Essential Truth

Don’t Believe In It

When the truth is told to you, don’t believe in it! Explore, inquire, search, experiment, experience: don’t believe in it. Even when truth is conveyed to you, if you believe in it, you turn it into a lie. A truth believed is a lie, belief turns truth into a lie.

Believe in Buddha and you believe in a lie. Believe in Christ and you believe in a lie. Don’t believe in Christ, don’t believe in Buddha, don’t believe in me. What I say, listen to it attentively, intelligently; experiment, experience. And when you have experienced, will you need to believe in it? There will be no doubt left, so what will be the point of belief? Belief is a way of repressing doubt: you doubt, hence you need belief.

The rock of belief represses the spring of doubt.

When you know, you know! You know it is so; there is no doubt left. Your experience has expelled all darkness and all doubt. Truth is: you are full of it. Truth never creates belief.

How to attain to truth? By dropping all kinds of beliefs. And remember, I am saying all kinds – belief in me is included. Experience me, come along with me, let me share what I have seen, but don’t believe, don’t be in a hurry. Don’t say, “Now what is the point? Now Osho has seen it, all that is left for me is to believe it.”

What I have seen cannot become your experience unless you see it. And it is the experience of truth that delivers you from ignorance, from bondage, from misery. It is not the belief that delivers you, it is truth.

Jesus says, “Truth liberates.” But how to attain to truth? It is not a question of belief, but a question of meditativeness. And what is meditation? Meditation is emptying your mind completely of all belief, ideology, concept, thought. Only in an empty mind, when there is no dust left on the mirror, truth reflects. That reflection is a benediction.

Without meditation one is bound to live in misery. One can cover it up, one can find a few consolations, one has to find a few consolations otherwise life would be intolerable. One has to remain occupied so that one does not feel the inner emptiness. And people find a thousand and one occupations just to keep themselves engaged. They are very much afraid to be left alone, to be left empty.

Buddha is an empty mind, Lao Tzu is an empty mind. And out of these empty people — Buddha, Lao Tzu, Basho — god has been experienced. They have been able to sing songs of joy. Their life is a festival, a festival of lights; their life is a continuum of celebration.

Meditation means making the mind empty, empty of all thoughts, discarding all thoughts, remembering that ‘I am not these thoughts,’ that ‘I am separate,’ that ‘I am just a watcher, a watcher on the hills, looking at the valley.’ Creating a distance between the thoughts and your awareness is the whole process of meditation.