According to Osho, he abides in a paradoxical totality: simultaneously totally present and totally absent. Presence as pure awareness; absence of the mind, ego, and person. In this silence, meeting and communion become possible. He invites you to the same state, warning that the restless mind diverts you from the waters; let presence–absence become your whole life.
I’m fully here as awareness while the ‘me’ is gone, quiet inside, so we can truly meet.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Your second question is: "Osho, you are like an exotic flower or rare species of creature whom I have watched and listened to and tried to find words to describe for the past fourteen years. To hear you talk of the state you are in is to feel endlessly in awe. One of the most intriguing things about you is that you are always so absolutely present and at the same time so totally absent. Would you please comment?" maneesha, totality has two sides: the presence and the absence.
You cannot be totally present if you cannot be totally absent at the same time, simultaneously -- you cannot choose one. Just the very word `total' includes presence and absence both. Your understanding is accurate. You have felt rightly that I am present -- at the same time I am not present. This has to be your state also. Only then -- the meeting, the communion. Once in a while you have, for a moment, come to the place where you meet me -- but soon your mind takes you away. You come very close to the waters and yet you remain thirsty. Your mind takes another route which goes away from the waters. In this silence you are both: totally present and totally absent. This presence, this absence, this totality has to become your whole life. Just because you could get the feel of an ultimate fact, Zen master…
Beloved Osho, I am puzzled that I feel in your presence a beautiful absence, not in the sense of emptiness, but rather a quality of overflowingness. Can you say something about this sense of absence?
I said, "I will do it properly. You accept this as an original character certificate, and I will get exactly the same from my professor -- so that will be a carbon copy of the original; the original I am giving to you. I will not sign it, I will put my professor's signature, and because I have loved his handwriting, even he himself cannot make a distinction, whether he has signed it or I have signed it." He said, "Finish it somehow, just do it." So I signed the character certificate in the name of my professor, Dr. S. S. Roy, and I made a copy of it, and I went to S. S. Roy and I said, "The original I have given to the education minister. Now you give me a carbon copy of it." He said, "What do you mean? I have heard always that the original…
For excample, the mind believes that you are a person, and you are not; you are only a presence, not a person. A person is a static thing, defined, well-defined, structured, with a name, form, label. A presence is an undefined, vague cloud. You can feel it but you cannot say what it is. The person is definable -- you can pinpoint it; the presence cannot be pin-pointed. This is a great experience, to know that you don't know who you are. This is the beginning of a transformation. This is what I call real knowing. It is not knowledge, it is knowing. It is not information, it is transformation. The person is dissolving and the presence is arising. The presence is vast, infinite. The person is really a false entity that we have created to cling to. It will be very difficult to live as a presence.
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, is there any difference between the state of no-mind and being present?
Just leave the mind aside ... But we are against the body, we are very condemnatory of the body, not knowing at all that this condemnation of the body is breaking the bridge to your being. A man of authentic spirituality is deeply in love with his body, because he knows body shares many things with being. Mind shares nothing, either with body or with being. It is an absolute stranger that has been forcibly put into you by the culture, the religion, the society. They are using the mind to enslave you. And because you are in the mind you continuously go on asking about things of which you have no experience. You don't know what no-mind is, except a word. You don't know what presence of being is, except that you have heard about it. Just words won't do. Move away from the mind ... And when I…