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Simplicity
Simplicity is life without ideals.
To be simple, you need a backbone. You need a backbone because you will live in constant rebellion. You need a backbone because you will never be adjusted to the so-called rotten society that exists around you. You will always be an outsider. But you will be simple, and in simplicity there is beauty. You will be in total harmony with yourself. Then there will be no conflict within you, there will be no
split within you.
Simplicity is life without ideals. Ideals create complexity; ideals create a division in you, and therefore complexity arises. The moment you try to become someone, you become complex. To be content with yourself — that is simplicity. The future brings complexity; when you are totally in the present, you are simple. Simplicity does not mean living a life of poverty. That is very stupid, because the person who imposes a life of poverty on himself is not simple at all. He is a hypocrite.
The need to impose poverty on yourself deep inside means that you crave the diametrically opposite; what other necessity is there to impose it? You impose a certain character upon yourself because you are its direct opposite. An angry person wants to become compassionate; a violent person wants to become non-violent. If you are non-violent, you will not
try to become non-violent. Why? The person who imposes poverty on himself is simply trying to live his life according to Others, not according to his own inner center, not according to his own spontaneity. And to live according to others means never to be simple. To live according to others means to live a life of imitation. Such a life will be plastic: on the surface you will be one thing, in your depths the opposite. And only the depth matters, the surface is never important. You will be a saint on the surface, and deep inside — a sinner. And it is this that will be decisive in you, because God only touches your depth, not the surface.
The surface is in contact with society, existence is in contact with the depth. Existence only knows who you really are, it never knows who you are pretending to be. Existence knows nothing about your actions. You can pretend to be a great saint, a mahatma, but existence never knows about it, because it never knows anything false. Everything that is false happens outside of existence. It only knows the real, your reality. Simplicity means — simply being yourself, whoever you are, in total acceptance, without a goal, without an ideal. All ideals are rubbish; throw them all away.
To be simple, you need a backbone. You need a backbone because you will live in constant rebellion. You need a backbone because you will never be adjusted to the so-called rotten society that exists around you. You will always be an outsider. But you will be simple, and in simplicity there is beauty. You will be in total harmony with yourself. Then there will be no conflict within you, there will be no
split within you. The ideal brings a split. The greater the ideal, the greater the split will be. The ideal means that somewhere in the future, someday, maybe in this life, maybe in the next, you will become a great saint. In the meantime, you remain a sinner. This
helps you to keep hoping; it helps you on the surface to keep hoping that tomorrow everything will be fine, that tomorrow you will be what you should be.
Today can be endured. You can ignore it, it can be disregarded, it can be overlooked. The most important thing will happen tomorrow.
But tomorrow never comes. Always today... today is always. And a person living in ideals continues to miss reality, because reality is now, here. To be now and to be here means to be simple: to be like trees, here now, to be like clouds, here now, to be like birds, here now — to be like buddhas, here now. The ideal needs the future. Simplicity is not an ideal. People have created
an ideal even out of simplicity, such is human stupidity.
Simplicity can never be an ideal, because no ideal can create simplicity. It is the ideal that poisons you and makes you complex, splits you, makes you two people — who you are, and who you want to become. Now a constant war continues within you, a civil war.
And when you fight with yourself — a violent person
tries to be non-violent, an ugly person tries to be beautiful, and so on, and so on — when you are constantly trying, striving to be someone else, your energy is dissipated in this conflict, energy constantly leaks away. And energy is joy. And to have energy means to be alive, to be fresh, to be young. Look at people's faces — how dull they appear. Look into their eyes — their eyes have lost all luster and depth. Feel their presence, and you will not feel any radiance, you will not
feel any energy flowing from them. On the contrary, you
will feel as if they are sucking energy from you. Instead of being overflowing with energy, they have become black holes: they suck you in, exploit your energy. Staying near them, you become poorer. That is why, when you enter a crowd and return, you feel tired, exhausted, drained, and you
need rest. Why? Why, after being in a crowd, do you feel as if you have lost something? Certainly, you have lost something, because the crowd consists of black holes. And the more unintelligent the crowd, the more it consists of the mob, the more you will feel exhausted. That is why, when a person is alone, sits in silence, and no one is with him — in absolute celibacy, in solitude — he again becomes
filled, renewed. That is why meditation makes you younger, more alive. You begin to share something with existence. A song arises in you.
But in a crowd you always lose. In meditation you always gain. Why? What happens in meditation? In meditation you become simple: the future no longer concerns you. That is what all meditation is about: dropping concern for the past and future, being here now. Only this moment exists. And, whenever it happens that only this moment exists — watching the sunrise, or looking at a white cloud floating across the sky, or just sitting next to a tree, in silent communion, or watching a bird soaring — whenever it happens that you forget about the past and the future, and the present moment grips you, when you are completely absorbed in the present
moment, you will feel renewed. Why?
The split disappears; the split was created by your ideals. In this moment you are one, whole; you are gathered together.
Simplicity is not an ideal; you cannot impose simplicity upon yourself. That is why I say that people like Mahatma Gandhi are not simple. They are not simple and cannot be simple. Simplicity is their ideal, and they try to achieve it. Simplicity is a separate goal in the distant future,
and they try, they strain, they make great efforts. How can simplicity be created by effort? Simplicity simply means that which is. By effort you try to improve existence.
Existence is perfect as it is, it does not need
improvement. So-called saints keep continuously improving themselves — dropping this, dropping that, suppressing this, imposing that, this and that is not good, this and that is good... constant effort, and in this very effort they are lost. Simplicity is a state without effort; it is humility — not humility created in opposition to arrogance, not humility created in opposition to ego, not humility opposite to a proud mind. No, humility is not the opposite of pride. Humility is simply the absence of pride. Try to see the essence. If your
humility is against pride, if you had to struggle to drop pride, ego, arrogance, then all you have done is suppression. Now you will be proud of your humility; now you will start to boast about how humble you are.
This is exactly what happens. Just look at so-called humble people — they are constantly advertising how humble they are. Truly humble people themselves do not know that they are humble; how can they boast about it? How can a humble person know that he is humble? A humble person —
is no longer a personality. A humble person is
a state of fana: the humble person has dissolved. Now he is only a presence. Humility is a presence, not a characteristic of personality, not a character trait, but only a presence. Others feel it, but you
cannot feel it yourself. The same is true of simplicity. Simplicity only means: living from moment to moment, spontaneously, not trying to conform to any philosophy whatsoever, not trying to conform to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, not conforming to any
philosophy. When you live according to a philosophy, you betray yourself, become your own enemy. Simplicity means: being in deep friendship with yourself, living your life without the interference of any idea.
For this, certainly, a backbone is required, because you will live in constant insecurity. A person living in ideals is secure. He is predictable; in that is his security. He knows what he is going to do tomorrow. He knows, if a certain situation arises, — he will react in such and such a way. He is always certain. A person who is simple
knows nothing about tomorrow, knows nothing about the next moment, because he is not going to act from the past. He will respond from his present awareness.
A simple person has no "character"; only a complex person has character. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. There are good characters and bad characters, but both are complex. A simple person is without character, he is neither good nor bad, but there is a beauty in him that cannot be in either good or bad people. Both good and bad people
are not very different from each other; they are two sides of the same coin. Behind the character of a good person lies a bad one, and a bad person — a good one.
A simple person is simple. He lives from moment to moment, without any idea of how to live; he has no philosophy of life. He trusts his intelligence. What need is there to have a philosophy? Why should a person have a philosophy? — to guide him.
This means that if you are stupid, you need a philosophy of life so that it can guide you. If you are intelligent, you do not need any philosophy of life. Intelligence itself is enough — it is a light unto itself.
To be simple means to be intelligent. Simplicity is intelligence, life without ideals, without directions, without maps, just living from moment to moment, without any backup. Our concern for rightness and fear of wrongness is nothing but the fear of insecurity. Right makes us secure, wrong makes us insecure, but life is insecurity. There is no security anywhere. You may have a bank account, but the bank can go bankrupt any moment. You may have certainty in marriage, a husband or wife, but the wife can leave you any moment, she may fall in love; or the husband may die.
Life is full of insecurity. Security is only an illusion with which we surround ourselves, a cozy illusion. And for this cozy illusion we kill intelligence. A person who wants to live will simply have to live in insecurity, will have to accept the fact that nothing is exact or
certain, that we are making a journey into the unknown, that no one can be certain where we are going, and no one can be certain where we came from
In fact, except for stupid people, no one suffers from illusions of security. The more intelligent you are, the less certain. The more intelligent you are, the more you waver — because life is vast. Life is boundless, immeasurable, mysterious. How can you be certain? To live in uncertainty, to live in insecurity — that is simplicity.
Live a life without ideals, without character, a life not rooted in the past, not motivated by the future; a life that is utterly here and now.
Osho
Simplicity is life without ideals.
To be simple, you need a backbone. You need a backbone because you will live in constant rebellion. You need a backbone because you will never be adjusted to the so-called rotten society that exists around you. You will always be an outsider. But you will be simple, and in simplicity there is beauty. You will be in total harmony with yourself. Then there will be no conflict within you, there will be no
split within you.
Simplicity is life without ideals. Ideals create complexity; ideals create a division in you, and therefore complexity arises. The moment you try to become someone, you become complex. To be content with yourself — that is simplicity. The future brings complexity; when you are totally in the present, you are simple. Simplicity does not mean living a life of poverty. That is very stupid, because the person who imposes a life of poverty on himself is not simple at all. He is a hypocrite.
The need to impose poverty on yourself deep inside means that you crave the diametrically opposite; what other necessity is there to impose it? You impose a certain character upon yourself because you are its direct opposite. An angry person wants to become compassionate; a violent person wants to become non-violent. If you are non-violent, you will not
try to become non-violent. Why? The person who imposes poverty on himself is simply trying to live his life according to Others, not according to his own inner center, not according to his own spontaneity. And to live according to others means never to be simple. To live according to others means to live a life of imitation. Such a life will be plastic: on the surface you will be one thing, in your depths the opposite. And only the depth matters, the surface is never important. You will be a saint on the surface, and deep inside — a sinner. And it is this that will be decisive in you, because God only touches your depth, not the surface.
The surface is in contact with society, existence is in contact with the depth. Existence only knows who you really are, it never knows who you are pretending to be. Existence knows nothing about your actions. You can pretend to be a great saint, a mahatma, but existence never knows about it, because it never knows anything false. Everything that is false happens outside of existence. It only knows the real, your reality. Simplicity means — simply being yourself, whoever you are, in total acceptance, without a goal, without an ideal. All ideals are rubbish; throw them all away.
To be simple, you need a backbone. You need a backbone because you will live in constant rebellion. You need a backbone because you will never be adjusted to the so-called rotten society that exists around you. You will always be an outsider. But you will be simple, and in simplicity there is beauty. You will be in total harmony with yourself. Then there will be no conflict within you, there will be no
split within you. The ideal brings a split. The greater the ideal, the greater the split will be. The ideal means that somewhere in the future, someday, maybe in this life, maybe in the next, you will become a great saint. In the meantime, you remain a sinner. This
helps you to keep hoping; it helps you on the surface to keep hoping that tomorrow everything will be fine, that tomorrow you will be what you should be.
Today can be endured. You can ignore it, it can be disregarded, it can be overlooked. The most important thing will happen tomorrow.
But tomorrow never comes. Always today... today is always. And a person living in ideals continues to miss reality, because reality is now, here. To be now and to be here means to be simple: to be like trees, here now, to be like clouds, here now, to be like birds, here now — to be like buddhas, here now. The ideal needs the future. Simplicity is not an ideal. People have created
an ideal even out of simplicity, such is human stupidity.
Simplicity can never be an ideal, because no ideal can create simplicity. It is the ideal that poisons you and makes you complex, splits you, makes you two people — who you are, and who you want to become. Now a constant war continues within you, a civil war.
And when you fight with yourself — a violent person
tries to be non-violent, an ugly person tries to be beautiful, and so on, and so on — when you are constantly trying, striving to be someone else, your energy is dissipated in this conflict, energy constantly leaks away. And energy is joy. And to have energy means to be alive, to be fresh, to be young. Look at people's faces — how dull they appear. Look into their eyes — their eyes have lost all luster and depth. Feel their presence, and you will not feel any radiance, you will not
feel any energy flowing from them. On the contrary, you
will feel as if they are sucking energy from you. Instead of being overflowing with energy, they have become black holes: they suck you in, exploit your energy. Staying near them, you become poorer. That is why, when you enter a crowd and return, you feel tired, exhausted, drained, and you
need rest. Why? Why, after being in a crowd, do you feel as if you have lost something? Certainly, you have lost something, because the crowd consists of black holes. And the more unintelligent the crowd, the more it consists of the mob, the more you will feel exhausted. That is why, when a person is alone, sits in silence, and no one is with him — in absolute celibacy, in solitude — he again becomes
filled, renewed. That is why meditation makes you younger, more alive. You begin to share something with existence. A song arises in you.
But in a crowd you always lose. In meditation you always gain. Why? What happens in meditation? In meditation you become simple: the future no longer concerns you. That is what all meditation is about: dropping concern for the past and future, being here now. Only this moment exists. And, whenever it happens that only this moment exists — watching the sunrise, or looking at a white cloud floating across the sky, or just sitting next to a tree, in silent communion, or watching a bird soaring — whenever it happens that you forget about the past and the future, and the present moment grips you, when you are completely absorbed in the present
moment, you will feel renewed. Why?
The split disappears; the split was created by your ideals. In this moment you are one, whole; you are gathered together.
Simplicity is not an ideal; you cannot impose simplicity upon yourself. That is why I say that people like Mahatma Gandhi are not simple. They are not simple and cannot be simple. Simplicity is their ideal, and they try to achieve it. Simplicity is a separate goal in the distant future,
and they try, they strain, they make great efforts. How can simplicity be created by effort? Simplicity simply means that which is. By effort you try to improve existence.
Existence is perfect as it is, it does not need
improvement. So-called saints keep continuously improving themselves — dropping this, dropping that, suppressing this, imposing that, this and that is not good, this and that is good... constant effort, and in this very effort they are lost. Simplicity is a state without effort; it is humility — not humility created in opposition to arrogance, not humility created in opposition to ego, not humility opposite to a proud mind. No, humility is not the opposite of pride. Humility is simply the absence of pride. Try to see the essence. If your
humility is against pride, if you had to struggle to drop pride, ego, arrogance, then all you have done is suppression. Now you will be proud of your humility; now you will start to boast about how humble you are.
This is exactly what happens. Just look at so-called humble people — they are constantly advertising how humble they are. Truly humble people themselves do not know that they are humble; how can they boast about it? How can a humble person know that he is humble? A humble person —
is no longer a personality. A humble person is
a state of fana: the humble person has dissolved. Now he is only a presence. Humility is a presence, not a characteristic of personality, not a character trait, but only a presence. Others feel it, but you
cannot feel it yourself. The same is true of simplicity. Simplicity only means: living from moment to moment, spontaneously, not trying to conform to any philosophy whatsoever, not trying to conform to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, not conforming to any
philosophy. When you live according to a philosophy, you betray yourself, become your own enemy. Simplicity means: being in deep friendship with yourself, living your life without the interference of any idea.
For this, certainly, a backbone is required, because you will live in constant insecurity. A person living in ideals is secure. He is predictable; in that is his security. He knows what he is going to do tomorrow. He knows, if a certain situation arises, — he will react in such and such a way. He is always certain. A person who is simple
knows nothing about tomorrow, knows nothing about the next moment, because he is not going to act from the past. He will respond from his present awareness.
A simple person has no "character"; only a complex person has character. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. There are good characters and bad characters, but both are complex. A simple person is without character, he is neither good nor bad, but there is a beauty in him that cannot be in either good or bad people. Both good and bad people
are not very different from each other; they are two sides of the same coin. Behind the character of a good person lies a bad one, and a bad person — a good one.
A simple person is simple. He lives from moment to moment, without any idea of how to live; he has no philosophy of life. He trusts his intelligence. What need is there to have a philosophy? Why should a person have a philosophy? — to guide him.
This means that if you are stupid, you need a philosophy of life so that it can guide you. If you are intelligent, you do not need any philosophy of life. Intelligence itself is enough — it is a light unto itself.
To be simple means to be intelligent. Simplicity is intelligence, life without ideals, without directions, without maps, just living from moment to moment, without any backup. Our concern for rightness and fear of wrongness is nothing but the fear of insecurity. Right makes us secure, wrong makes us insecure, but life is insecurity. There is no security anywhere. You may have a bank account, but the bank can go bankrupt any moment. You may have certainty in marriage, a husband or wife, but the wife can leave you any moment, she may fall in love; or the husband may die.
Life is full of insecurity. Security is only an illusion with which we surround ourselves, a cozy illusion. And for this cozy illusion we kill intelligence. A person who wants to live will simply have to live in insecurity, will have to accept the fact that nothing is exact or
certain, that we are making a journey into the unknown, that no one can be certain where we are going, and no one can be certain where we came from
In fact, except for stupid people, no one suffers from illusions of security. The more intelligent you are, the less certain. The more intelligent you are, the more you waver — because life is vast. Life is boundless, immeasurable, mysterious. How can you be certain? To live in uncertainty, to live in insecurity — that is simplicity.
Live a life without ideals, without character, a life not rooted in the past, not motivated by the future; a life that is utterly here and now.
Osho