Given my recent dealings with the abyss, the void of existential nothingness, I was very relieved but challenged by these comments from Osho which I found quite serendipitously while flicking through The Mustard Seed:‘Deep inside you, you are an abyss; that’s why you go on escaping. Buddha called that abyss “no-self”, anatta. There is nobody inside. When you look it is a vast expansion, nobody there - just an inner sky, an infinite abyss, endless, beginningless. The moment you look you get dizzy……Wherever you go that emptiness will be with you because it is you, it is your Tao, your nature. One has to come to terms with it’. (63)
‘The problem is that whenever you are alert, alone, you feel empty…. You feel a nothingness inside and that nothingness becomes the abyss..... Meditation is nothing but coming to terms with your inner emptiness: recognising it, not escaping it; living through it….Then suddenly the emptiness becomes the fullness of life. When you don’t escape it is the most beautiful thing, the purest….God means the great abyss, the ultimate abyss. It is there but you are never trained to look into it’. (63)
‘One has to come to terms with the inner emptiness. And once you come to terms with it, suddenly the emptiness….becomes the all. Then it is not empty, not negative; it is the most positive thing in existence. But acceptance is the door’. (64)
I now accept that there is an alternative to the negativity I felt in encountering this painful truth. Perhaps it's a case of once having seen the blackest black it then turns you towards the light. I don't pretend that trying to surrender to this is at all easy or that I have achieved it - but I do recognise it as a truth. And I know I just have to work on it some more.
Shree Rajneesh, The Mustard Seed (Discourses on the Sayings of Jesus from the Gospel According to Thomas), 1975, Rajneesh Foundation, Oregon
