you are not lacking anything
Obstacles have to be eliminated, dropped. So nothing else has to be added to you. The positive religion tries to add something to you: virtue, righteousness, meditation, prayer. The positive religion says you are lacking something; you have to be in search of that which you are lacking. You have to accumulate something. Buddha's negative approach says you are not lacking anything. In fact, you are possessing too many things which are not needed. You have to drop something. It is like this: A man goes trekking into the Himalayas. The higher you start reaching, the more you will feel the weight of the things you are carrying with you. Your luggage will become more and more heavy. The higher the altitude, the more heavy your luggage will become. You will have to drop things. If you want to reach to the highest peak, you will have to drop all. Once you have dropped all, once you don't possess anything, once you have become a zero, a nothingness, a nobody, you have reached. Something has to be eliminated, not added to you. Something has to be dropped, not accumulated. When Buddha attained, somebody asked him, "What have you attained?" He laughed. He said, "I have not attained anything -- because whatsoever I have attained was always with me. On the contrary, I have lost many things. I have lost my ego. I have lost my thoughts, my mind. I have lost all that I used to feel I possessed. I have lost my body -- I used to think I was the body. I have lost all that. Now I exist as pure nothingness. But this is my achievement." Let me explain it to you, because this is very central. According to Buddha's approach, in the beginningless beginning of existence there was absolute sleep; existence was fast asleep, snoring, what Hindus call SUSHUPTI, a state of dreamless sleep. The whole existence was asleep in SUSHUPTI. Nothing was moving, everything was at rest -- so tremendously, so utterly at rest, you can say it was not existing at all. When you move into SUSHUPTI every night, when dreams stop, you again move into that primordial nothingness. And if in the night there are not a few moments of that primordial nothingness, you don't feel rejuvenated, you don't feel revitalized. If the whole night you dream, and turn and toss in the bed, in the morning you are more tired than you were when you went to bed. You could not dissolve, you could not lose yourself. If you have been in SUSHUPTI, in a dreamless state, that means you moved into that beginningless beginning again. From there is energy. From there you come rested, vitalized, new. Again full of juice, full of life and zest. That, Buddha says, was the beginning; but he calls it the beginningless beginning. It was like SUSHUPTI, it was tremendously unconscious; there was no consciousness in it. It was just like samadhi, with only one difference: in samadhi one is fully awake. In that SUSHUPTI, in that dreamless deep sleep, there was no consciousness, not even a single flame of consciousness -- a dark night. It is also a state of SATCHITANAND, but the state is unconscious.