What happens when I meditate and feel empty inside?

For example, it brings you the experience that not the body, so clearly, so solidly, so categorically, that even if the whole world denies it, it cannot make any difference: you know from your innermost core you are not the body. It brings you the experience that you are not the mind either. And the moment you know you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly a door opens. You have never been born and you are never going to die because only that which is born can die. The body was born, the mind was born -- they will die -- but you were before your birth and you will be after your death. Once this reality is revealed to you all fears and all miseries disappear. You become part of eternity. Only one thing remains and that is pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is nothing but godliness.

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.

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…

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: 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.