presents
Why I Am Against Belief
Osho,
Questions seem to be the offspring of the capacity to doubt;
and doubt,
the spark of an alive and active intelligence.
Without questions
– and thus, without doubt
– how can intelligence continue to flourish?
And yet within you is the ultimate in silence
and the ultimate in intelligence.
It is true in the beginning.
Doubt
helps your intelligence,
sharpens it.
Questioning
makes you aware
of many possibilities
of which you may not have been aware before.
But this is only the beginning of the journey.
At the end,
when all your questions
have disappeared...
and the real master never gives you the answer.
Let me repeat it:
the real master never gives you the answer,
so you cannot doubt it.
He brings you to a point
where all your questions disappear.
His answers are
murderous,
killing your questions,
destroying them mercilessly,
to bring you to a point
where there is no question
in your consciousness.
And the master does not give you any answer that you can doubt.
This non-questioning consciousness is the answer.
And it is your experience; you cannot doubt it,
it is there.
And from this point,
silence
and intelligence
are just two aspects of the same thing.
From this point,
not knowing,
innocence
and knowing
are two aspects of the same thing.
This is the mysterious world
which is available to you
if you can pass the jungle of questions
and doubts
and reach
into the clear,
where there are no questions and doubts, and no answers either.
Just you are
in utter silence,
with immense clarity,
with tremendous sharpness.
That's why I am against belief,
because it will never allow you to reach to this stage.
It will stop you
in the very beginning of the journey.
It will not help to
make you more intelligent;
it will make you more unintelligent.
It will make you more fanatic,
superstitious,
but it will not
allow you to come into the clarity
which can be
called the very
goal of
what transpires between master
and the disciple:
the moment of total silence,
the moment
where everything is crystal clear.
But it has to be earned.
Belief is cheap.
This will bring you
something totally different,
what I call trust
in existence.
In the dictionaries, trust and belief and faith
are all synonymous
– but not in reality.
Belief
is opposite to trust.
You believe because you have doubt;
the belief is an
antidote to doubt,
it is a need
to cover up the doubt.
Trust
is when you don't have any doubt,
so trust is not a belief.
Belief is always in something
– in some doctrine,
in some principle,
in some philosophy.
Trust is
in the totality of the cosmos.
It has nothing to do with books
– Holy Bibles,
Gitas, Korans – no.
Then there is only one scripture
which is spread all around you
– in the trees, in the rivers, in the ocean, in the stars.
And you don't have to read it;
you have to be just silent,
and it starts showering on you
all its wisdom,
which is eternal.
I am against belief
because I want you to come to the point of trust.
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