Meditation Is Looking Into Emptiness

Looking with inner eyes

"People are thirsty for power because deep down they are empty. Somehow they want to stuff that emptiness with something -- it may be money, power, prestige, respectability, character, virtue. Anything will do; they want to stuff their inner emptiness.

Stuffing emptiness creates frustration

There are only two types of people in the world: those who try to stuff their inner emptiness, and those very rare precious beings who try to see the inner emptiness. Those who try to stuff it remain empty, frustrated. They go on collecting garbage, their whole life is futile and fruitless. Only the other kind, the very precious people who try to look into their inner emptiness without any desire to stuff it, become meditators.

A real paradox: full emptiness

Meditation is looking into your emptiness, welcoming it, enjoying it, being one with it, with no desire to fill it -- there is no need, because it is already full. It looks empty because you don't have the right way of seeing it. You see it through the mind; that is the wrong way. If you put the mind aside and look into your emptiness, it has tremendous beauty, it is divine, it is overflowing with joy. Nothing else is needed.

Only then a person stops thinking about money, stops thinking about power, stops thinking about paradise -- because he is already in paradise, because he is already rich, because he is already powerful."

Osho, excerpted from The Book of Wisdom #28

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This Osho quote on emptiness shows what is true: we stuff emptiness with power, money, sex, food or anything else. A meditator is looking straight into emptiness. And discovers the paradox: emptiness is full.