When I say believing can make impossible things possible, I mean believing in the heart — an innocent heart, the heart of the child which knows not how to say no, which knows only yes, yes not against no. Not that the child says no inside and says yes outside; then it is of the head. That is the way of the head: yes outside, no inside, no outside, yes inside.
The head is a schizophrenic. It is never total and one. When the heart says yes it simply says yes. There is no conflict, there is no division. The heart is integrated in its yes; that is true believing, trust. It is a heart phenomenon. It is not a thought but a feeling, and ultimately it is a being, not even a feeling.
In the beginning trust is a feeling, in its final flowering it is being.
The so-called beliefs remain in the head, they never become your feeling, and they cannot become your being. And unless something becomes your being it is just an ideal dream. It is a wastage of energy.
But believing needs risking. You will be surprised to know this: that doubt is very cowardly.
Ordinarily you must have heard that brave people doubt, that cowards believe. That too is true, in a sense. The head-belief is cowardly, and you know only the head-believers, so it corresponds with the reality. If you go into the mosques and the churches and the temples, you will find them full of cowards. But real belief is not cowardly, real belief is a great courage; it is heroic.
Doubt arises out of fear; how can it be brave? Doubt is rooted in fear. Doubt arises because there is a longing to defend oneself, to protect oneself, to be secure. You can trust only if you are ready to go into insecurity, if you are ready to go into the uncharted, if you are ready to sail your boat without any map into the unknown. Trust means immense courage, and only a courageous person can be religious, because only a courageous person can say yes.
Doubt is defense. And even if you are defended by it,, you remain stuck, you cannot move — because each movement brings fear, because each movement is movement into the unknown, the unfamiliar. Doubt is a by-product of fear, remember it.
Then what is believing? Believing is a by-product of love. Only those who know how to love know how to believe. Love arises from the heart, and belief also. Doubt arises in the head, and fear also. The person who lives in the head remains a coward. In fact, because he is cowardly, he lives in the head. He is afraid to move towards the heart because one never knows where the heart will take you.
The heart is an adventurer, the explorer of the mysteries, the discoverer of all that is hidden. The heart is always on a pilgrimage. It is never satisfied, it has an innermost discontent, a spiritual discontent. It never settles anywhere. It is very much in love with movement, with dynamism.
The heart is satisfied only when it has come to the ultimate, beyond which there is 'no go'. The mundane cannot satisfy it. The heart is never conventional, the heart is always in revolution. It is always leaping from one state into another state. It is always groping, it is always risking. Whatsoever it has, it is always ready to gamble it for the unknown. Its desire is to know that which truly is; that's what God is all about.
The heart longs for adventure, it longs for danger, it longs for the uncharted, the unknown, the insecure. It hankers for the oceanic experience; it wants to dissolve. It wants to disappear into the totality. The head is afraid, afraid of dying, afraid of disappearing.
When the river faced the desert, encountered the desert, it was the head that was saying, "Don't evaporate. Otherwise, who knows where you will land? Who will you be then? Your identity may be erased forever. You may not be able to be again as you are now." It was head. But the heart understood the whisperings of the desert. Something deep inside felt a conviction, "Yes, this is not my destiny, to be just a river losing itself in the desert. I have to go beyond, and I have to risk. It is dangerous and there is no guarantee."
But the moment the river started thinking of risking, somewhere deep in the unconscious it started feeling, glimpses, memories started arising. It started feeling, "Yes, there is somewhere, some experience. I have been in the hands of the winds before too."
When you trust, your unconscious starts revealing many things to you. It reveals itself only to the trusting mind, only to the trusting being, only to the trusting consciousness. Religion is the fragrance of this trust, impeccable, absolute. Atheism is an act of weakness, of impotency. It is decadent.
A society becomes atheist only when it is dying, when it has lost vigor and youth. When a society is young, alive, vigorous, it hankers for the unknown, it longs for the danger. It tries to live dangerously because that is the only way to live.
OSHO