Mystic Mantra: Relax into nothingness

Shrini was a brilliant young man with many skills, but somehow he could not complete his studies of engineering. He dropped out in the last year. And once he lost his confidence it was very difficult for him to gear it up again. Parents and friends used to nag him, worry about him. Slowly he developed an inferiority complex. His father used to drive him about 120 miles to the psychologist for getting treated, but to no avail.

Luckily he arrived at the Osho International Meditation Resort and applied for work in a meditation program. The atmosphere at the meditation resort, so alive and friendly, surcharged with meditation and celebration, helped Shrini reclaim his self-esteem.

Once he came to me for a Osho Zen tarot cards reading session. The tarot is, in essence, a soul map, a deep psychological guide to self-empowerment as imaged through 78 symbolic cards. Tarot cards are known for their colourful and picturesque depiction of the unconscious mind. The imagery in the cards give you instant access to your intuition and from this place of inner power and wisdom, you can discover how to make positive changes in your life.

The card he drew was : Nothingness. A pitch-black emptiness on the card. No design, no colours to guide you. It means the gap. This is Osho’s view: The forms cannot exist without the formless just as success cannot be there without failure. Light exists because of the darkness. So make friends with emptiness.

This exactly correlated with Shrini’s state of mind. He was truly in the gap. Being in the gap can be disorienting and even scary. Nothing to hold on to, no sense of direction, not even a hint of what choices and possibilities might lie ahead. So what to do? All you can do now is to relax into this nothingness, fall into the silence between the words, watch the gap between the outgoing and incoming breath. And treasure each empty moment of the experience.

I asked Shrini to do this meditation for 24 hours: “Watch the gap between two things, two breaths, two thoughts. Slowly you will find that the gaps are more than the things. There is vast emptiness that surrounds the things. If you focus on it the forms will look very small. Birth and death are but two incidents between the vast timeless space.”

The next day he came back a totally different person. He was shining as if some inner understanding had dawned on him. He was totally at ease with his gap. And he found that the gap was very potential, exactly how Osho describes it, “The nothing is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with all possibilities. It is potential, absolutely potential. It is unmanifest yet, but it contains all. In the beginning is nature, in the end, is nature, so why in the middle do you make so much fuss? Why, in the middle, becoming so worried, so anxious, so ambitious — why create such despair? Nothingness to nothingness is the whole journey.”