Astrall
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Does Nothingness have a quality?
Nothingness can be either simply emptiness or an immense fullness. It can be negative, it can be positive. If it is negative, it is like death, like darkness.
Religions called it hell. It is hell because in it there is no joy, no song, no heartbeat, no dance. Nothingness does not bloom, nothingness does not open. It is simply a vacuum. This empty Nothingness created a strong fear in people. That is why—especially in the West—God was never called Nothingness, with the exception of a few mystics such as Dionysius, Eckhart, Böhme; but they were not representatives of the mainstream of Western thought. In the West, Nothingness was always presented in negative terms, and therefore an immense fear arose in connection with it. People continue to be told that an empty mind is the devil's workshop. In the East, they knew about the positive aspect of emptiness; this is a most valuable contribution to human consciousness. Buddha would laugh at the assertion that emptiness is the devil's workshop.
He would say:
≪Only in emptiness, only in the absence of anything does divinity happen≫. But he is speaking of a positive phenomenon. For Gautama Buddha, for Mahavira, for the long tradition of Zen masters and Taoists, emptiness simply means the absence of anything. Everything has disappeared, and because everything has disappeared, pure consciousness remains. Nothing is reflected in the mirror, but the mirror exists. Consciousness is free from content, but consciousness exists. As long as it was filled with content, there was so much in it that you could not know what it actually is. Consciousness filled with content is what we call the mind. Consciousness free from any content is what we call no-mind or meditation. To create emptiness within oneself is the goal of meditation, but this emptiness has nothing to do with the negative representation.
It is full, more than full. It is so full that it begins to overflow. Buddha defined such emptiness as overflowing compassion. The word ≪compassion≫ is beautiful. It comes from the word ≪passion≫*. When passion is transformed, when the strong desire to seek another person disappears, when you are enough for yourself, when you need no one, when the very desire directed toward someone else has evaporated, when you are completely happy, blissful, simply abiding in solitude, then passion becomes compassion. Now you seek another person not because you are empty and lonely; now you seek another because you are too full and wish to share. An enlightened person, just like an unenlightened one, seeks another person, but there is a qualitative difference. The unenlightened person seeks another because he feels a negative emptiness within himself. When he is alone, he does not feel solitude, he feels lonely. Remember: solitude and loneliness** are not synonyms, regardless of what dictionaries say. This is not a question of language; it is something existential. Loneliness is negative—you are lacking something.
Solitude is positive—you have found something. The unenlightened seeks another person because that is his need; he needs them, he craves their presence. He clings to the other person, he grasps them. He is always afraid that they might leave. Husbands fear, wives fear, parents fear, children fear, everyone fears. Even your so-called religious teachers fear that students might leave them, which is why they have to agree with the students and compromise with them. Do you understand the irony of this?
Passion arises from negative emptiness, while compassion arises from positive emptiness. Buddha says that a true person of wisdom can be recognized by only one sign—by his compassion, his love. He will radiate compassion. He will always be ready to help people on the path. People will insult him, people will oppose him in every possible way, people will be angry with him because they are fast asleep, and in order to guide them onto the path, he must wake them up. And nobody likes it when their sleep is disturbed: people dream beautiful dreams, and you shake them, you wake them, you destroy their dreams, and that is all they have. If they don't have this, they are lonely, they are empty. Therefore, they somehow fill their inner space with dreams, projections, imaginary things.
And the function of the master is to destroy all your dreams, to free you from all content. But when you discard all content consciously, voluntarily, you do not feel loneliness—you abide in solitude. Solitude is beautiful, loneliness is ugly. Loneliness is like a wound; solitude is like a flower. Loneliness is painful—Søren Kierkegaard called it the ≪sickness unto death≫, while solitude is life, life in abundance. This is health. The Sanskrit word denoting health is very beautiful. In the English word there is also its own beauty. The word health means that the wound is healed; it comes from the word healing. A person is no longer sick, the wound of negative emptiness is no more. It is healed. This is beautiful, but it does not compare to the Sanskrit word denoting health. The Sanskrit word denoting health is svasthya. It means ≪becoming centered≫.
It means coming to one's own ≪I≫, realizing one's own ≪I≫. Sva means ≪I≫, svasthya means ≪rooting in the "I"≫. People are not rooted in their own ≪I≫, which is why they cling to others. Any clinging is a sign that you are afraid: if you remain alone, you will not be in solitude, you will simply be lonely, miserable. The West has yet to realize this fact of immense importance. Western religions are still limited to prayer. They have not even touched the periphery of meditation for the simple reason that meditation means emptiness, and for them emptiness implies only one thing—loneliness, the absence of anything. And they feel that if you become empty inside, you will begin to fall into an abyss, you will be lost.
But we have tasted a completely different quality of emptiness. We have tasted the divinity hidden within it, we have recognized in it the highest degree of bliss, we have known its blessing. My own experience is such that there is no greater joy than being in solitude; the joy of love is secondary. And the joy of love is possible only if you have known the joy of solitude, because only then do you have something to share. Two beggars who meet and cling to each other cannot be happy. They will make each other miserable, as each will hope—and hope in vain—that ≪this person will make me happy≫. And both expect exactly this from each other... They cannot make each other happy. They are both blind; they cannot help each other.
only one part of you should follow, but when you are intensely, passionately, completely involved in something. You cannot love through the mind; in order to love, you must enter the world of no-mind. This is exactly what meditation is. True learning happens through meditation. Meditation means casting aside the past and exploring the present, establishing direct contact with the here and now, because God is now, God is here. God is always now and always here. The mind
lives in the past because it lives in knowledge. Knowledge is what you have learned, understood, studied. Existence happens now, while the mind abides in then;
Existence is here, but the mind is always there. The mind looks back; it is like a rearview mirror. If you are reversing your car, then the rearview mirror is useful, but if you are driving forward, continuing to look in the rearview mirror is dangerous. If you are fixed on the rearview mirror, you are doomed to have an accident. You are in great danger; you are a suicide. Life always moves forward, there was no reverse gear. Life is exactly like that. The reverse gear was added later, when some experience had accumulated, for before that, if you wanted to return home, you had to make a loop of several miles. Then the thought arose that it would be better... Even if you had driven only a few feet away from your house, you could not go back; you had to travel a long way.
Sometimes you had to drive around the entire city just to return. Then the reverse gear was added. But God has not yet added any reverse gear. In fact, there is no need to move backward. The past disappears—the past does not exist. It leaves traces only in your memory; it exists nowhere else. Existence is always ≪now≫; the past is only memory, and the future is only imagination. There is neither future nor past. That which exists is the only reality, and the mind does not allow you to be in contact with it. How can you learn, how can you gain experience? Your experience cannot be useful or healthy. It will be painful, it will be unhealthy. And this has turned every person almost into a monster.
Your head continues to become larger and larger, while everything else has shrunk so much that it has almost disappeared. People have turned into mere heads, with little legs and arms; they are just heads. This is monstrous. Man has become a monster: he has lost balance, harmony. The head uses you for its own interests. It has destroyed your organic unity; like a parasite, it becomes larger and larger at the expense of your wholeness.
Osho
Nothingness can be either simply emptiness or an immense fullness. It can be negative, it can be positive. If it is negative, it is like death, like darkness.
Religions called it hell. It is hell because in it there is no joy, no song, no heartbeat, no dance. Nothingness does not bloom, nothingness does not open. It is simply a vacuum. This empty Nothingness created a strong fear in people. That is why—especially in the West—God was never called Nothingness, with the exception of a few mystics such as Dionysius, Eckhart, Böhme; but they were not representatives of the mainstream of Western thought. In the West, Nothingness was always presented in negative terms, and therefore an immense fear arose in connection with it. People continue to be told that an empty mind is the devil's workshop. In the East, they knew about the positive aspect of emptiness; this is a most valuable contribution to human consciousness. Buddha would laugh at the assertion that emptiness is the devil's workshop.
He would say:
≪Only in emptiness, only in the absence of anything does divinity happen≫. But he is speaking of a positive phenomenon. For Gautama Buddha, for Mahavira, for the long tradition of Zen masters and Taoists, emptiness simply means the absence of anything. Everything has disappeared, and because everything has disappeared, pure consciousness remains. Nothing is reflected in the mirror, but the mirror exists. Consciousness is free from content, but consciousness exists. As long as it was filled with content, there was so much in it that you could not know what it actually is. Consciousness filled with content is what we call the mind. Consciousness free from any content is what we call no-mind or meditation. To create emptiness within oneself is the goal of meditation, but this emptiness has nothing to do with the negative representation.
It is full, more than full. It is so full that it begins to overflow. Buddha defined such emptiness as overflowing compassion. The word ≪compassion≫ is beautiful. It comes from the word ≪passion≫*. When passion is transformed, when the strong desire to seek another person disappears, when you are enough for yourself, when you need no one, when the very desire directed toward someone else has evaporated, when you are completely happy, blissful, simply abiding in solitude, then passion becomes compassion. Now you seek another person not because you are empty and lonely; now you seek another because you are too full and wish to share. An enlightened person, just like an unenlightened one, seeks another person, but there is a qualitative difference. The unenlightened person seeks another because he feels a negative emptiness within himself. When he is alone, he does not feel solitude, he feels lonely. Remember: solitude and loneliness** are not synonyms, regardless of what dictionaries say. This is not a question of language; it is something existential. Loneliness is negative—you are lacking something.
Solitude is positive—you have found something. The unenlightened seeks another person because that is his need; he needs them, he craves their presence. He clings to the other person, he grasps them. He is always afraid that they might leave. Husbands fear, wives fear, parents fear, children fear, everyone fears. Even your so-called religious teachers fear that students might leave them, which is why they have to agree with the students and compromise with them. Do you understand the irony of this?
Passion arises from negative emptiness, while compassion arises from positive emptiness. Buddha says that a true person of wisdom can be recognized by only one sign—by his compassion, his love. He will radiate compassion. He will always be ready to help people on the path. People will insult him, people will oppose him in every possible way, people will be angry with him because they are fast asleep, and in order to guide them onto the path, he must wake them up. And nobody likes it when their sleep is disturbed: people dream beautiful dreams, and you shake them, you wake them, you destroy their dreams, and that is all they have. If they don't have this, they are lonely, they are empty. Therefore, they somehow fill their inner space with dreams, projections, imaginary things.
And the function of the master is to destroy all your dreams, to free you from all content. But when you discard all content consciously, voluntarily, you do not feel loneliness—you abide in solitude. Solitude is beautiful, loneliness is ugly. Loneliness is like a wound; solitude is like a flower. Loneliness is painful—Søren Kierkegaard called it the ≪sickness unto death≫, while solitude is life, life in abundance. This is health. The Sanskrit word denoting health is very beautiful. In the English word there is also its own beauty. The word health means that the wound is healed; it comes from the word healing. A person is no longer sick, the wound of negative emptiness is no more. It is healed. This is beautiful, but it does not compare to the Sanskrit word denoting health. The Sanskrit word denoting health is svasthya. It means ≪becoming centered≫.
It means coming to one's own ≪I≫, realizing one's own ≪I≫. Sva means ≪I≫, svasthya means ≪rooting in the "I"≫. People are not rooted in their own ≪I≫, which is why they cling to others. Any clinging is a sign that you are afraid: if you remain alone, you will not be in solitude, you will simply be lonely, miserable. The West has yet to realize this fact of immense importance. Western religions are still limited to prayer. They have not even touched the periphery of meditation for the simple reason that meditation means emptiness, and for them emptiness implies only one thing—loneliness, the absence of anything. And they feel that if you become empty inside, you will begin to fall into an abyss, you will be lost.
But we have tasted a completely different quality of emptiness. We have tasted the divinity hidden within it, we have recognized in it the highest degree of bliss, we have known its blessing. My own experience is such that there is no greater joy than being in solitude; the joy of love is secondary. And the joy of love is possible only if you have known the joy of solitude, because only then do you have something to share. Two beggars who meet and cling to each other cannot be happy. They will make each other miserable, as each will hope—and hope in vain—that ≪this person will make me happy≫. And both expect exactly this from each other... They cannot make each other happy. They are both blind; they cannot help each other.
only one part of you should follow, but when you are intensely, passionately, completely involved in something. You cannot love through the mind; in order to love, you must enter the world of no-mind. This is exactly what meditation is. True learning happens through meditation. Meditation means casting aside the past and exploring the present, establishing direct contact with the here and now, because God is now, God is here. God is always now and always here. The mind
lives in the past because it lives in knowledge. Knowledge is what you have learned, understood, studied. Existence happens now, while the mind abides in then;
Existence is here, but the mind is always there. The mind looks back; it is like a rearview mirror. If you are reversing your car, then the rearview mirror is useful, but if you are driving forward, continuing to look in the rearview mirror is dangerous. If you are fixed on the rearview mirror, you are doomed to have an accident. You are in great danger; you are a suicide. Life always moves forward, there was no reverse gear. Life is exactly like that. The reverse gear was added later, when some experience had accumulated, for before that, if you wanted to return home, you had to make a loop of several miles. Then the thought arose that it would be better... Even if you had driven only a few feet away from your house, you could not go back; you had to travel a long way.
Sometimes you had to drive around the entire city just to return. Then the reverse gear was added. But God has not yet added any reverse gear. In fact, there is no need to move backward. The past disappears—the past does not exist. It leaves traces only in your memory; it exists nowhere else. Existence is always ≪now≫; the past is only memory, and the future is only imagination. There is neither future nor past. That which exists is the only reality, and the mind does not allow you to be in contact with it. How can you learn, how can you gain experience? Your experience cannot be useful or healthy. It will be painful, it will be unhealthy. And this has turned every person almost into a monster.
Your head continues to become larger and larger, while everything else has shrunk so much that it has almost disappeared. People have turned into mere heads, with little legs and arms; they are just heads. This is monstrous. Man has become a monster: he has lost balance, harmony. The head uses you for its own interests. It has destroyed your organic unity; like a parasite, it becomes larger and larger at the expense of your wholeness.
Osho