10. You Are The Best, Why Compare?

Emotions of fear, desire and guilt are subjective emotions. What I mean by this is that you do not need another person or even an object to create these emotions. Imagine that you are in a sound-proofed room with your eyes closed and with nothing to touch, taste or smell. You can still feel the emotions of fear or desire. But to compare yourself with another person and to feel jealous of him, you need the presence of another person. Jealousy is therefore an objective emotion. It needs an object to be activated.

A small story:

One evening a man was sitting with his wife on a park bench. Without noticing them, a young man and his girlfriend sat down next to them. The young man started talking to his girlfriend in a very loving manner.

Hearing this, the wife whispered to her husband, 'I think he is going to propose to her. Maybe you should cough or do something to warn him!'

The husband replied, 'Why should I warn him? Nobody ever warned me!'

Jealousy starts from comparison. We always compare ourselves with others in various fields like looks, wealth, knowledge, name and fame and friends to name a few. When we compare ourselves with others we feel that somebody else has something more than what we have and we get caught in jealousy.

Comparison is the seed and jealousy is the fruit!

Why exactly do we compare ourselves with others?

First, we compare ourselves because we have never understood ourselves. We are not aware of who we are and what we have.

Second, society has conditioned us from our birth to evaluate ourselves based upon others. From childhood the comparison starts. In school, the grading system introduces a child to competition and comparison with others.

There are standard benchmarks to measure a child's qualities such as mathematical ability, scientific aptitude, artistic skill, athletic ability, musical talent and so on. But what we don't realize is that when we try to measure a quality using a standardized benchmark, it is nothing but using comparison as the scale to measure the child himself. We are literally punishing all children with the reward systems we use in schools.

Nothing exists except in relationship.

The child gets used to judging and

knowing himself by looking at others and comparing himself with them. He has no understanding of himself based on what he is. He knows himself only based on others.

A small story:

Once a man was testifying in court about a road accident. Suddenly, the man noticed that the court reporter was writing while he spoke. As the man started speaking faster and faster he noticed that the reporter was writing faster and faster.

Suddenly the man said to the court reporter, 'Please don't write so fast. I am not able to keep up with you!'

Every judgment you make about yourself is based on some comparison. But why does the idea of the other enter into your mind? It is because you have not looked in and realized who you are. You have not experienced the bliss and tremendous potential you have inside you. You feel incomplete because you have not been able to express yourself as you are. So the emptiness and lack of fulfillment inside makes you feel inferior to others.

The futility of comparison

Buddha says, 'Nothing exists except in relationship.' Suppose you were the only person on a new planet, how could you compare yourself with anyone? Could you call yourself tall or short, ugly or beautiful, rich or poor, intelligent or dumb? No! When there is no one with whom to compare ourselves, we just are!

Even now, there is no scale to compare you with anybody. Each individual is unique.

Can you compare a lion and a horse? Do we ever compare ourselves with flowers or birds or mountains? Then why do we have to compare ourselves with other human beings!

A beautiful Zen story:

A king once went to a master to ask for a technique to become more powerful than his neighboring kings. He sat in front of the master and started telling him the purpose of his visit. The master listened patiently to the king.

He then told him to go into the royal garden where a rose plant and a cypress plant were growing side by side. He told the king, 'They are your teachers. They can teach you what you need to learn.'

The king went into the garden, saw the two plants but could not understand what he was meant to learn from them. He went back to the master and asked, 'What do you mean, master? I am not able to understand what and how these plants will teach me.'

The master took the king to the plants and explained, 'This cypress plant has been next to the rose plant for so many years. Never once has it even aspired to become a rose plant. Similarly, the rose plant has never ever aspired to become a cypress plant. If man had been the cypress plant, he would have compared himself with the rose and felt jealous at the attention that the rose plant was getting from people. Or if man were the rose plant, he would have looked at the cypress plant enviously thinking how peaceful the plant was without the torture of getting plucked by people all day!'

The two plants prospered because they used all of their energy for their own growth instead of using it to compare themselves with the other.

The moment you stop comparing, all jealousy disappears. Instead, you will start feeling contented in yourself and grateful to Existence for having given you so much and for making you unique.

If you feel jealous of others, you will suffer. You will constantly fight with others openly or inside yourself. If somebody laughs, you think he is laughing at When you feel hurt, understand you have a wound.

you. If somebody is friendly towards another person, you feel lonely and jealous of that person. Actually, you are just waiting for someone to hurt you. The jealousy you allow inside you is like a raw wound. Any action done with no intention to hurt you also touches the wound and hurts.

So when you feel hurt, understand that you have a wound. Don't throw the responsibility of the suffering on the other person. The wound needs to be healed, the jealousy has to be dissolved. Then nobody can hurt you. Nobody can hurt you without your silent permission.

You compare yourself to each other because you feel that you are somehow lacking. Honestly, you have no idea of your true, unique potential! If you did, you wouldn't spend one second looking outside yourself for answers about how to live a creative, fulfilling life. All of the confidence, intelligence, and vibrant energy that you need already exist inside you. You have the potential to live like gods on earth. Don't believe the limiting things that you have been made to believe about yourselves. Just look in! Experiment, explore and discover the truth for yourself. Then you will simply radiate all of these qualities effortlessly.

Above and below the ladder

Suppose there was a huge ladder and everybody in the world was asked to stand on it in ascending order of success in any field such as beauty or intelligence. You would probably position yourself somewhere in the middle of the ladder. There are many people above you but there are also many people below you. Seeing the people above you causes you to feel jealous, so you constantly try to become better than them in order to move further up the ladder.

Now at some point in your life, you may realize the uselessness of this never-ending game. Then you want to jump off the ladder. You look down. Now what do you see? There are so many people below you. Suddenly you start feeling happy to see so many people below you and you feel hopeful because you are not as inferior as you thought you were when you were looking at the people above you.

This is where the fight starts. When you look up, you feel miserable, but when you look down, you feel happy. Now even though you begin to realize the futility of spending your life just climbing the ladder, still you are not able to jump off the ladder because if you jump off, you will be left alone – there will be nobody above you or below you.

When you are on your own at home, you may think it is so nice that you have a beautiful home and a lovely car for yourself. You may feel satisfied with yourself and relaxed inside. After some time, when you step out of your house and go for a drive in your car, you stop at a traffic light and notice a flashy, new Mercedes alongside you. What happens? Suddenly you start feeling that maybe your car is not all that great after all. Now a thought comes, 'It is time to buy a new car…maybe a Mercedes.'

Just sometime back, you were happy with your own things, but now seeing somebody else's car, a desire has entered you to have that same car. You have borrowed the desire of that car owner – this is called a borrowed desireborn out of comparison.

This borrowed desire is an example of a want, not a need. Try this: do an honest analysis of each of your desires when they surface. Drop all your prestige problems and do a self-analysis. If you can't drop your prestige when you are alone, how will you drop it when you are with people!

The very nature of the mind is to not be satisfied, not be happy, and not be in the present moment. The mind can only exist either in the past or the future. It cannot exist in the present because you cannot have thoughts in the present moment. So, by its very nature, the mind will chase desires. We have to be aware and see which desires are actually ours and which we have borrowed from others.

Mahavira* , the enlightened master and founder of the religion of Jainism, makes a beautiful statement, 'When you are born, the entire quantity of food and energy that you will need during your lifetime is sent along with you.' Before sending you to planet earth, Existence equips you with the energy to fulfill all that you will need to live a happy and fulfilling life.

But when you start spending this energy to realize borrowed desires, you feel you don't have enough energy to fulfill all your desires. You feel unfulfilled because your own desires have not been fulfilled.

You have enough energy to fulfill all of your needs but not your wants. The moment one want is fulfilled, many more come up as you borrow more desires from others.

We all function around the three axes of doing, having and being. Doing for having, without enjoying being, is the sole cause of all our misery. Doing never catches up with having! Every time you work hard and fulfill one

Before sending you to planet earth, Existence equips you with the energy to fulfill all that you will need to live a happy and fulfilling life.

desire, suddenly that desire loses its pull over you.

As enlightened master, Ramana Maharishi* , says beautifully, 'The mind is such that it shows a tiny mustard seed to be a huge mountain until it is attained. As soon as it has been attained, even a mountain appears as insignificant as a mustard seed!'

As soon as a desire is fulfilled, another one starts pulling at you. You don't even have time to enjoy it and feel satisfied. You may think, 'Let me get this one more thing also. Then I can relax and enjoy what I have.' Be very clear, your mind will never let it happen.

The only way to really live and enjoy life is to enjoy the very doing itself. Then

Mahavira – Vardhamana Mahavira was the 24th and last Jain tirthankara or enlightened one, and established the tenets of the religion of Jainism, founded in Bharat and now practiced by millions worldwide.

Ramana Maharishi - Enlightened master, based in Tiruvannamalai in South Bharat. He taught the method of self-inquiry, asking oneself, 'Who am I?', as the path to self-realization.

automatically the doing, having and being, will be integrated and will happen.

Nature has its own unique way of growth for each of us.

Take the Chinese bamboo for example. When it sprouts, it doesn't show much growth for the first four years. Then in the fifth year, the bamboo grows ninety feet in six weeks! It was not that the tree was not growing in the first four years. Though the growth was not visible, the roots were being strengthened to make it possible for the plant to grow fast and safely into a huge tree!

Like the bamboo's growth, there is no scale to measure yourself with anyone other than your own self. If you spend all your energy looking in and competing with yourself, you will progress in leaps and bounds.

First of all, understand that god is an artist, not an engineer. If He was an engineer, He would have made one perfect man and one perfect woman and then made millions of copies from that mould! No. God has made each one of us unique in every way.

It does not matter whether you are a rose or a lily or a wild flower. The important thing is that the wild flower should realize its ultimate potential as a wild flower just as the rose should actualize its inherent potential. The fragrance of you realizing your unique potential is what radiates and, without effort, touches everyone around you.

Whether in regard to beauty or intelligence, you are unique. It is only when you don't respect your uniqueness that you start comparing yourself with others. Even if your favorite cinema star or model is very beautiful, can you enjoy drinking even a cup of water from that body? No! You can only enjoy using your own body, your best friend. Accept and welcome it.

Actually, jealousy has no solid existence. In that way it is like darkness. Darkness does not have an independent, positive existence. Darkness is not the presence of something. Darkness is just the absence of light. In the same way, jealousy has no independent, solid existence by itself. It is just the absence of knowledge or awareness.

A small story:

A man was having trouble finding a wife whom his mother would also like. He asked his friend for some advice. His friend advised, 'Maybe if you get a girl just like your mother, she would like her.' The man took his friend's advice and searched for a long time and finally found such a girl.

He then came back and told his friend, 'Just like you said, I found a girl who is exactly like my mother. She talks, walks, behaves just like my mother.' But the man still looked depressed. His friend asked him, 'Ok, good you found such a girl. But why are you still sad?'

The man replied, 'Because my father hates her!'

There is no end to comparison because comparison exists in the mind, not in reality. The jealousy that arises from comparison also has no basis.

Some people ask me, 'Then, is it better for us not to look at others and their achievements? Then there is no problem of comparison at all! Isn't that the best way out of jealousy?'

I tell them, you can't escape from your mind just by ignoring your thoughts! If you can look but not be affected by what you see, then you have found the right way. If you can accept and welcome what you see and what happens, then you are centered within yourself and nothing can shake you.

Don't condemn the object of Jealousy

A small story:

A man was asked, 'Do you believe in luck?'

He replied, 'Of course! How else do you explain the success of people that you don't like!'

Just by condemning the object of jealousy, you will not be liberated from jealousy itself because the moment you start condemning another person, it means that there is a wound inside you that you are trying to cover up, knowingly or unknowingly.

By condemning the object of jealousy, you might be liberated from that particular object of jealousy, but you will simply get fixed on another object of jealousy, that's all! It is like saying 'sour grapes' and moving on to another vineyard! So, trying to overcome the object of jealousy is not the solution. You need to work on the subject, that is, you.

The sage Patañjali* , the father of yoga* , says, 'When somebody is blissful, feel blissful and friendly.' The secret is that bliss is a quality that belongs to everyone. It is

This is the start of hypocrisy: you try to imitate others and become what you are not. This is a vicious cycle.

there for anyone to share, just like a flower's fragrance spreads

choicelessly and is available for everyone, like a beautiful sunrise that is there for anyone to enjoy, or like a beautiful piece of music available to everyone! You can choose to tune into bliss, and that is all that is needed to experience it!

Other's sufferings worse than our own

A small story:

A man was feeling very burdened by his suffering. Every day he would pray to god, 'Everybody is so happy, why do only I have to suffer?' One day, he was really depressed and prayed, 'I am not able to bear my pain anymore. Please take it away! Even if I have to take someone else's pain in exchange, I am ready to do that.'

That night he had a dream where he saw god telling everyone in his village to bring all their sufferings to Him. So everybody gathered their sufferings in big bags and they all rushed to god. Then god said, 'Now you can keep your bags together around me.' Everybody was very happy to get rid of their sufferings and dropped off their bags.

Then, as they had asked in their prayers, god said, 'Ok, now you can take any bag.' Suddenly, everybody including this man, rushed to take his own bag! Not only him, but all others were doing the same thing.

For the first time, each one had seen others' sufferings and they were glad their bag was not as big as those around them. Also, each person had become used to his own sufferings. Nobody wanted to risk taking somebody else's unknown suffering instead of their known!

The man suddenly woke up and prayed to god, 'Thank you for opening my eyes! I know what I have is good for me. That is why you have given my circumstances to me!'

Jealousy – the mother of hypocrisy

Because of jealousy, you suffer inside yourself. You feel something is missing in your life. To get that missing element, you try to become what you are not by nature. This is the start of hypocrisy. You try to imitate others and become what you are not. This is a vicious cycle. The more you pretend, the farther you go from your true nature. This leads to further dissatisfaction and jealousy, which in turn leads to more pretence.

The only way to break out of this vicious cycle is to realize your own uniqueness and express it. Be authentic in everything that you do. This new experience of freedom will help you tremendously to find your unique and authentic dimension of creativity. Love yourself just as you are, as the unique creation of the Divine. And watch the self-created myth of jealousy just drop.

Peer pressure – the stick of Jealousy

There is a beautiful verse in the ancient scriptures that says the power of maya*, the energy which runs the universe, uses jealousy as a tool to make you do whatever it wants you to do.

In Bharat, there are people who do circus shows with monkeys in the street. They will have a small stick. Once they pick up the stick, the monkey will do whatever they say. If they just gesture to the monkey, it won't listen. Even though it knows that the man can pick up the stick at any time, unless he picks up the stick, the monkey won't listen. If he picks up the stick and tells

Peer pressure is just a big ego game. Actually, it is not at all necessary for you to grow.

the monkey to walk straight, it will walk straight. If the man tells the monkey to jump three times, it will jump three times.

The man will use the stick like the ringmaster uses it in the circus. In the same way, the power of maya* uses peer pressure and jealousy as a stick to make you do whatever it wants. Understand, peer pressure is just a big ego game. Actually, it is not at all necessary for you to grow. There is enough food, shelter, medical care and clothing in the world to satisfy all of our basic needs. There is no need to compete!

Jealousy is closely related to many negative emotions like anger, greed, possessiveness and depression. All of these emotions will dissolve when we break this cycle of jealousy.

Maya – Literally 'That which it is not'. It is the concept that life is but a dream, however real it may seem while being experienced.

1. Witnessing

Jealousy cannot be overcome either by escaping from it or hating the object of jealousy. All you need to do is just be fully aware when the feeling of jealousy arises. You will be surprised, it simply disappears.

The enlightened master Buddha says, 'Destroy those envying roots and enjoy lasting peace.'

Just be aware and destroy the jealousy, competition, envy and comparison that have robbed you of your very nature of bliss. Use the light of awareness to reveal the shadow nature of these negative emotions. Otherwise, you are just caught in the rat race. I always tell people, even if you win the rat race, you are still just a rat!

The way out of jealousy is not by suppressing it or denying its existence. Expressing and encouraging it is also not the way because then you are not ready to face the jealousy with awareness.

Just watch how jealousy arises in you, how it develops into hatred for the object of jealousy, how it creates restlessness and frustration inside you and makes you lose all of your peace and calm.

Be aware of the jealousy instead of hating it or the object of your jealousy. Just watch, as if you have nothing to do with it. Look at it with a scientific attitude. What do I mean by a scientific attitude?

When a scientist is experimenting, he simply experiments without any judgment, without any pre-determined conclusion. If he has a conclusion already in his mind, that means he is not a scientist because his conclusion may influence the experiment.

Now, you are the scientist in the laboratory of the inner-world science. Be a scientist in your inner world and let your mind be your laboratory. Just be aware and witness without any prejudice.

Don't condemn the emotion saying it is bad because that is what you have been taught. It has not become your experience. If it is your experience that jealousy is a negative emotion you will drop it automatically. It has not become your own experience. It is only something that you have picked up from others. Unless it becomes an experiential understanding in you that jealousy and comparison are negative, it will not become a part of you.

Don't condemn the object of jealousy. The object has not generated the emotion from outside. The jealousy is happening inside you.

Once you see your jealousy with awareness, you will realize that it does not have a basis for existence at all. When this happens, jealousy will drop automatically. You won't have to drop it.

A small story:

A woman once hired a professional artist to paint her portrait. The artist carefully made a large portrait and then presented it to her saying, 'How do you like it?'

The lady looked at it and said, 'Yes, very nice. But can you add a few things? I want you to add a glittering diamond necklace, a gold watch and bracelet, emerald earrings and beautiful pearl rings on the fingers.' The artist was surprised and said, 'But madam, the portrait looks simple and beautiful as it is. Why do you want to add all the jewelry and clutter it?'

The woman replied, 'I want my rich neighbors to see the painting and go crazy when they see all the jewelry that they will think I have.'

The fire of jealousy can just consume you completely if you don't control it with the fire extinguisher of your awareness.

2. Infinite love

Jealousy does not allow you to experience your true nature of love and bliss. It arises out of misunderstanding life and yourself. You misunderstand love to be something outside of you that has to be acquired. Not only that, you think love is a quantity that needs to be shared. That is why you are afraid, thinking that if you

If you accept yourself just as you are, you can accept others also as they are.

share your love, your share will be reduced.

Love is a quality inside you. It is not a limited quantity. It is an unending happening overflowing from within you. It cannot be blocked by anything or anybody except you because it is your very nature.

Once love starts flowing, jealousy and possessiveness and all that simply become non-existent. If you accept yourself just as you are, you can accept others also as they are.

3. Ocean of energy

This technique puts you in touch with the tremendous energy inside of you. There is an immense reservoir of energy inside us that most of us are not even aware of. If you know how to tap into this vast energy source, you can simply go beyond what you now think are your limitations.

The key to this meditation is to keep the mind fixed on the throat region, the location of the vishuddhi chakra* , throughout the technique. When you do this, the cosmic energy enters through the vishuddhi chakra* and becomes a tremendous source of energy for you.

Stand with your eyes closed and focus on your vishuddhi chakra* . Stand behind a chair or some support and hold it and start walking slowly, very slowly in the same spot where you are standing.

Now start increasing your pace very gradually. Keep walking faster and faster in the same spot. Push your limits only to the extent that you can, with no discomfort. Don't over-exert yourself at any time. At all times focus on the vishuddhi. You will be able to feel the energy coming from it. The important thing is never to slow down at any point in time but always keep your awareness on the throat region. Stop after twenty minutes.

Then, for the next ten minutes, just sit down quietly wherever you are. Keep your eyes closed and focus on the vishuddhi. You will absorb the energy that is generated during the movement.

Vishuddhi chakra - Chakra or subtle energy center in the throat region. Locked by comparing ourselves with others.