According to Osho, when you taste nothingness, the ego silently disappears like a shadow, leaving a cool, calm, utterly ordinary-yet-extraordinary space. In this absence of the doer, life happens by itself—dancing, laughter, and rejoicing arise spontaneously while you remain a witnessing presence. From this emptiness, love descends, vast and fragile, beyond certainty or security; trying to fix it kills it.
Your sense of ‘me’ drops away, everything feels peacefully simple, and joy and love happen on their own while you just watch.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: THEREFORE, O SARIPUTRA, IN EMPTINESS THERE IS NO FORM, NOR FEELING, NOR PERCEPTION, NOR IMPULSE, NOR CONSCIOUSNESS; NO EYE, EAR, NOSE, TONGUE, BODY, MIND; NO FORMS, SOUNDS, SMELLS, TASTES, TOUCHABLES OR OBJECTS OF MIND; NO SIGHT-ORGAN ELEMENT, AND SO FORTH, UNTIL WE COME TO: NO MIND-CONSCIOUSNESS ELEMENT; THERE IS NO IGNORANCE, NO EXTINCTION OF IGNORANCE, AND SO FORTH, UNTIL WE COME TO: THERE IS NO DECAY AND DEATH, NO EXTINCTION OF DECAY AND DEATH. THERE IS NO SUFFERING, NO ORIGINATION, NO STOPPING, NO PATH. THERE IS NO COGNITION, NO ATTAINMENT Nothingness is the fragrance of the beyond. It is the opening of the heart to the transcendental. It is the unfoldment of the one-thousand-petaled lotus. It is man's destiny.
Question: OSHO, IS THERE QUALITY IN NOTHINGNESS? Meditation is nothing but the method of discovering the positive aspect of nothingness, the positive quality of it. Meditation means dropping the content of the mind very consciously, knowing that you are dropping it. And when you have dropped everything, suddenly you realize that everything has disappeared but you ARE and you are more full than ever because all those things, all that junk that you have been carrying all along was simply taking your space. Now the whole space, the whole sky is available, and your heart can open its petals. We call it in the East "the one-thousand-petaled lotus." Now there is space. With all the junk that you carry in your mind, where is the space for the one-thousand-petaled lotus to open? You are not spacious enough.
Live the emptiness... because whatsoever you do can never be greater than you. Whatsoever the mind is going to do is going to be part of the mind. Mm? It is going to be a game. Once you start feeling empty there is no need to do anything on your own. Let emptiness be lived, and things start happening. Not that you do them -- they happen. Emptiness is hard in the beginning, because one starts feeling a little depressed, sad, with nothing to do. For the whole life we have been occupied with this and that, improving ourselves, reaching for, achieving, some goal... excitement, misery, failure, success -- but one is occupied. Then suddenly one feels emptiness settling -- nothing to do, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide; no ambition that can give one excitement and can create fever.
Just go on seeing what is happening -- what the body is doing, what the mind is doing. Not that you have to verbalise it. You are not to evaluate it, you are not to judge it. You are not even to label what it is. Simply go on seeing whatsoever is. You remain with it and yet you remain far away. This experience can grow slowly, slowly. Just think -- one day you were a child, then the body changed; you became a young man. But have you changed? Has that awareness inside you changed? It is the same. You may be young, you may be old. You may be ill, you may be healthy, sometimes poor, sometimes rich, sometimes famous, well-known, sometimes thrown into oblivion -- nobody bothers about you, sometimes a somebody and sometimes a nobody.
Beloved Osho, being near you, looking into your eyes, feeling you, I am losing my ground. And I feel what I am, what I am not. Osho, how can I find myself? There seems to be nothing to find.
You have found it! Yes, nothing is there to be found. But to say it from the very beginning is to destroy the whole business. So religions go on saying to you, "You will find God, and you will find the soul, and you will find this and that." The truth is: you will not find anything. And it is better that you don't find anything, otherwise there is going to be trouble. Just think: if you find God sitting inside you, what are you going to do stuck with the fellow for eternity? Nothingness is beautiful. It implies freedom, infinity. The whole sky is yours. And you don't find anyone, so there is no question of quarrel, no question of who is higher and who is lower; no question of how to coexist because to anybody who is there you will be a stranger -- red people in Oregon!…