According to Osho, when emptiness makes you cry, it’s a negative, lonely absence born of frustration; the mind uses tears and the hope of "what next" to patch it. Drop this negativity by meditating and loving without expectations. Then emptiness turns positive: content, present, futureless, so full it feels like being itself—existence, consciousness, bliss. Open totally and let it drown you.
If emptiness makes you cry, it's the lonely kind; stop chasing fixes and instead meditate and love without expecting results, and it will soften into a peaceful, full presence.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
I feel empty. I cry. What's next?
This emptiness is negative. Otherwise you will not cry; you will laugh. This emptiness is like loneliness, not like aloneness. This emptiness is not a deep presence; it is simply absence. This emptiness is only death, and there is no resurrection in it. That's why the crying comes. You are filling your emptiness by crying, by tears. That is a trick of the mind. And that's why the question arises: "What's next?" -- because when you feel negatively empty, you want to fill it with something. You are hankering for something to happen: some relationship, some achievement, some lottery... something to happen. "What next? " Emptiness, when it is negative, is never at ease with itself. It is thinking of the future. It is hoping that in the future this emptiness will not be there "and I will be fulfilled". Emptiness, when it is negative, creates future. Emptiness, when it…
[A visitor says that before he came here he found it difficult to cry. Over the past few days he has been crying a lot.] Mm mm, something has broken inside and you should be happy about it. Some ice has broken, some coldness has broken, some dead layer has broken. Whenever it happens, one starts crying because one again becomes a child. The cry is the first thing that the child does. That is his first entry into the world. Everybody enters the world crying. So if you can really cry deeply, it can become a rebirth. That's why you are feeling so full of change. Your old self will dissolve into crying. So don't stop it -- allow it, and on the contrary, enjoy it. It has a tremendous beauty in it.
Osho! While listening to you I start to weep. Now, even in the celebration of active meditation, tears burst forth. What is this? In the midst of meditation a feeling arises that this body is a hindrance now; how can it be shed—the feeling keeps growing more intense. Why? Please explain out of compassion.
Akshay Vivek! Human beings have been given such wrong conditioning that they have neither ever cried to their heart’s content nor laughed to their heart’s content. They have never really lived to their heart’s content. In no aspect, in no dimension, have they ever done anything totally; everything remains half-done! So many things hang inside, suspended like Trishanku. I say meditation is a celebration, but what is happening to you happens to others as well. While celebrating, suddenly tears arise from some unknown corner! They must have been suppressed somewhere—perhaps for lifetimes. Especially in men. Because from childhood we tell boys: Don’t cry! Girls cry. You are a man; crying is not for you. This is false. It is utterly false. Nature has made the tear glands in the eyes of men and women just the same. Men’s tear glands are not smaller than women’s. So one thing is certain—nature…
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.
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…