Question – I feel empty. I cry. What’s next?
Osho – 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 is positive, has no future to it. There is nothing next to it; you have arrived home. There is nothing next to it. It is enough unto itself.
This type of emptiness. negative emptiness, has to be dropped. It has not come out of meditation; it is coming out of life’s frustrations. It has not come out of love; it is coming out of the frustration that lust gives to everybody. It is a by-product of failure.
Positive emptiness happens when you are in a deep inner contentment; negative emptiness happens when you are deeply frustrated. Your life seems meaningless. Whatsoever you do, you go on doing like a robot, mechanically. There is no romance in it. You drag your life; there is no dance to it. You cannot sing, you cannot be happy, you cannot celebrate.
Drop this type of emptiness! And this type of emptiness can be dropped only if you try to change the negativity towards positivity. Meditate more, and meditate without expectations. Love more, and love without expectations.
If you expect anything out of love, or meditation, you will get only frustration, and negative emptiness will happen. If you love for the sheer joy of it, if you meditate for the sheer delight of it and you don’t have any result in mind — you are not goal-oriented — then there comes an emptiness which is positive. You start feeling full. You start feeling, for the first time, that you ARE. Being is felt, and that being is tremendously beautiful, blissful. It is SATCHITANANDA: it is existence, it is consciousness, it is bliss.
Always remember to beware of the negative. Move from the negative towards the positive; and when the positive happens, then stay with it. Then allow it. Open yourself to it totally, be vulnerable to it — all doors and windows open so it can come from everywhere and it can drown you completely. Then it becomes a resurrection.
Source – Osho Book “Come Follow To You, Vol 2″