Believe and trust are very two different things; while belief is directed towards an object, trust is an inner quality. There is this danger in belief; it makes you feel that you know the truth. And because it makes you feel that you know the truth, this becomes the greatest barrier in the search. Believe or disbelieve and you are blocked because disbelief is also nothing but belief in a negative form.
How can so many beliefs, contradictory to each other, go on? People have a certain need - the need not to appear ignorant. How to fulfill this need? Gather a few beliefs. And the more absurd the belief is, the more knowledgeable you appear, because nobody else knows about it.And the best way to avoid truth is to believe. Then you need not look at it. Your eyes become full of belief; belief functions as dust on the eyes. You become closed into yourself, the belief becomes a prison around you. Belief closes you: then you are living within yourself in a windowless existence, and you can go on believing whatsoever you want to believe. But remember, it is belief, and belief is a lie. Even 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. 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. 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 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.
Remember the first preliminary of Atisha: truth is. You need not believe in it for it to be. Your belief or your disbelief is not going to make any difference to the truth. Truth is truth, whether you believe or you disbelieve. But if you believe in something it starts appearing as true to you at least. That's what the meaning of belief is: belief means to believe in something as true - you know that you don't know, you know that the truth is unknown to you, but in your ignorance you start believing, because belief is cheap. To discover truth is arduous, it needs a long pilgrimage. It needs a great emptying of the mind, it needs a great cleansing of the heart. It needs a certain innocence, a rebirth: you have to become a child again. Only very few people have ever dared to discover truth. And it is risky, because it may not console you; it has no obligation to console you. It is risky: it may shatter all that you have known before, and you will have to rearrange your whole life. It is dangerous: it may destroy all your illusions, it may shatter all your dreams. It is really going through fire; it is going to burn you as you are, it is going to kill you as you are. And who knows what will happen later on? And only then will you find for the first time something new arising in your consciousness. And then trust will become a very lighted phenomenon, far more superior to love, because it needs nothing from the others. You should learn to become more conscious and alert to trust yourself. Do you trust yourself? If you trust yourself that will be unconditional trust because it cannot be for any particular reason. And out of that unconditional trust will grow many branches: you will become a huge tree with great foliage. You will trust love, you will trust the truth, you will trust godliness, you will trust beauty; you will simply trust because your heart is full of trust and there is not even a shadow of distrust. Even if you want to distrust, you cannot. You are trusting somebody else and things can go wrong any moment. The basic trust has not to be in existence, it has to be within you.❤️