Osho Quotes on Emptiness – Nothingness, Emptiness, Shunyata

Osho Quotes on Emptiness

1. There is no person like God. There is nobody, there is pure emptiness. And only pure emptiness or nothingness is what I have been calling enlightenment.
2. The first and the only worthwhile inquiry is to know: “Who am I within this body-mind mechanism? What is this consciousness, this miracle of consciousness?” This miracle of awareness has to be discovered. You have to peel your being as one peels an onion. Go on peeling…. You will find layers within layers. And finally, when all the layers are discarded, eliminated, you will find in your hands pure nothingness, emptiness, SHUNYATA. That is your essential core, the center of the cyclone.
3. You have to learn meditation to enjoy your emptiness. And that is one of the greatest days in life — when a person starts enjoying emptiness, aloneness, nothingness.
4. Just finding that “I am nobody”… and that’s how existence is. What is a marigold flower? What is a rose? They are both nobodies. And we belong with them. Once this settles in you, the idea of nobodiness, silence starts descending on you. There is no idea, no picture — no Jesus Christ, no Krishna, no Buddha: You are utterly empty. And in this emptiness is the light. In this emptiness is enlightenment.
5. In English there is no right word, so you have to understand that we are using ‘meditation’ for dhyana. Dhyana means a state of being where there is no thought, no object, no dream, no desire, nothing — just emptiness. In that emptiness you come to know your self. You discover the truth. You discover your subjectivity. It is perfect silence.
6. The most strange thing about the mind is, if you become a watcher it starts disappearing. Just like the light disperses darkness, watchfulness disperses the mind, its thoughts, its whole paraphernalia. So meditation is simply watchfulness, awareness. And that reveals — it is nothing to do with inventing. It invents nothing; it simply discovers that which is there. And what is there? You enter and you find infinite emptiness, so tremendously beautiful, so silent, so full of light, so fragrant, that you have entered into the kingdom of God. In my words, you have entered into godliness.
7. No matter what, you are alone. And all the fiction that there may be somebody who is just made for you, there may be somebody who will fill this gap, this emptiness in you…. Nobody can do it; not because nobody wants to do it, no, everybody would love to do it, but it is just not possible in the very nature of things. And it is good, I repeat, that it is not possible in the very nature of things, because if it was possible then there would be no necessity for religion — no need of religion.
8. The desire to belong arises because you feel empty. In a crowd of any kind — political, religious — you forget your emptiness; the crowd fills you.
9. With me, you have only to lose; you cannot gain anything. You are in a game where you can only be a loser. You will have to lose your ego, you will have to lose your jealousy, you will have to lose your fear. You will have to lose all kinds of crap that you are filled with. You will have to be empty — and emptiness cannot claim the ego. There is no place in emptiness, in nothingness, for the ego. You can be with me, not for anything that is going to be profitable in the future; you can be here only for this moment.
10. Just as one peels an onion, peel your personality, layer by layer. Go on throwing those layers. New layers will be there, but finally a moment comes when the onion disappears and there is only emptiness in your hands. That moment is the moment of enlightenment. You cannot desire it, because desire adds another layer to your onion — and a far more dangerous layer than any other layer.
11. The master is already merged into existence. Merging into the master you are really merging with existence itself. The master functions only as a door, and a door is an emptiness; you pass through it. The master is the door to the beyond.
12. The energy of the cosmos is surrounding you. All that is needed is a certain emptiness in you. So the emptiness is good; don’t fill it by beliefs, don’t fill it again by another kind of god, another philosophy, some existentialism. Don’t fill it. Leave it clean and fresh, and go deeper. Soon you will find from both sides, from outside and inside, a tremendous rush of energy, a tremendous rush of consciousness. Then you disappear, you are almost flooded with the cosmos. You are so small and the cosmos is so vast. You suddenly disappear into it, and that disappearance is the ultimate experience of enlightenment. Then you know you were neither an outsider, nor an insider; you are one with existence. Other than oneness with existence, nothing is going to help you. But that oneness is so easy, so obvious. Just a little relaxation, just a little turning in — not much effort, not much discipline, not much torture for yourself.
13. Man should be like a hollow bamboo, so that existence can pass through him. Man should be like a porous sponge — not hard — so that the doors and the windows of his being are open, and existence can pass from one end to another without any hindrance; in fact, finding no one inside. The winds blow — they come in from one window and they go out from another window of his being. This emptiness is the highest bliss possible. But you are like a hard, unporous rock, or like a hard steel rod. Nothing passes through you. You resist everything. You don’t allow. You go on fighting on all sides and in all directions as if you are in a great war with existence. There is no war going on, you are simply befooled by yourself. Nobody is there to destroy you. The whole supports you; the whole is the very earth on which you are standing, the very sky in which you breathe, you live. In fact, you are not — only the whole is. When one understands this, by and by one drops the inner hardness, there is no need for it. There is no enmity, the whole is friendly towards you. The whole cherishes you, loves you. Otherwise, why are you here? The whole brings you forth, like a tree is brought forth by the earth. The whole would like to participate in all your blessings, in all the celebrations that are possible. When you flower, the whole will flower through you; when you sing, the whole will sing through you; when you dance, the whole will dance with you. You are not separate.
14. Once you understand this, meditation becomes possible. Once you understand this, you relax. You throw off all the armour that you have created around you as a security. You are no longer afraid. Fear disappears and love arises. In this state of love, emptiness happens. Or, if you can allow emptiness to happen, love will flower in it. Love is a flower of emptiness, total emptiness — emptiness is the situation. It can work both ways.