According to Osho, simplicity is living without ideals—dropping all becoming and future-oriented goals—so you can be totally present and content as you are. It is authenticity, not ascetic poverty or imitation. When you accept your real depth and live here-now, inner division ends, harmony arises, and beauty flowers.
Be yourself right now without trying to become someone else later—that’s simplicity.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Dear master, what is simplicity?
The really humble people will not know that they are humble; how can they then brag about it? How can the humble person know that he is humble? The humble person is a person no more. The humble person is in a state of fana: the humble person has dissolved. Now he is only a presence. Humbleness is a presence, not a characteristic of personality, not a trait, but just a presence. Others will feel it, but you will not be able to feel it yourself. So is the case with simplicity. Simplicity simply means living moment to moment spontaneously, not according to some philosophy, not according to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, not according to any philosophy. Whenever you live according to a philosophy you have betrayed yourself, you are an enemy to yourself. Simplicity means to be in a deep friendship with oneself, to live your life with no idea…
Osho, the path of simplicity is the second one. What is it?
The first path is to try to be simple, to make an effort, to practice it. Cultivated simplicity is always false. Because to practice, by its very meaning, is to practice against your own mind; otherwise, what is the practice against? If being naked is blissful for me, I will not call it practice. If wearing clothes is blissful for me and then I start practicing being naked, will nakedness be a “practice”? And if being naked is simply blissful—if wearing clothes never gave me the joy that comes from being naked—then no one would call it a practice. It is my joy. We practice only that which is contrary to us; practice means repression. Practice is inevitably repression. And wherever effort is required, against whom is that effort made—against oneself? No effort made against oneself can ever win. How could it win? Who would win? How can I win…
Question: Osho, Saint Ryokan lived in a hut at the foot of a mountain. His life was utterly simple. One evening a thief entered his hut, but he saw there was nothing in it. Meanwhile the saint returned to the hut and saw the thief leaving. He said to the thief, “You have come a long way to see me, so it would not be right for you to go back empty-handed. Please, as a gift, take my robe.” The thief was utterly astonished. Embarrassed, he took the clothes and slipped away without a word. Ryokan was now naked. Sitting there, he kept gazing at the moon in the sky. And then he said to himself: “If only I could give that poor fellow this beautiful moon as well!” Osho, what is the essence of this beautiful Zen parable? What does simple life mean?
So I am not telling you that by dropping this or that you will become simple. If you drop them for the sake of simplicity, you have started with calculation—and that calculation is your complexity. Someone convinces you: leave cigarettes and you will attain liberation; you give them up. Have you thought how cheaply you want liberation? By dropping cigarettes? If liberation were gained by not smoking, it would not be worth having. If it came by giving up liquor—not worth it. What value would something have that is bought so cheaply? What you do is not the point. Simplicity has to do with not flowing in opposite directions. Whatever you do, let it have an inner harmony, an inner music; no division, no conflict. Simplicity means: you flow in one direction. This is intelligence—do not scatter yourself in many directions.
Osho, you always praise a simple, innocent consciousness. What is this simplicity, this innocence?
The man said, “Then send me to the Indian one; I don’t want the German.” That difference was enough. The Germans refined it further—they read your scriptures and perfected them. German intellect knows how to refine things, arrange them, run everything by the clock. Even in the ashram I have given the electricity work to Haridas—a German sannyasin. However many times Pune’s electricity fails, the ashram’s does not. Let Pune fail, but not the ashram. Haridas takes great care; he has arranged everything—automatic generators: the moment the power fails, they kick in; you can’t even tell there was a failure. Where has this been learned? This much evil in the world—your saints had already arranged for it in the scriptures. Hell for others, heaven for themselves. These are not marks of simple-hearted people. A simple person—why would he think of hell and heaven? He has no such notions, no such…