The Futility of Comparison

SMALL STORY

(His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam has delivered almost 20,000 hours of recorded talks till date. As part of the talks, He shares simple small stories that give powerful A cognitive shifts to the listener. Following is one such story.)

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 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.