According to Osho, a spiritual explosion is a sudden, causeless break with the past in which the mind and ego fall away, the old ‘you’ dies, and something wholly new is created. It cannot be produced by effort or understood by the mind; your only 'doing' is non-doing—becoming absent, vacant—so the creative, discontinuous new can arise.
Your old self drops all at once and a fresh you appears, but only when you stop trying and stop getting in the way.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, you have said that whenever the ultimate spiritual explosion happens to a person, there then starts around him a process of spiritual explosion which effects other seekers like a chain reaction. So please tell us whether a chain reaction of spiritual explosion has started around you? Are there persons who have undergone a higher spiritual explosion? Are there persons near you physically who are going to explode in the very near future?
Material explosion is destructive. Spiritual explosion is creative. But if we try to understand it by analogy, then we will not be able to know it. Something new, something quite new, comes into being. You cannot give it meaning because you are the old. You cannot create it. You have just to be vacant. You can only help it negatively by your absence, by your not being. If you are absent, then the explosion will take place. Your cooperation is needed only in a negative way. But to do something positively is easy, to do something negatively is very arduous. To cooperate is easy, not to cooperate is easy; but to cooperate negatively is very difficult. To cooperate negatively means not to create hindrances. And we all go on creating hindrances for the new to come into being. We always emphasize the old, we always stick with the old, are…
Is this what you call the explosion?
I would call it an explosion. As long as the mind is quiet, the breath is perceptible; when the mind becomes a void, the breath too is gone. What remains then cannot be put into words. Breath is the last stop. Up to there you can still keep a reckoning; beyond that, all reckoning is gone. After that, suddenly you may even feel as if you have completely died. And the first experience will be almost like that—as if everything has come to an end. Because our sense of life is bound to the breath. That is an explosive event; that is the explosion.
Do you mean after satori?
Yes. Only after satori, never before that. When you become silently aware of the going out and the coming in of the ego, the ultimate explosion can happen. You go beyond out and in; you dissolve in the explosion. This is the point of nirvana, brahma-upalabdhi, moksha, or whatever you want to call it. It has never been recorded by the mind; it can never be recorded because the mechanism itself has dissolved.
Osho, what do those people mean who say that, so that there is no explosion, one should search within with a subtle, refined vision...
But the effortless awakening I speak of—once it arrives, there is no question of its departure, because you did not bring it; it came. Gradually you and awakening are not two; you are the awakening. You did not make even anger “the other,” so how would awakening be “other”? It becomes you. There is no question of its return. Whatever we have truly known cannot be unknown. You cannot undo knowing. Yes, what we have merely learned by rote can wobble. But what is known—like a child who comes to know love; once he knows, he cannot un‑know it. Knowing becomes part of you; it cannot fall away. Reading four books about love is different; that can be forgotten. Through the experiment of awakening, whatever happens in us reveals itself gradually. Awakening is not something that comes from outside; it is your inner being uncovering itself. If it were an…
What was that event that made you turn toward the spiritual? What was that miracle?
Yes, it may happen that someone living in an irreligious way may just become tired of it, and his irreligiousness might break down. Then religiousness will not come, but his non-religiousness will simply break. His non-religiousness will shatter and disappear completely. And one day he may suddenly find that he has become naked. The clothes of irreligiousness will have dropped away and to his surprise he will exclaim, "Aha! This is something new! What has happened is a religious experience!" Thus, religious experience is a happening, something that is an unplanned occurrence, not an achievement, not a preplanned, progressively attained accomplishment. No one can reach there step by step as if it were on a ladder. But from living -- and living irreligiously -- that irreligiousness may simply shatter. I say that supreme knowledge cannot be a goal, but the ignorance and false knowledge can disintegrate. And the moment ignorance…