„People live identified with the body; that’s how the body becomes an imprisonment. Rather than helping you to grow toward the infinite, your identification with the body makes you very finite, very small. And that is one of the fundamental causes of misery: the body will get old, then you will feel afraid, scared – you are getting old. The body will be ill and then you will be in tremendous fear, and sooner or later the body is going to die. You may not think about it, but it is there. You see people dying – you cannot deny it. You may overlook it but you cannot deny it. You may not look at it, you may bypass it, but still it is there and deep down you know that you have to die. That creates a trembling, that creates a sadness inside that soon this life will be taken away from you and nothing is fulfilled yet, no flower has bloomed yet.
Identification with the body becomes identification with death, old age, sickness. The moment you are not identified with the body, when you know “I am separate, I am consciousness,” you are immediately freed from illness, old age, death. They will happen to the body but you are just a witness to it all, just an onlooker; it has nothing to do with you.
The experience that whatsoever happens in the body has nothing to do with you is such freedom, is such a relief, that suddenly you become weightless. That weightlessness is one of the significant by-products of meditation.
Meditation simply means the art of witnessing. Start by witnessing your body and then your mind – and get out of both! In fact, by meditation you will be out of both. And the day one knows, “I am not the body, not the mind,” one has come home. Then one knows who one is.“
Osho