According to Osho, when mental content falls away, what remains is neither individual nor cosmic; both are concepts of thought. The residue is an unnameable suchness where personal/impersonal, me/universe do not apply. Any label reintroduces limitation. At that frontier only direct, silent awareness abides, beyond all categories and descriptions.
When you drop all thoughts and labels, what’s left can’t be called “me” or “the whole”—it’s just quiet, wordless being.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
If the content is removed, does it become cosmic, or does it remain individual?
In truth, both these words of ours—“individual” and “cosmic”—belong to thought. What remains is neither individual nor cosmic; it is hard to say what it is. Because it is impossible to give it any concept; we have set aside all concepts. These two are merely ideas. On that level no thought has meaning. You cannot say it is personal, nor can you say it is impersonal. At that boundary, whatever is, cannot be named by any word. (The audio recording of the question is not clear.) This is inherent in all our thinking—if we try to think about it, this is bound to happen. Even calling it “cosmic” introduces a limitation.
Osho, is there any practical process for being in the realm of existence beyond thoughts, in the void?
The way to thin them out is non-cooperation. Right now we are their makers—that is, we are the ones maintaining them. When we sit idle, some thought or other is running, because without our cooperation they cannot run. Withdraw your cooperation from whatever thoughts are running, and do nothing else; regard just this as samayik, as meditation. If all thoughts dissolve, you will feel no ego and no person within. You will know only being—only being will be known, in which the distinction “I am an individual” or “I am the whole” will not be felt. Only pure being will remain—pure existence. In truth, because of the thoughts accumulated upon that pure existence, we appear to be a person. This sense that I am “A,” you are “B,” you are “C”—the A, B, C we have pasted on—is our thought-power. We commonly say, “I will become liberated”—this is not quite…
Is there still an individual body?
No. It only seems so to others. If I try to talk about it, to verbalize it, then the whole thing becomes a problem. Whenever we talk about what happens when one goes beyond meditation, it becomes a paradox. It can never be explained because any type of explanation will create new paradoxes, new contradictions. This fifth stage is an explosion of everything that has been. Now nothing remains. It is an explosion of the totality that you were: your memory, your intellect, your ego, your personality, your being, your soul. Everything that you were is now not; you just go beyond. There is no you; you become everything. That is the point of Brahman, cosmic consciousness. Dynamic Meditation can lead you only up to the fourth stage, satori. The fifth is beyond method. Guidance is possible only up to the fourth stage. That is why Krishnamurti talks of no-guidance.…
Osho, but in that knowing, Maharaj-ji, can there not be sameness—that as another has known, I may know the same? And may that sameness become available to me.
If you look very closely, such sameness is possible only if I am exactly as the other was. Otherwise it can never be. See the full implications: when I am knowing, my whole personality, my total being, is knowing. Only if your whole personality is exactly as mine, could the event of our knowing be one and the same. And no two persons are ever the same. In fact, forget persons—that is a far-off matter. Pick up a stone from a Delhi street; search the whole earth and you will not find another exactly like it. Pluck a flower from a garden; comb all the forests and you will not find another just like it. Here, each and every thing has its own uniqueness. And that very uniqueness is its soul. In my view, this uniqueness is its soul. A machine has no soul, because a machine is not unique.…
Therefore Buddha has been very difficult to understand. Because he says there is no Atman; he says there is no God; he says there is no Brahman. Then what remains is that which remains—that which remains. And what remains? Emptiness remains—shunya—without any boundary. Emptiness remains in which there is no wave of thought. Emptiness remains in which there is no center, no ego. Emptiness remains... one should say: nothing remains. This very losing of everything is the finding of everything. This is the ultimate, the last. Beyond this? There is no way beyond—for now there is no one left who could go beyond. From the cosmic unconscious, from the Brahman-unconscious, the leap that happens is into the void, into the Supreme, into Truth, into Mahanirvana, into Moksha—whatever name we may give. In truth, all names are futile. All language is futile.