24. Comparison and Jealousy

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 comparison?

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.

Wants Vs Needs

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.

Doing, having and being

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 India and now practiced by millions worldwide.

Ramana Maharishi - Enlightened master, based in Tiruvannamalai in South India. 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.

You are unique

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.