If there is no 'I', who comes back?

You say we have to come back again and again, until we understand. But if there is no 'I' -- who comes back?

Just become a little patient. That's why coming to the East helps. In the West it is difficult to slow down, the whole of life is moving at such a speed that you cannot slow down -- otherwise you will be out of life, you will be a misfit. In the East, if you go to the villages, life moves so slowly that if you move fast you will be a misfit, you will find yourself alone, nobody is going with you. Life moves slowly. In the old days when life was moving slowly on the whole of the earth, to understand oneself was very easy because you could see easily. You could close your eyes and you could see vast spaces between two thoughts -- just as there is a vast space between two atoms. I have heard a story about the future. A man was travelling and he…

You say that buddha would not speak of god because it cannot be proven. Yet in the next breath he speaks of other lives, and reincarnation. How does this fit into scientific fact? A buddha says there is no soul. What is it that remains after death? What is reincarnation? I vaguely understand that it can be the formless that remains, but can that have an individual entity? The same wave is not reborn.

Buddha is very illogical and he is illogical because his insistence not to go against reality is absolute. His emphasis is this: that whatsoever reality reveals we have to listen to it. We are not here to impose our own ideologies on it. Who are we? If this is the fact, then something is wrong in our logic, in our language, in our very way of thinking. We have to change that rather than avoiding reality, escaping reality. So he seems to be the most absurd thinker in the world, because this is one of the most absurd statements -- that you don't exist but you are reborn. You can see it clearly, it is absurd. If you don't exist how can you be reborn? And he says, 'That I don't know. You don't exist and you are reborn -- that much I know, that I have come to see,…

A friend has asked: Osho, if in the mother’s womb man and woman create the opportunity for a soul to be born, does that mean souls are separate and there is no all-pervading Soul? He also asked: I have said many times that truth is one, God is one, the soul is one—then don’t these two statements seem contradictory, opposed?

These two statements are not opposed. The Divine is one; in truth the soul is one. But bodies are of two kinds. One is what we call the gross body, which we can see; the other is the subtle body, which we cannot see. When death happens, the gross body falls away, but the subtle body does not die. The soul abides within two bodies, a subtle body and a gross body. At death the gross body drops. This body made of earth and water, of bone, flesh and marrow, falls. What remains is an extremely subtle body—of thoughts, subtle sensations, subtle vibrations, subtle filaments. That filament-woven body begins the journey again with the soul and takes birth anew by entering a new gross body. When a new soul enters a mother’s womb, it means the subtle body has entered. At ordinary death only the gross body falls, not the…

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…

Beloved Osho, you speak of reincarnation. I have not experienced it, and I don't want to believe in anything I don't experience. What to do?

Who is asking you to believe in reincarnation? And why are you concerned to do something about it? There must be some lingering belief. If you don't believe in reincarnation, that is the full stop. Why bother about what to do? Don't believe in reincarnation! Just live this incarnation, and you will come to experience that reincarnation is not theory, it is a reality. Just live this incarnation. Do you believe in this incarnation, or not? Reincarnation is either in the past or in the future, but you are here, alive. Life is throbbing in you. I know reincarnation is a truth. But I am not saying that you should believe it because I say so. Never believe anybody else's experience; that is a hindrance. I can only say to you, just live this incarnation. That will open doors and you will be able to see backwards, you will be…