According to Osho, your inability to trust springs from your own deceit. Distrust mirrors the tricks you play on others; when you betray, you cripple your capacity to trust. Reverse the spiral: become transparent, allow others to trust you, and even risk being deceived. It is better to be fooled than to fool, because trust is life’s greatest treasure—without it, love, prayer, and God remain closed.
When you trick others, you can’t feel safe with anyone; be honest and open—even if you’re sometimes tricked—so your heart can trust.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, I CANNOT TRUST ANYBODY. WHY? Sargam, I will just tell you a story. Meditate over it. The hired boy gets the youngest girl in the farmer's family to go out into the hayloft with him. She comes back and tells her sister, "Say, the hired boy sure knows some good tricks!" The sister goes out to the hayloft too, and comes back saying the same, followed by the mother, and finally the farmer himself who has heard his wife's remark that, "The hired boy certainly knows some tricks." When the boy sees the farmer coming, he thinks fast and begins doing cartwheels and acrobatic tricks all over the walls of the barn. The farmer watches him and then goes back and tells his assembled wife and daughters, "Guess you are right. That boy sure knows some fancy tricks." "God almighty!" cry the wife and daughters.
Beloved Osho, why don't I trust you?
How long will you be able to pretend with a person with whom you have to live in love? You can pretend in the marketplace, you can pretend in the Lions' Club and the Rotary Club -- smiles, all smiles. You can do beautiful acting and role-playing. But if you live with a woman or a man for twenty-four hours a day, then it is tiring to go on smiling and smiling and smiling. Then the smile tires you, because it is phony. It is just an exercise of the lips, and the lips become tired. How can you go on being sweet? Your bitterness will surface. Hence by the time the honeymoon is over, everything is over. Both have known each other's reality, both have known each other's phoniness, both have known each other's falsity. One is afraid to become intimate. To be intimate means you will have to…
Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHY DO I STILL NOT TRUST YOU? Trust brings into your life a new breeze, a new opening, a new door. You have not travelled that way ever; you have not moved in that direction ever. You are not acquainted, familiar; you are moving into the strange -- fear arises. And you cannot trust yourself either -- otherwise there would not be so much fear. If you had trusted yourself then you could have a try, then you could have a certain confidence in yourself -- even that is not there. Trust as such has simply disappeared from your life; that dimension is closed. So your ind will find a thousand and one arguments against trust. You cannot trust anybody. How can you trust me? -- I am outside you.
I need to trust so badly, and I suffer because I don't. From where am I to find the courage to trust my killer?
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. Remember it: surrender is possible if…
Beloved Osho, when you talked about trust, tears wouldn't stop coming. You said you trust us, and I feel so untrustworthy. Please comment.
Somebody was asking me in a letter... because just a few days ago Shiva has written a letter: "Please forgive me. I have done everything wrong. I have said lies against you, and the burden of it all is so much it is killing me." The other person was asking, "If Shiva comes back" -- because this letter may be just the beginning of the camel coming back from Santa Fe -- "would you give him the same position that he used to have, your bodyguard?" I said, "Certainly. I trust him." Trust is a miracle. If you trust even the person who is going to murder you, his sword will fall from his hands. If you trust the man who is going to shoot you, there is every possibility he may shoot himself. Trust is a tremendous power. Distrust makes you weak. And how many people are you going…