According to Osho, a ‘leap’ is the instantaneous ignition of awareness in the heart—an explosion, not a step-by-step method. In meditation, love, and sannyas, nothing happens by calculation or gradual renunciation; in one moment you see the futility of clinging and are transformed. This ripens in satsang: like an unlit lamp near a lit one, when the threshold is crossed, the flame jumps—effortless, irreversible.
It’s like a light suddenly turning on inside you, often by sitting near someone already glowing, not by slow steps.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you call sannyas, meditation, and love a leap. What do you mean by a leap?
Narendra! Whatever is essential in life—be it meditation, love, or sannyas—does not come the way mathematics does. It has no method, no staircase. There is no sequential movement in it. It is an explosion. Everything happens in a single instant. It is not a conclusion of thought; it is a condition of the heart, a state of feeling. Suddenly! When you light a lamp, darkness doesn’t go away gradually—first a little, then a little more. Here the lamp is lit, and there the darkness is gone—in one moment, at once. I call the lighting of the lamp and the vanishing of the darkness a leap. If it left little by little, in sequence, in measurable increments, then it would be a process. So too with sannyas: it is not a process. In a moment of awakening, the futility of life is seen. It is seen with such intensity that nothing…
With meditation your inner light starts burning, your being becomes a flame, exactly, literally a flame -- and it is no ordinary flame either. It has a few extraordinary things about it. One is that it burns but it has no fuel, hence it cannot be extinguished. Once it is there it is forever. Secondly, it is smokeless, it does not create any smoke. Smoke is created only by the fuel. The more refined the fuel is the less smoke is created; the cruder the fuel, the more smoke. But if there is no fuel at all there is no smoke. Meditation is a flame without smoke, hence it gives you an absolute clarity. Once the light is there inside you your whole world becomes luminous.
It can be reduced to a very simple maxim: to watch your thoughts is meditation, because through your watching your thoughts, they start disappearing, evaporating. When your watchfulness becomes really intense, thoughts disappear, and in that thoughtless consciousness you hit upon your innermost core... and the explosion. That explosion is wisdom. That explosion makes one a Christ or a Buddha. And my whole effort here is not to make you a Christian but a Christ, not to make you a Buddhist but a Buddha. Why become a Christian? -- because that is knowledge. Why not become Christ? -- that is wisdom. Why become a Buddhist? -- that is knowledge. Become a Buddha -- that is wisdom. Why settle for secondary things? Why not go to the primary source which is within yourself? Why settle for borrowed things, old and rotten?
That's what sannyas is: creating a right space, the right soil for love to grow, for love to expand. As your love becomes bigger, you become bigger. When your love is perfect you are perfect. There is no other way to be perfect. Only the perfection of love can bring perfection to your being. There are two ways to reach God: one is meditation, the other is love. A few people reach through meditation, a few people reach through love. Both are valid ways and both reach the same experience. When the meditator reaches the ultimate peak he suddenly finds love arising in his being, and when the lover reaches the ultimate peak he finds meditation happening of its own accord. On the way they are different, at the peak they become one. The path of meditation is arduous, it demands a little superhuman effort.
This false knowing has to be dropped. It is better to accept that you don't know; that is a first step towards truth. Dionysius calls it "agnosia", a state of not-knowing. So these are the three states: ignorance.... In ignorance a person does not know but thinks he knows. The second is agnosia: a state of not-knowing. A person still does not know, but he knows that he does not know -- and that is a tremendous growth. And the third is realisation, enlightenment, awakening Buddhahood, when a person knows that he knows. Millions are living in the first state. Sannyas means moving to the second. And then the third comes or its own, you need not do anything. You just remain in the second, watching so that the first does not come in from some back door.