Emptiness

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…

Beloved Osho, for a few moments the other morning, while watching you, I saw that nobody was there. I saw the emptiness, the hollow bamboo. Why did I find this spooky and awesome when you have been speaking of the beauty of emptiness for years?

It is just because from your very childhood you have been told that the goal is not emptiness, but fullness. Emptiness symbolizes the beggar's bowl. In the West particularly, the word `emptiness' never achieved any positive meaning. In the East the case is different. We have two words for emptiness. One -- which will translate the English word `emptiness' -- is riktata. It simply means absence of something. And the other is shunyata for which, in the Western languages, there is no equivalent because that kind of experience has not happened in the West. Shunyata is emptiness from one side, and fullness from another side. For example, this room is full of people now, furniture, things. We can empty it -- all the people can leave the room, all the furniture can be removed -- and then somebody can come and see and can say, "The room is empty." He…

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.