Leap

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…

(In Punjabi; audio indistinct) About the “leap”: isn’t there some causal gap? He is no longer what he was—the same person, the same life, the same soul—he has become a cause… My point is: there must be a cause for the leap. A faint, causeless jump does nothing; something big must have caused it…

No—I am saying: not even by grace, because to make “grace” a reason is still to be seeking a cause. This fact must be accepted as uncaused. It happens. And when it happens, one sees there truly was no cause. Until it happens, we live in the world of causes. The mind’s mode of thinking is cause-and-effect; it cannot think without causes. As long as we live in the mind, we will say, “No—this doesn’t sit right.” I too would say: it doesn’t sit right. I too would say: it doesn’t satisfy the intellect. But there is no help for it—whether it satisfies or not, the fact is this: it is utterly uncaused—only then is it a jump. Have you understood what ‘jump’ means? Only if it is uncaused is it a jump. If there is a cause, it is development. Without a cause, it is revolution. Only when it…

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?