The first question:

Osho,
Why don't I trust you?

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 godliness 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.