According to Osho, when a feeling of separation appears in meditation, it’s the conditioned mind reasserting itself—associating stillness with seriousness, guilt, even thoughts of death. Don’t follow it; just watch. The ego’s pious gloom dissolves in awareness, and the natural state—playful, celebrative, connected with life—returns. Meditation is to drop separation and relax into joyful oneness.
If you feel split while meditating, it’s old guilty habits talking—ignore them kindly and your natural happy togetherness comes back.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Kill out all sense of separateness.
If you are afraid of death you will be afraid of meditation also. But if you love meditation, you will not be afraid of death. If you enter meditation unafraid, fearless, you will become deathless, because there will be no death for you. You are already dead, so how can you die again? One who has entered meditation is already dead. Now you cannot die again, now death cannot destroy you. You have already surrendered; you are no more. Death will enter an empty house. You will not be found there. Only the ego dies, not you. Your life is eternal, but the ego is transitory. The ego is just a created, composed phenomenon. You have created it. It is needed, it has some utility. In society, you need an ego; but in life, in existence, that same ego becomes a barrier. Sannyas means going beyond society, because it means…
Osho, in the morning meditation the body disappears completely. What remains feels immense, beyond all limits and ends. But after meditation, through the rest of the day, the sense of the body returns; once again the small, limited body is experienced. So is all this only the play of the ego?
Three things should be kept in mind in this regard. First, as meditation deepens, the body will disappear; or sometimes it will become very vast; or sometimes it may feel very minute, very small—smaller than it “is.” The body’s appearance depends on the mind. If the mind expands greatly, the body seems expanded; if the mind contracts, the body seems small. In fact, the boundary of the body is perceived through the boundary of the mind. This is confirmed by experience. And it is not the play of the ego; it is the outcome of meditation. After meditation it is natural that the body again appears as it ordinarily is. There is nothing to worry about in this. For friends to whom this is happening, whenever during the day they have the opportunity—even for a moment or two—close your eyes and again keep experiencing the body’s vastness. Do this two…
For example, it brings you the experience that not the body, so clearly, so solidly, so categorically, that even if the whole world denies it, it cannot make any difference: you know from your innermost core you are not the body. It brings you the experience that you are not the mind either. And the moment you know you are neither the body nor the mind, suddenly a door opens. You have never been born and you are never going to die because only that which is born can die. The body was born, the mind was born -- they will die -- but you were before your birth and you will be after your death. Once this reality is revealed to you all fears and all miseries disappear. You become part of eternity. Only one thing remains and that is pure consciousness. And pure consciousness is nothing but godliness.
Beloved Osho, while listening to the discourse yesterday, I felt I was not of this earth, but was a small particle of light in the free and infinite sky. After discourse, an experience of lightness and aloneness continued and I wanted to keep wandering in this sky. I do not know what knowledge, karma, and devotion are, but in aloneness I wish to remain immersed in this state. Still, the feeling sometimes arises that this may be madness, that this may be a trick of the ego. Kindly shed light on my path.
We are on this earth, but in fact we cannot be on this earth, and we are not. We feel it: we are strangers to this earth. We have made a home in our body, but our body is not our home. It is as if someone settles abroad and forgets his homeland. Suddenly in the market one day he meets someone who reminds him of home, who speaks his own language. For a moment the foreign country will vanish and his homeland will be present. This is the significance of scriptures. This is the real purpose of the words of the masters. After listening to them, for a moment we are no longer here. We go where we belong. We flow in their music. The situations which had completely involved us vanish, and that which was very far away comes near. Ashtavakra's words are absolutely unique. Hearing them, it…
Solitariness is like a wound, a black hole inside you, which hurts. One wants to cover it, one wants to escape away from it, one wants somebody to be with so one can forget one's solitariness. Solitude is like Everest: it is a virgin peak. Just a single moment of it is more valuable than the whole life of living with the crowds. the whole life of so-called relationships is just sheer madness compared to a single moment of solitude. It is so healthy and so whole. And the same is true about loneliness and aloneness: loneliness is negative, aloneness is positive; loneliness means you are missing the other, aloneness means you are enjoying yourself. And meditation's whole function is to transform the negative into the positive, to transform the miserable into the blissful.