“If you move inwards you will come to feel more and more that there is nothingness, vast space.”
The seventh question:
We come out of nothingness and go back into it. The soul remains around the body if the body is buried after death, and it leaves the body immediately if the body is burnt. How is the soul related to nothingness?
You miss the whole point. The soul is the nothingness. It is not related. The soul is the nothingness. The body is something, the soul is nothing.
The body is filled, the soul is empty. That’s why the body has form and the soul is formless, but the very word ‘nothingness’ makes you afraid and scared. The soul – nothing? Then where will your ego be standing? Then no foothold is left. In fact there is no foothold. The ego exists as a dream exists, with no foothold, with no substance to it. The ego exists like a mirage.
If you move inwards you will come to feel more and more that there is nothingness, vast space. You will not encounter anybody, you will not find anybody there, you will not find the thing called atma, the self, no. They are just other names for the ego – religious names, spiritual names, but names for the ego. You will not find anybody there. Nobody is there, and that’s the beauty of it. When you encounter that nothingness you become absolutely silent, you become that nothingness.
That is the fear of going inwards, that’s why you go out and out and out. You go on the farthest journeys, but you never go on the nearest journey – from New York to Kabul, from Kabul to Delhi, from Delhi to Poona, from Poona to Goa, from Goa to Kathmandu, you go around the world, but you don’t go in.
And that is the nearest beach, and the nearest mountain, and the nearest Mecca, and the nearest Kasi, the nearest temple, the gurudwara. But there you never go because if you go there you become scared. It is a death. You die there.
You ask about suicide? Go in, and the suicide will happen without you committing it. Go in and you will not find yourself: you disappear, you evaporate. And in that absence all is present. In that nothingness is the whole.
Osho, Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 2, Ch 2, Q 7
Audio thanks to Siddho
Comments are closed.