Trust The Base Of All Growth

From Patanjali’s 6th sutra we will have question:

MOVING FROM FAITH TO TRUST. HOW CAN WE USE THE MIND THAT SWINGS FROM DOUBT TO BELIEF TO GO BEYOND THESE TWO POLARITIES?

Doubt and belief are not different – two aspects 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 concern Your mind argues, says no, finds no proof to say yes; you doubt. Then your mind finds arguments to say yes, proofs to say yes, you believe. But in both the cases you believe in reason; in both the cases, you believe in arguments. The difference is just on the surface; deep down you believe in the reasoning, and trust is dropping out of reasoning. It is mad! It is irrational! It is absurd!

And I say trust is not faith; trust is a personal encounter. Faith again is given and borrowed. It is a conditioning by others. Faith is a conditioning parents, culture, society gives you. You don’t bother about it; you don’t make it a personal concern. It is a given thing, and which is given and which has not been a personal growth, is just a facade, a false face, a Sunday face.

On six days you are different; 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, see the face – it looks so beautiful and innocent, and this man is a murderer. 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. You encounter reality, you face reality, you live reality, and by and by you come to an understanding that doubt leads to hell, misery. The more you doubt, the more miserable you become. If you can doubt completely, you will be in a perfect misery. If you are not in a perfect misery, that is because you cannot doubt completely: You still trust. Even an atheist, he also trusts. Even a man who doubts whether the world exists or not, he also trusts; otherwise he cannot live, life will become impossible.

If doubt becomes total, you cannot live a single moment. How can you breathe in if you doubt? If you really doubt, who knows the breath is not poisonous! Who knows millions of germs are not being carried into! Who knows cancer is not coming through the breath! If you really doubt, you cannot even breathe. You cannot live a single moment; you will die immediately. Doubt is suicide. But you never doubt perfectly, so you linger on. You linger on; you somehow drag on. But your life is not total. Just think: if total doubt is suicide, then total trust will be the absolute life possible.

That’s what happens to a man of trust: he trusts, and the more he trusts, the more he becomes capable of trust. The more he becomes capable of trust, the more life opens. He feels more, he lives more, he lives intensely. Life becomes an authentic bliss. Now he can trust more. Not that he is not deceived, because if you trust, that doesn’t mean that nobody is going to deceive you. In fact, more people will deceive you because you become vulnerable. If you trust, more people will deceive you, but nobody can make you miserable; that’s the point to understand. They can deceive, they can steal things from you, they can borrow money and they will never return – but nobody can make you miserable – that becomes impossible. Even if they kill you, they cannot make you miserable.

You trust, and trust makes you vulnerable – but absolutely victorious also, because nobody can defeat you. They can deceive, they can steal, you may become a beggar, but still you will be an emperor. Trust makes emperors out of beggars and doubt makes beggars out of emperors. Look at an emperor, who cannot trust; he is always afraid. He cannot trust his own wife, he cannot trust his own children, because a king possesses so much that the son will kill him, the wife will poison him. He cannot trust anybody. He lives in such a distrust, he is already in hell. Even if he sleeps, he cannot relax. Who knows what’s going to happen!

Trust makes you more and more open. Of course, when you are open, many things will become possible. When you are open, friends will reach to your heart; of course, enemies can also reach to your heart – the door is open. So there are two possibilities. If you want to be secure, you close the door completely. Bolt it, lock it and hide within. Now no enemy can enter, but no friend can enter also. Even if God comes, he cannot enter. Now nobody can deceive you, but what is the point? You are in a grave. You are already dead. Nobody can kill you, but you are already dead; you cannot come out. You live in security, of course, but what type of life is this? You don’t live at all. Then you open the door.

Doubt is closing the door; trust is opening the door. When you open the door, all the alternatives become possible. Friend may enter, foe may enter. Wind will come; it will bring the perfume of the flowers; it will also bring the germs of diseases. Now everything is possible – the good and bad. Love will come; hate will also come. Now God can come, the devil can also come. This is the fear that something may go wrong, so close the door. But then everything goes wrong. Open the door – something is possible to go wrong, but for you, nothing, if your trust is total. Even in the enemy you will find the friend and even in the devil you will find God. Trust is such a transformation that you cannot find the bad because your whole outlook has changed.

That is the meaning of Jesus’ saying, “Love your enemies.” How can you love your enemies? It has been a problem to be solved – an enigma for Christian theologians. How can you love your enemy? But a man of trust can do, because a man of trust knows no enemies. A man of trust knows only the friend. In whatsoever form he comes makes no difference. If he comes to steal he is the friend; if he comes to take he is the friend, if he comes to give he is the friend: in whatsoever form he comes.

It happened that Al-Hillaj Mansoor, a great mystic, a great Sufi, was murdered, killed, crucified. The last of his words were – he looked at the sky – and he said, “But you cannot deceive me.” Many people were there, and Al-Hillaj was smiling, and he said towards the sky “Look, you cannot deceive me.” So somebody asked “What do you mean? To whom you are talking?” He said, “I am talking to my God: in whatsoever form you come you cannot deceive me. I know you well. Now you have come as death. You cannot deceive me.”

A man of trust cannot be deceived. In whatsoever form, whosoever comes, it is always the divine coming to him because trust makes everything holy. Trust is an alchemy. It transforms not only you; it transforms for you the whole world. Wherever you look you find him: in the friend, in the foe; in the night, in the day. Yes, Heraclitus is right. God is summer and winter, day and night, God is satiety and hunger. This is trust. Patanjali makes trust the base – the base of all growth.

Faith is that which is given; trust is that which is found. Faith is given by your parents; trust has to be found by you. Faith is given by the society; trust you have to search and seek and inquire. Trust is personal, intimate; faith is like a commodity. You can purchase it in the market.

You can purchase it in the market – when I say it, I say it with a very considered mind. You can go and become a Mohammedan; you can go and become a Hindu. Go to an Arya temple and you can be converted to be a Hindu. There is no difficulty. Faith can be purchased in the market. From Mohammedan you can become Hindu, from Hindu you can become Jain. It is so simple that any foolish priest can do it. But trust – it is not a commodity. You cannot go and find it in the market, you cannot purchase it. You have to pass through many experiences. By and by it arises; by and by it changes you. A new quality, a new flame comes to your being.

When you see that doubt is misery, then comes trust. When you see faith is dead, then comes trust. You are a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; have you ever observed that you are completely dead? What type of Christian you are? If you are really a Christian, you will be a Christ – nothing less than that. Trust will make you Christ, faith will make you a Christian – a very poor substitute. What type of Christian you are? Because you go to the church, because you read the Bible? Your faith is not knowing. It is an ignorance.

When you cannot understand, when you are ignorant, the whole society says, “Have faith.” I will say to you: 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! 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 me suffer. And then the transformation becomes possible.

Our question is – HOW CAN WE USE THE MIND THAT SWINGS FROM DOUBT TO BELIEF TO GO BEYOND THESE TWO POLARITIES?

You cannot use it, because you have never been an honest doubter. Your faith is false: doubt is deep down hidden. 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 with 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 man 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 He will say both are kisses and exactly the same.

But you know when you love a person then something of the invisible passes which cannot be detected by any instrument. When you don’t love a person, then you can give the kiss, but nothing passes. 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 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 only through misery one grows.

And 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 there is not doubt and you have suffered through it, you start moving towards trust.

Trust is transformation – shraddha; and, says Patanjali, that shraddha – trust – is the base of all samadhi, of all ultimate experience of the divine.