In the fourth stage there is only consciousness. But if consciousness has no memory – it simply is – how will we experience this?

     You can feel it as a gap. The memory only records the gap. Your memory did continue till a particular moment, then there was a gap; then it began again. This gap you feel afterwards. The gap, the interval, becomes your memory. Our memory records events, and this interval, void, is a great event. It is the phenomenon.

What records it?

     Your memory, your mechanism.

So the memory is working during the period of the gap?

     Your mechanism is always ready to record everything. This recorder here is working. It will record when we speak and when we are not speaking. The silence also is recorded because the mechanism is always there. It records everything and it is more keen, sensitive, more intense. This machine can err when we are silent. The memorable event is a burden, a tension. The gap is a calm, blissful interval and it is dhyana.
     In fact, there can be no spiritual experience; there can only be the interval. The person who experiences was not there. So you cannot use the terminology of experience. You experience a moment that is of no-experience: a total gap.
     Every type of indication is bound to be negative because language is inadequate; it is just a choice between mistakes. So, every type of religion and language is equally erroneous because the gap cannot be expressed. But it can be felt, and feeling has no language and words.

How and why does the ego come back after the meditation?

     It comes back because the whole mechanism and the part are there. It was as if you had gone out of your house and you come back. But, now you cannot be the same person, back in the same house, for you have known something beyond that.
     The easier it becomes to go out and come in, out and in, the more a new stage comes in which neither you are out nor you are in. You transcend both. That is the culmination, that is samadhi. When you repeatedly come and go, and transcend it, you begin to witness these outgoings and incomings – the meditative and non-meditative state of mind.
     When you start observing it, then there descends a silent awareness.
     When we become silently aware of it, then comes the ultimate explosion.
     You go beyond out and in. That means you yourself go in the explosion.
     Now, there is no recording because the mechanism has dissolved. This is the point of nirvana brahma, upalabodhi, moksha, or whatever you call it. This has never been and cannot be recorded.

After this, does one live in the body?

     Certainly, because the working of the body is another process. It is there of its own and has a process of its own. One can live on or one can go out of it. To us it seems that one lives in the house but for the resident, now there is no house.
     The body is there, but not as we feel it. The whole universe becomes the body.

But there is still an individual body?

     No, no. This is all for us. This fifth stage, whenever we talk about it, becomes a puzzle. So it can never be explained.

So, in the fifth stage there is the explosion of individual awareness, or whatever you call it?

     The explosion of everything, and of the total that you were: your memory, intellect, ego, personality, your being and your soul. Everything that you were is not so now. You just go beyond. There is no you. You become everything. That is the point of Brahman, cosmic consciousness.
The method and guidance can lead you up to satori only, up to the fourth stage. The fifth is beyond any method only. That silent awareness is always beyond guidance. Either it happens or it does not happen.

Is one aware of the explosion?

     No, no. There is no question of awareness or non-awareness.
     Buddha was asked many times repeatedly the same question every day: "What happens to the enlightened person? Where does he go? Does he exists or not?"
     He said. "It is irrelevant – do not ask." He categorized eleven questions that were not to be asked, and this question was one of them. Not that Buddha did not know the answer, but because any type of statement was bound to create new puzzles...

Osho: "Early Talks"

...Back For More Articles on Stage Four