What happens when I experience a feeling of vastness during meditation?

Beloved Osho, at the end of the meditations I sometimes reach a quiet, expanding space inside me. It is like a feeling of vastness and it relaxes me very much. Then, after some time I get tense and afraid and the vastness reaches a barrier and disappears. Each time, the silence during this experience has something unbearable in it. Beloved Osho, what is the barrier that I encounter?

Albert Einstein had an idea which most probably will be found to be accurate, because he was the man who worked the hardest as far as space travel is concerned. His idea is mind boggling. He himself kept it for many months and did not announce it to the scientific world because he was afraid that nobody was going to believe him. The idea was such that people would think he had gone cuckoo. But the idea was so significant that he finally decided that he could risk his sanity but he had to declare it. The idea was that beyond gravitation you stop aging. If a man leaves the earth for a faraway star, and if it takes thirty years for him to reach that star and then coming back again another thirty years, and when he had left the earth he was thirty years old, then if you…

As you move into meditation this feeling starts becoming stronger every day. That does not mean that you start neglecting the body, on the contrary, you start caring about the body more carefully because it is a beautiful house, a gift of god. You have to keep it clean and beautiful and young and vital, energetic, alive, because you have to live in it for many many years. There is no need to make it ugly, poor, starved. Make it a palace, make it a marble palace, make it a temple, but remember "I am not it," so when it dies you are not dying. The body is born, the body dies; you are never born and you never die. And the method of meditation is very simple: just watching. Three things have to be watched. The first is the body and its actions.

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.

Meditation gives you unbounded space. It makes you as vast as the ocean. Without it one is only a dewdrop, confined into a very small space, imprisoned. And that's our misery, that wherever we try to move there is a limitation. The body limits us, the mind limits us, even the heart limits us. One has to go beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the heart. Only then, these three concentric circles transcended, you become as vast as existence itself. You are no more in that vastness. You cannot be the way you have always been; there is no ego. The ego can exist only in the dewdrop. The ocean means egolessness. The moment you are infinite, you taste the truth for the first time; otherwise whatsoever we go on thinking about truth is not truth. Thinking about truth can never be truth.

Osho, for many years I have been making continuous efforts—nothing happened. I did this, I did that—nothing happened. But yesterday, when I simply sat holding awareness, I was astonished: What was that? What happened was beyond my imagination.

It will be; it is bound to be beyond imagination. You don’t even know—what will happen is utterly unknown and unknowable. You cannot make any expectation of it; you have no idea what it will be. What will happen in meditation cannot be said in advance, nor can it be imagined. What happens is unprecedented. It has never been known before. It is totally unknown, utterly unknowable. It will happen only when this entire known mind of yours becomes utterly quiet. And it will become quiet. Awareness stills the mind. When the mind becomes still, meditation descends. Meditation is not something you do; it descends. It surrounds you. Meditation is a state outside the mind-field. Meditation is the very nature of the soul. As soon as the mind-field is quiet, meditation begins to spread. So, very quietly, very effortlessly, without any tension, in silence; everyone sit with a little space…