Emptiness is full of existence

Beloved Osho,

Would you please comment on what has enabled and allowed you to go into and contain so much of existence. That you have penetrated and absorbed such vast realms and inexhaustible energies is a beautiful and majestic opening, and yet seemingly so far away, so unreachable. What can be said of your reality?

First: I am not far away, I am here.

The difference between you and me is not of how far away I am.

The difference is of depth.

I am here, but at the deepest, most interior center of my being. You are also here, but just on the circumference. And the difference between the center and the circumference is not big, because they are related. The circumference belongs to the center and the center belongs to the circumference. They cannot exist separately, they are always together. Can you have a center without a circumference, or can you have a circumference without a center?

But you can choose one, become obsessed with it, and completely forget your own center. It is easy to forget it, because it is obvious. It is easy to forget it because you are born with it. You have not earned it, you have not traveled to it, it has not been arduous for you. It has been the sheer grace of existence to give you a center, a soul, a consciousness.

Secondly, it may seem to you and to thousands of people that I contain so much… what is my secret? There is no secret, because I am not containing anything.

I am just an open space, alive, fully alert. So when you ask a question, it is not from some stored knowledge that the answer comes to you. When you raise a question, my whole being responds to it. It is not my memory. In this moment, this is my response. It is not an answer which was accumulated within me.

I have been living in my room for many years, and people are naturally curious because I don’t do anything. I don’t even look outside the window! So to me, whether I am in India or in America or in England or in France does not matter. I am always in a room.

Living in my room for almost twenty, twenty-five years, I am simply sitting in emptiness. But it is such an exquisite experience that I don’t want anything more… although every day something more goes on happening.

But basically, I remain empty. When you ask me a question I have to encounter the question as if it is my question, and what I would do if this were my question, and then I reply to you. But the reply, the answer, was not waiting there in my memory system.

I am the most empty man on the earth today.

Yes, I am full only of one thing, and that is emptiness. But emptiness is not a negative state, emptiness is full of existence. The whole of existence has come out of emptiness, and whenever it becomes tired it goes back into emptiness. You are born out of emptiness and you die to again rejuvenate yourself in emptiness. You will be born again… thousands of times you have been coming and going.

Emptiness is the complete, total rest, where everything ceases. But in that rest and in that cessation of everything you are becoming again ready to go for another run, another existence… thousands of lives.

My answers are not confined to any religion, confined to any theology. My answers are confined only to this minute — and I am not committed. Tomorrow you cannot say to me, “You are contradicting yourself.” What can I do? It was so yesterday, and this is how it is today.

I cannot lie.

I can answer only that which arises in my emptiness.

But to you it will seem… I must have answered at least fifty thousand questions. Anybody looking at those questions is bound to wonder how much knowledge I contain.

The reality is, I don’t contain any knowledge at all.

I am just a mirror, an empty mirror.

You bring your question — that is, you bring your face — and my mirror reflects. The moment you are gone, my mirror is empty again; your coming and going leave no marks on my mirror.

This should be understood clearly, because any wrong understanding about me and you will start following that line. You may start collecting more knowledge, more scriptures. I have done that dirty work, and I have wasted so much time on your holy scriptures and the commentaries, but they are all just words. In fact, to expect more from books is not logical; books are collections of dead words.

While I am here, you have the opportunity to listen to a living word. Once I am gone, you will read the same words in books, but they will be dead. My warmth, my love, my heartbeat will not be in them.

And if you cannot understand while I am behind my words, it is absolutely impossible that you will be able to understand them from a book when I am no longer behind those words. So while listening to me you have to be aware of a few more things. It is not just a lecture. It is not imparting information to you, it is not something that you have to remember. It is a totally different phenomenon.

Listening to me is not listening to my words.

Of course, you will hear them.

Hear my words, but listen to me.

And while listening to me, remember: it has to be more like drinking something, eating something, digesting something; not accumulating something in the memory.

While listening to me, just be as empty as I am.

The answer is coming from emptiness.

And this kind of answer can be understood only if it is heard in emptiness.

Osho, Sermons in Stones, Ch 15, Q 4 – Dec 1986

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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