What is the relationship between belief and reality in the mind?

John lilly has said, "what the mind believes is true or becomes true." would you please comment on this?

What John Lilly says is utter nonsense. He says, "What the mind believes is true." It is never true, because belief has nothing to do with truth. You can believe that this is night but just by your believing, this is not going to become night. But you can believe, and you can close your eyes and for you it is night -- but only for you, remember, not in truth. You are living in a kind of hallucination. 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. The Catholic believes in God, the communist believes in no God: both are believers. Go to Kaaba or…

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.

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…

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…

Beloved Osho, I am old, and had been a buddhist for over thirty years before I came to poona. But still I feel as if I am at the beginning, confused with lots of doubts. On the other hand, something inside me knows about your silence, and that something is not irritated at all. It is like a robe of trust. But I am not able to believe. Could you please say something about the difference between trust and belief?

Jesus was never a Christian. So one thing is certain, that no Christian remaining a Christian can find the experience that Jesus found. If any Christian wants to experience what Jesus experienced, the first thing to do is to get rid of Christianity -- because Jesus was not a Christian. Your belief system has to be completely thrown out, so that your juices are not divided and your whole energy moves into your trust. Your trust is growing, but under a heavy burden, under a tension. It can grow in a relaxed way, under open sky. Just say goodbye to those beliefs that you have been carrying, and let your trust grow. What Buddha has been to his disciples, his theories cannot be. Theories are mere words. They don't have the charm and the grace and the charisma; they don't have that magnetism. And when you are here and the…