The first question:

Osho,
What is simplicity?

Simplicity is to live without ideals. Ideals create complexity; ideals create division in you and hence complexity. The moment you are interested in becoming somebody else you become complex. To be contented with yourself as you are is simplicity. The future brings complexity; when you are utterly in the present you are simple.

Simplicity does not mean to live a life of poverty. That is utterly 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 means, deep down, he hankers for the diametrically opposite; otherwise why should there be any need to impose it? You impose a certain character upon yourself because you are just the opposite of it.

The angry person wants to become compassionate; the violent person wants to become non-violent. If you are non-violent you will not try to become non-violent. For what? The person who imposes poverty upon himself is simply trying to live out a life according to others, not according to his own innermost core, not according to his own spontaneity. And to live according to others is never to be simple.

To live according to others means to live a life of imitation. It will be a plastic life: you will be one thing on the surface and just the opposite of it in your depths. And only the depths matter, the surface never matters. You will be a saint on the surface and a sinner deep down. And that’s what is going to be decisive about you because God is only in contact with your depth, not with your surface.

The surface is in contact with the society, the existence is in contact with the depth. The existence only knows what you are, it never knows what you are pretending. The existence never knows about your actings. You may be pretending to be a great saint, a mahatma, but existence will never know about it, because it never knows about anything false. Anything false happens out of existence. It knows only the real, the real you.

Simplicity means to be just yourself, whosoever you are, in tremendous acceptance, with no goal, with no ideal. All ideals are crap – scrap all of them.