According to Osho, the 'explosion' is the pivotal inner event when the mind falls utterly silent, breath itself disappears, and all capacity to measure or reckon ceases. What remains is ineffable, like a sudden death of the familiar sense of life. Breath is the last station; beyond it, nameless being bursts open.
It’s when thinking stops and even breath seems to vanish, feeling like dying, but a silent, indescribable presence remains.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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.
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…
When it comes, it comes and never goes. And if it is achieved through any process, it comes and it goes, because it has not come, really; it has been part of the feeling created by the process. When the process stops, it goes. It will go by and by, but it will go. and you will have to repeat the process constantly. When the explosion comes, then it has come. In the explosion, it is not that you have achieved bliss, because in the explosion you have gone. Only the bliss is there... not even you, not even the experiencer. When you go through a technique the experiencer remains, the ego remains, and the ego says, "I have experienced, I am experiencing." If the experiencer is there, then you have not come to the explosion, because the very explosion is the explosion of the experiencer. That experiencer is gone.
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…