According to Osho, belief is auto-suggestion—a repeated mental imprint that creates projections and consoling illusions (mantras, visions, deities, even 'I am the Absolute'). Awareness or inner nature appears only when all beliefs and thoughts drop. It is direct, wordless realization—one, not two—where dialogue ceases and a silent resonance remains. Inner nature cannot be manufactured; it is discovered by ending belief.
Belief is pretending by repeating ideas; awareness is what remains when you stop pretending and rest in quiet, clear being.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Your belief is not going to change the nature of things. You can believe that a rose flower is a lotus -- and you can believe stubbornly, you can believe blindly and madly -- but the rose remains a rose; just by your belief it is not transformed into a lotus. Yes, you can remain in a kind of illusion, you can remain hallucinating, you can even start seeing it as a lotus. Belief creates dreams, but it cannot create reality. Belief cannot deliver reality to you because all belief is a hindrance. Belief basically means that you have believed before knowing; you are deceiving yourself. All believers are deceivers: they have lied to themselves. They have not known God, and they have started believing in a Christian God or a Jewish God or a Hindu God. They know nothing; they have not experienced anything.
Drop all beliefs, all disbeliefs. Let the mind become less cluttered. Remove all unnecessary luggage, become more unburdened. The more unburdened you are, the closer to truth. When you are absolutely unburdened, empty, when you are just there, with no idea surrounding you, truth happens. That is what Zen people call satori. It happens in a state of no-mind. And the beginning of no-mind is the dropping, slowly slowly, of all kinds of prejudices -- Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan; these are all prejudices. Communist, Catholic... these are all prejudices. And to cling to these prejudices is a very very irreverent act, very egoistic, because these beliefs are claims, and claims without any validity. You don't have any existential validity for them -- you simply believe because you have been told to believe.
Osho, why is it that the moment we cling to some belief—whether theism or atheism—the mind feels so reassured? Why does it seem almost impossible for it to stand in the middle, dropping both?
There is no greater courage than to stand in existence without conclusions. By “without conclusions” I mean: no belief, no superstition. It means: we will see existence as it is, without bringing our notions in between. We will neither say “God is” nor “God is not.” We will neither say “the soul is” nor “the soul is not.” We will inquire. But inquiry is hard. Inquiry means you must pay a price. Who wants that bother? So we borrow beliefs on credit. We say, Mahavira knew, Buddha knew, Krishna knew—why should we get into the mess? We’ll cling to them, hold their feet, and pass through. That is not faith; it is only weakness. And the weak do not move. It is not trust to think we can walk to freedom by holding Buddha’s feet. If you have no trust in yourself, how will you trust Buddha? No real trust…
Osho, there is a saying, “If you believe, it is a god; otherwise, it’s a stone.” Is it all just a matter of believing?
I tell you: do not believe in God. There is no need to believe. If you believe in God, then what will you know? To believe in God means you have declared defeat in knowing—you are tired, you have thrown down your arms. You have said, “The search is over; there is nothing to know, so let us believe.” You don’t believe in the sun or the moon; you know them. You don’t believe in this world; you know it. And you believe in God? If your believed God is repeatedly defeated before your known world, it is no surprise. God should also be known. The day God is known, this world becomes insipid—maya, a dream. Experience is wealth; empty beliefs are not. So I make a small change in the saying: “Know, and it is God; otherwise, it’s a stone.” But to know, a great journey is required. To…
Osho, you call belief superficial and wrong. You say that truth is not to be believed but to be known. But psychologists say that a person becomes what he thinks. In this light, can thought and belief be used in spiritual practice?
Anand Maitreya! What the psychologists say is right—and that is precisely the danger. A person does become what he thinks, but only on the surface, in conduct; not in the depths, not in being. The foundation-stone does not change so easily. As when you see a hypnotist’s experiment: if he tells a man in a hypnotic trance, “You are a woman,” the man starts walking like a woman—but he does not become a woman; he remains a man, only a veil of delusion descends. If someone keeps imposing a certain idea upon himself, that is self-hypnosis, auto-hypnosis. He will feel it has happened; others will also feel it has happened. Naturally others will, because they can only see your exterior; your interior only you can see. But if someone were to look within, he would find that everything has changed only on the surface, all the coloring is superficial; and…