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. Vincent van Gogh continuously painted the sun his whole life, he loved the sun so much. In fact, it was the sun that drove him mad. For one year continuously he was standing and painting under the hot sun. His whole life revolved around the sun. And the day he was content painting the painting that he had always wanted to paint—and to paint this painting he had painted many others, but he had not been contented with them—the day he was contented, the day he could say, ‘Yes, this is the thing that I wanted to paint,’ he committed suicide, because, he said, ‘My work is done. I have done the thing that I came for. My destiny is fulfilled, now it is pointless to live.’ His whole life a devotion to a certain painting? He must have been madly in love with the sun. He looked at the sun so long that it destroyed his eyes, his vision, it drove him mad.

 

When a poet composes a song it is because he loves it. God has painted you, sung you, danced you. God loves you! If you don’t see any meaning in the word god don’t be worried; call it existence, call it the whole. The 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. And 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 more 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.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #3, Q1"