What does it mean to feel both full and empty at the same time?

Beloved master, I feel so full inside that it overflows, and at the same time, so empty that it scares me. It seems a contradiction. Would you like to say something about it?

Jivan Kavya, life is not made of contradictions. It is made of complementaries. Only in the mind, do things appear to be opposite. Only in the mind, you cannot conceive how they both can be one. That's why euclidean geometry says that parallel lines never meet, but in fact, it has been discovered that parallel lines also meet. This whole existence is a meeting of many dimensions. That is its beauty, its variety, its unending procession of celebration. If you think about emptiness, you cannot think that fullness and emptiness can be the same. But if you experience you will be amazed that what mind has been always proposing, and what philosophers have always been supporting, is absolutely absurd. All philosophies are absurd. Only experience is truth, not theoretical considerations about experience. We teach people's minds contradictions: emptiness and fullness are absolutely contradictive. But when you come to a point…

Beloved Osho, when I close my eyes, I feel such an enormous presence, such a vast isness, such a beatitude. But it is a fullness, not an emptiness. Could you please say something about the difference between this fullness, and the emptiness or nothingness which you are speaking of?

These ideas appeal to the ego. The ego would like to have all the stars, if not inside the chest then at least hanging on the coat outside the chest. "Enormous light"... the ego is very willing. To cut the very roots, Buddha says the experience is as if you were to blow out a candle. There was a small flame on the candle giving a small light -- even that is gone, and you are surrounded with absolute darkness, abysmal darkness. People used to come to ask him, "If you go on teaching such things, nobody is going to follow you. Who wants darkness, enormous darkness? You are crazy. You say that the ultimate experience is ultimate death. People want eternal life, and you are talking about ultimate death." But he was a very consistent man, and you can see that for forty-two years he hammered on the genius…

In meditation, when the `I' drops temporarily and an emptiness is created within, after it a frustration is felt when that emptiness is not filled by the entry of the unknown. How can one learn to live with that emptiness?

Once you have known the inner treasure, once you have come in contact with your deepest core, then you can move in activity, then you can do whatsoever you like, then you can live an ordinary worldly life, but the emptiness will remain with you. You cannot forget it. It will go on inside. The music of it will be heard. Whatsoever you are doing, the doing will be only on the periphery; inside you will remain empty. And if you can remain empty inside, doing only on the periphery, whatsoever you do becomes divine, whatsoever you do takes on the quality of the divine because now it is not coming from you. Now it is coming directly from the original emptiness, the original nothingness. If then you speak, those words are not yours. That's what Mohammed means when he says, `This Koran is not said by me. It has…

Question: Second question: Osho, becoming empty—that is, attaining supreme bliss—is no goal for me. Who am I? My previous births? Where do I go after death? From where do people come, where do they go? What is all this? I have been wandering for fourteen years. When I was fifteen, a monk told a story in his talk. Its impact carried me away. Then from one monk to another—whomever I heard of, I went to. I kept vows, I kept meditating. I tried to know myself. Then another question began to arise: Who is going to know whom? Who wants to see whom? Who will search for whom? Nothing makes sense. The breath goes on. The heart beats. And nothing else! Then a notion formed that no one knows the mystery of this life! All useless. All lies. All talk; nothing.

Beloved Osho, for years I have contemplated what seems to me to be the basic message for well-being: love yourself. When I was a therapist, all day hearing, "I hate myself; I feel sorry for myself; I am proud of myself; I want to destroy myself," I started wondering -- who is this self? I love when you say there is no self. That seems so freeing. Could you please say more?

The whole therapeutic movement has gone wrong on that point: Love thyself. Socrates used to say, "Know thyself." And there have been masters, particularly Sufis, who say, "Be thyself." But there is only one person in the whole history of man, Gautam Buddha, who said, "There is no self. You are an emptiness, utter silence, a non-being." His message was much opposed by all the traditions, because they all depended in some way or other on the idea of the self. There may have been differences on other points, but on one point they were all totally in agreement -- and that was the existence of the self. Even people like George Gurdjieff, who used to talk about a very novel idea -- that you are not born with a self, you have to earn it: "Deserve thyself" -- finally, he also ends up with the self. Gautam Buddha does…