To get out of the body-mind prison cell is what meditation is

Pari means ultimate, nirvana means enlightenment – the ultimate enlightenment. It is a Buddhist term of tremendous significance. The ultimate enlightenment means the ultimate dissolution of the ego, the ultimate disappearance of the individual.

When you become a non-being, when you are not, then God is, because when you are not, the whole is. When you are, the part is claiming to be the whole, and that is the whole fallacy. That’s what ignorance is: the part claiming to be the whole.

We are parts of existence but somehow we have taken it for granted that we are the whole. This is what constitutes the basic substratum of the ego. It is as if my hand starts thinking it is the whole in itself. Then something has gone wrong: it will start struggling against the whole, the organic unity of my body. That’s what man is doing.

The trees are in enlightenment though not aware of it; they are unconsciously one with existence. So are the animals and the birds and small children – and so are great saints, Buddhas and Christ, but they are consciously one with it. That is the only difference between a tree and a Buddha: the tree is enlightened unconsciously, one with the whole but not knowing about it. Buddha is also one with the whole but knows it.

Ordinary humanity is just between the tree and the Buddha: neither conscious enough to know that it is one with existence, nor so unconscious that it can become one without knowing it, but just in the middle, in the limbo; hence the misery, anguish, anxiety, the split.

And the whole of religion is nothing but a process of disappearance. One has to disappear by and by, one has to dissolve one’s boundaries so that one can become unbounded. Not that in disappearance you will disappear. In fact, paradoxically, when you are not, you will be for the first time, because you will be this whole. These stars and these trees and these birds, all that has been and all that is going to be, will be part of you; you will be a vast ocean. Bliss is possible only with that vastness, that expansion that knows no limits.

Man is bound to remain miserable. He has become confined to such a small prison cell that you call the body and the mind. To get out of the body-mind prison cell is what meditation is. And there is no need to really get out of it because you are out of it!

Osho, The Zero Experience, Ch 18