Trust

T R U S T

I need to trust so badly, I want especially to be able to trust you, and I suffer because I don’t.

People who trust themselves can trust others. People who don’t trust themselves cannot trust anybody. Out of self-trust, trust arises. If you are distrustful about yourself, then you cannot trust me; you cannot trust anybody. If you don’t trust yourself, how can you trust your trust? It is going to be your trust. Maybe you trust in me, but it is your trust: you trust in me and you don’t trust yourself. So it is not a question about me, it is a deep question about yourself.

Who are these people who cannot trust themselves? Something has gone wrong somewhere. First, these are the people who don’t have a very good self-image; they are condemnatory towards themselves. They always feel guilty and always feel wrong. They are always defensive and always trying to prove that they are not wrong, but they feel deep down that they are wrong. These are the people who have missed, somehow, a loving atmosphere.

Psychologists say that the person who cannot trust himself is bound to have some deep-rooted problem with the mother. The mother-child relationship somewhere did not happen as it should. Because the mother is the first person in the child’s experience; if the mother trusts the child, if the mother loves the child, the child starts loving the mother and trusting the mother. Through the mother the child becomes aware of the world. The mother is the window from where he enters existence.

By and by, if there exists a beautiful relationship between the child and the mother, a response, a deep sensitivity, a deep transfer of energies, a flowering...then the child starts trusting others also. Because he knows the first experience was beautiful, there is no reason to think that the second is not going to be beautiful. There is every reason to believe that the world is good.

If in your childhood there was a deep milieu of love around you, you will become religious, trust will arise. You will trust, trust will become your natural quality. Ordinarily, you will not distrust anybody unless somebody tries hard to create distrust in you; only then will you distrust. But distrust will be exceptional. One man deceives you and tries hard to destroy your trust. Maybe trust in that man is destroyed, but you will not start distrusting the whole humanity. You will say, “This is one man, and there are millions of men. Just for one man, why distrust all?”

But if the basic trust is lacking, and something has gone wrong between you and your mother, then distrust becomes your basic quality. ]Then ordinarily, naturally, you distrust. There is no need for anybody to prove. You distrust man, and then if somebody wants you to trust him he will have to work hard, very hard. And even then, you will trust him conditionally. And even then, that trust will not be very comprehensive. It will be very narrow; it will be arrowed at one person. That is the problem.

In the old times people were very trusting. Shraddha, trust, was a simple quality. There was no need to cultivate it. In fact, if somebody wanted to become a great skeptic, doubting, then great training was needed, great conditioning was needed. People were simply trustful because love relationships were very, very deep. In the modern world love has disappeared, and trust is nothing but the climax of love, the cream of love. Love has disappeared. Children are born into families where the father and mother are not in love. Children are born; the mother does not care, is not bothered about what happens to them. In fact, she is annoyed because they are a disturbance, and they are disturbing her life. Women are avoiding children, and if they happen it seems like an accident. And there is a deep negative attitude. The child gets that negative attitude; he is poisoned from the very beginning. He cannot trust the mother.

...A philosophy is not born out of the blue. A philosophy comes from your own existence, your own lived experience. If the child has been deep in love with the mother and the mother has showered her love, that is the beginning of all trust for the future. Then the child will make more loving relationships with women, will make more loving relationships with friends, one day will be able to surrender to a master and, finally, will be able to dissolve himself completely into God. But if the basic link is missing then the foundation is missing. Then you try hard, but it becomes more and more difficult. That’s what I feel about the questioner.

“I need to trust so badly”...yes, because trust is nourishment. Without trust you remain hungry, you remain starved. Trust is the most subtle nourishment for life. If you don’t trust you cannot really live. You are always in fear; you are surrounded by death, not by life. With a deep trust inside, the whole view changes. Then you are at home and there is no conflict. Then you are not a stranger in the world. Then you are not an alien, you are not a foreigner. You belong to the world, the world belongs to you. The world is happy that you are; the world is protecting you. This feeling of a deep protection gives courage, and gives courage to move into unknown paths.

When the mother is in the home the child has courage. Have you watched it? He can go out on the road, he can move into the garden, and he can do a thousand and one things. When the mother is not there he simply sits inside, he is afraid. He cannot go out; the protection is not there, the protective aura is not there. The atmosphere is totally alien.

If you have lived a childhood of a deep showering of love and trust on you, you gather a beautiful self-image about yourself. And if your parents have been really in deep love with each other, and they were very happy in you because you were the culmination of their love, the crescendo of their love, the actualization of their love; if they were deep in love, then you are the song that is born out of their love. You are the proof, the evidence that they loved each other. You are their creation: they feel happy about you, they accept you, and they accept the way you are. Even if they try to help you, they try to help you in a very loving way. Even if they say sometimes, “Don’t do this,” you don’t feel offended and you don’t feel insulted. In fact, you feel cared about.

But when the love is missing and the father and mother go on saying, “Don’t do this,” and, “Do this,” by and by the child starts learning that, “I am not accepted as I am. If I do certain things, I am loved. If I don’t do certain things, I am not loved. If I do some other things, I am hated.”

So he starts shrinking. His pure being is not accepted and loved. The love is conditional; trust is lost. Then he will never be able to have a beautiful self-image. Because it is mother’s eyes which reflect you for the first time, and if you can see happiness there, a bliss, a thrill, a great ecstasy just watching you, you know you are valuable, you know you have intrinsic value. Then it is very easy to trust, very easy to surrender, because you are not afraid. But if you know that you are wrong, then you are always trying to prove that you are right.

People become argumentative. All argumentative people basically are people who don’t have good images of themselves. They are very defensive, very touchy. If there is some argumentative person, and you say that, “This thing you have done wrong,” he immediately jumps on you, becomes very angry. He cannot even take a small friendly criticism. But if he has a good image about himself he is ready to listen, he’s ready to learn, he’s ready to respect others’ opinions. Maybe they are right, and even if they are right and he is wrong, he is not worried because that doesn’t matter. He remains good in his eyes.

People are touchy. They don’t want criticism, they don’t want somebody to say to them to do this; they don’t want somebody to say to them not to do that. And these people think they cannot surrender because they are very powerful. They are just ill, neurotic. Only a powerful man or woman can surrender — weaklings, never. Because in surrender they think their weakness will be known to the whole world.

They know they are weak, they know their inferiority complex, so they cannot bow down. It is difficult for them, because bowing down will be accepting that they are inferior. Only a superior person can bow down; inferior persons can never bow down. They cannot respect anybody because they don’t respect themselves. They don’t know what respect is, and they are always afraid of surrender because surrender means weakness to them.

So if you feel it difficult to trust, then you have to go back. You have to dig deep into your memories. You have to go into your past. You have to clean your mind of the past impressions. You must be having a great heap of rubbish from your past; unburden it. This is the key to do it: if you can go back not just as memory, but as a reliving.

Make it a meditation. Every day, in the night, for one hour just go back. Try to find out all that has happened in your childhood. The deeper you can go the better — because we are hiding many things that have happened, but we don’t allow them to bubble up into consciousness. Allow them to surface. Going every day, you will feel deeper and deeper. First you will remember somewhere when you were at the age of four or five, and you will not be able to go beyond that. Suddenly, a China Wall will face you. But go. By and by, you will see that you are going deeper: three years, two years.

People have reached to the point where they were born from the womb. There have been people who have reached into the memories of the womb, and there are people who have reached beyond that, into the other life when they died.

But if you can reach to the point where you were born, and you can relive that moment, it will be of deep agony, pain. You will almost feel as if you are being born again. You may scream as the child screamed for the first time. You will feel suffocated as the child felt suffocated when for the first time he was out of the womb — because for a few seconds he was not able to breathe. There was great suffocation: then he screamed and the breath came, and his passages became open, his lungs started functioning. You may have to move to that point.

From there you come back. Go again, come back, every night. It will take at least three to nine months, and every day you will feel more unburdened, more and more unburdened, and trust will arise simultaneously, by the side. Once the past is clear and you have seen all that has happened, you are free of it. This is the key: if you become aware of anything in your memory, you are freed from it. Awareness liberates, unconsciousness creates a bondage. Then trust will become possible.

Psychologists have come across this — that love is food. Just twenty years ago, if somebody had said that love was subtle vitality, then scientists would have laughed. They would have thought, “You are a poet, you live in illusion and dreams. Love and food? — all nonsense.” But now scientific researchers say, “Love IS food.” When a child is given food, that nourishes his body; and if love is not given, then his soul is not nourished. His soul remains immature. Now there are ways to measure whether a child is being loved or not, whether the warmth he needs is being given to him or not. You can give a child all the nourishment he needs, all medical care he needs, in a hospital. Just remove the mother; give him milk, medicine, care, everything, but don’t hug him, don’t kiss him, don’t touch him.

Many experiments have been done. The child, by and by, starts shrinking into himself. He becomes ill, and in most of the cases he dies, for no visible cause at all. Or, if he survives, he survives at the minimum: he becomes an imbecile, an idiot. He will live, but he will live just on the fringe. He will never be deep in life; he has no energy. To hug the child, to give your body’s warmth to him is food, is very subtle food. Now this is being recognized, by and by.

Let me make you one prediction: after twenty or thirty years, psychologists will come to reveal that trust is even a higher food, of a greater potency — higher than love.... Like prayer. Trust is prayerfulness, but it is very subtle. You can feel it. If you have trust, you will suddenly see that with me you are going on a great adventure, and your life starts immediately changing. If you don’t have trust, you will stand there. I go on talking, I go on pulling you; you are stuck — somehow you go on missing me. Let your trust arise. That trust will be a bridge between me and you. Then ordinary words become luminous, then just my presence can become a womb, and you can be reborn.

People who trust because they are afraid, because they want somebody to hang to, to cling to, they are afraid and they want somebody’s hand, they look at the sky and they pray to God just to feel unafraid. Have you watched? Sometimes passing through a dark street in the night you start whistling, or you start singing — not that it is going to help. But it helps in a way. Singing, you become warmer. Singing, you become occupied; fear is repressed. Whistling, you start feeling good. You forget that it is dark and it is dangerous, but it makes no real change in reality. If there is fear and danger it is still there. In fact, it is more, because a person who is engaged in singing can be robbed more easily because he will be less alert. He will be less cautious while whistling. He is creating an illusion around him with whistling. If your trust arises out of fear, it is better not to have that trust. It is false. I have heard....

Mulla Nasrudin climbed into a barber’s chair and asked, “Where is the barber who used to work on the next chair?”

“Oh, that was a sad case,” the barber said. “He became so nervous and despondent over poor business, that one day when a customer said he did not want a massage, he went out of his mind and cut the customer’s throat with a razor. He is now in the state mental hospital. By the way, would you like a massage, sir?”

“Absolutely!” said Mulla Nasrudin.

Out of fear you can say ‘absolutely’, but that will not be trust. Trust is born out of love, and if you find that you cannot trust, then you have to work hard. You have a very loaded past, wrongly loaded. You have to clean it, clear it.