Belief is always out of ignorance. Those who don’t know, they believe. If you know, what is the point of believing in? When you know, you know!
You don’t believe in the morning sun. You don’t believe in the trees and in the mountains. You need not! You know the sun is there. You know the people are there, you know the trees are there. There is no question of belief. Why do you believe in God? Because you don’t know.
You substitute your knowledge by belief. You hide your ignorance behind the belief. The belief gives you a pretension of knowing. All beliefs are pretentious. All beliefs are deceptions. Whom are you deceiving? You yourself are deceived.
A belief has no roots; it is just an imposed phenomenon. Howsoever staunchly you believe in it, it makes no difference. In fact, the more you are afraid of losing it, the more staunchly you believe in it. Whenever somebody says, “This is my strong belief.” know well that he is afraid. Otherwise what does it mean? Why should he brag about his staunchness? If he knows, he knows.
You know that the sun has risen, that it is day. You don’t say, “I strongly believe that this is sunrise.” you simply say, “I know this is sunrise.” You don’t say, “I strongly believe, nobody can shake my belief.” If you say it people will think you are crazy. If you say it people will think you must be blind; you are not seeing the sun, you have only heard about it. Others must have told you and you are saying, “I believe strongly.” Just to protect yourself you create great armor around yourself.
But a real experience needs no protection. The real experience needs no bragging about being staunch. One simply knows or one knows not; things are very simple.
By being a Catholic you are closed, by being a Jain you are closed, by being a Buddhist you are closed. You are not an enquirer, you are not a seeker. You don’t love truth, you love security. Belief gives you security.
And if you want to know the truth you have to begin with agnosticism, you have to begin from the state of not knowing. Every true enquiry starts only in not-knowing. One has to be clearly aware that “I don’t know. But I have to seek, I have to search, I have to find, and I should start without any a priori conception.”
People are so uncaring about truth that they say, “Whatsoever you say, it must be right. Who cares? I am not interested enough to bother.”
That’s the situation in the world: a few are Christians, a few are Hindus, a few are Mohammedans. If you look deeply into them you will see that they don’t care whether God is or is not, they don’t care what truth is. They have simply accepted the belief that the people around them believe.
The man who is utterly empty of knowledge is immediately worthy of receiving the ultimate gift of knowing. Only those who renounce knowledge become capable of knowing.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), The Guest (Chapter 3)
Only blind people believe in light. Those who have eyes… They don’t believe in light, they simply see it.
I don’t want you to believe in anything, I want you to have eyes; and when you can have eyes, why be satisfied with a belief and remain blind? And you are not blind. Perhaps you are only keeping your eyes closed. Perhaps nobody has told you that you can open your eyes. Then you live in darkness, and in darkness you ask, “Does light exist?”
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), From Unconsciousness to Consciousness (Chapter 2)
I would like you all to be Gnostics, to come to a point of experience where things beyond words happen, where language is left far away back, light-years back, where there is no possibility to conceptualize your experience. You cannot say, “God is.” you cannot say, “God is not.” You cannot say, “I cannot say these things.” You can be simply silent. And those who can understand silence will understand the answer. You can help people—that’s what Gnostics can do—you can help people to come to silence. Call it meditativeness, awareness, presence—those are just names, but the essential quality is absolute silence, nothing stirring in you, nothing wavering in you. It is all over the place. It is within you, it is without you.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho), From Unconsciousness to Consciousness (Chapter 14)