Comparison - The Greatest Disease

From our very early childhood, we are taught comparison. Your mother starts comparing you, not only with other children but also your own siblings, "Look at your brother, see how he is getting good grades, and look at you, wasting your time in playing". The teacher compares you: "Look at Tom, how well he is doing, and you are no good at all! "

From the very beginning you are being told that you should compare yourself with others. This is the greatest disease; it is like a cancer that goes on destroying your very soul – because each individual is unique, and comparison is not possible. I am just myself and you are just yourself. There is nobody else in the world that you can be compared with. Do you compare a lily with a rose? A lily is a lily, a rose is a rose. You don’t compare. Do you compare an orange with an apple? You don’t compare. You know they are different! Comparison is not possible.
Every person is unique. There has never been any individual like you before and there will never be again. You are utterly unique. It is your privilege, your prerogative, it is God’s blessing, that He has made you unique. Don’t compare. Comparison will bring trouble. If you fall victim to this disease of comparison, then you will either become very egoistic or you will become very bitter; it depends on whom you compare yourself with. If you compare yourself with those who seem to be bigger than you, higher than you, greater than you, then you will become bitter.
You will nurture a complaint in your heart "Why am I not greater than so & so? Why am I not like that person? Why am I not physically so beautiful, so strong? Why am I not intelligent? Why am I not this, not that?” And there are millions of things in the world....If you compare yourself with the people who are greater in some way than you, you will become bitter, very bitter. Your life will become poisoned by the comparison. You will remain always in a state of depression, as if you have been deceived , betrayed , as if you have been let down.

And on the other hand, if you compare yourself with people who are smaller than you, in some way lesser than you, then you will become very egoistic. This is one of the reasons why such people collect smaller people around themselves so that they can look bigger than they are by comparison. It is stupid, but one cannot expect anything more from such foolish people.

The vast majority of us, we always look at others’ houses, their successes, their achievements, and feel somewhat bitter. But only a man who understands the uniqueness of everybody , feels immense gratitude for whatsoever God has given to him. If you don’ t compare, then you are neither bigger nor smaller, neither ugly nor beautiful, neither intelligent nor stupid. If you don’t compare, you are simply yourself And in that state of simply being yourself, spring comes, flowers come. It is only from a deep acceptance of life, do we have a deep gratitude towards what God has blessed us with & this helps to bring the spring.

A lesson from fledglings

On a nearby tree a bird was raising her young. There were two babies & they kept on growing day by day. One day they came out of the nest for the first time. When they came out of the nest, both of them settled on a branch – wonderstruck, trying their wings, thinking should we go forward or not? They had never come out of their nest before, and their mother was sitting on a distant tree giving them a call, a loud call ... she went on calling. Hearing her call, they fluttered their wings. But the attachment to the nest, to the safety was too much. And they had never before opened their wings... Should we open them or not? Will we be able to fly or not? The mother kept on calling, kept on provoking, call after call. It took about half an hour, slowly slowly they fluttered their wings, moved a little further from the nest, sat on other branches of the same tree. They felt a little more confident, flew a little in the air and came back. Confidence grew further and then they flew away... They have not been seen since. They never came back. Why come back? The nest is left behind – two egg shells left in it, broken to pieces.

Birds who have never flown before gather the courage to fly into the sky, but we are human beings, bestowed with unparalleled capabilities & still cannot gather courage. We hesitate, procrastinate, doubt & fear the unknown. Isn't it time that we learn from the baby birds?

Contradiction - that's what life is!

You see a man who is loving. When the man is loving you think,"Yes, how nice is this man." But the next moment he is angry; then there is a contradiction. He is angry and loving and jealous and possessive, and sometimes so sharing, and sometimes so mean. Have you not seen it?

Sometimes your friend is so sharing and sometimes so mean. This is how reality is. Reality contains all contradictions. Don't you realise how absurd and ridiculous we all are and yet how incredibly beautiful life is. Nothing is contradictory in it. If you were all very, very consistent, life would not be so rich. It would be stale and gray. Life is rich because it is a rainbow, it is psychedelic. It has so many colors and so many changing colors. And it is so unpredictable – that’s why it is absurd. Why do you call it absurd? Because you cannot contain it in your logic. Your logic falls short; it is bigger than your logic. It destroys your logic. Somehow you make a plan, set a goal, toil & burn the midnight oil and then what happens, life comes and destroys everything.

We want to define everything, this is right, this is wrong. We want to impose our moral values on others without realising that we ourselves are nothing but a bunch of contradictions. H.G. Wells once wrote "Self righteous morality is nothing but jealousy with a halo". If you look deeply wherever you find imposed morality, there is bound to be a trace of hypocrisy over there.

Can there be pleasure without pain, light without darkness, up without down ? And we keep arguing on petty matters. The big pine tree and the small rosebush – who is higher? Neither the pine tree ever boasts that she is higher, nor the rosebush ever says that "You may be higher, but where are the roses?" The real height in the roses is in the fragrance, in the flowering. Height itself is not enough to be higher.But the rosebush and the pine tree remain together without any quarrel, any competition, for the simple reason that they both understand that they are part of the same nature.

Truth has its own fragrance.
Love has its own power.

Silence has its own impact.

Words fall short

Waking up early in the morning,the sun is rising in the garden, the trees are waking up. The smell of fresh earth is in the air –perhaps it has just rained. The dew drops on the grass leaves are shining like pearls. The birds have started singing. A peacock dances, a cuckoo calls. Flowers bloom, the lotuses open their petals. You see all this. It is not beyond your senses, it is within their grasp. It is not unknown to you, it is known. You experience all this beauty. If somebody asks you to describe it in one word, what would you say? Just this: it was beautiful, it was very beautiful. But is this any description? In this "very beautiful" there is no ray of the sun, or fragrance of the fresh earth, or blooming petals of the lotus, or the song of the bird, or the dew drop pearls, or the green of the trees, or the open sky. There is nothing in it.What is in this "very beautiful"? Nothing at all, only a few letters of the alphabet.

Be like a river

Life is a wandering; it is not a settlement, you have to go. It is a constant flow, river-like – you have to flow till the ocean is achieved. But the journey to the ocean comes naturally to the river. There is no planning for the ocean; the river does not know. The maps don’t exist for a river, of where the ocean is. And the river has no discipline. Sometimes it goes to the south, and sometimes it starts moving to the north, and sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another direction. Have you ever seen the zigzag path of a river? It is not straight. It is not economical. It is not mathematical. It is not the shortcut at all – very zigzag, just goes on, not knowing where it is going, just goes on because the energy is there to go. And one day the river reaches.

If the river is planning, then it will find the shortest route, then it will move in a straight line, then it will never deviate, then it will be very consistent. But then it will not be a river. Maybe a canal, a man-made canal, but it will not be a river. It won’t have any freedom. Canals are ugly. Rivers are beautiful.And life is a hilly track. Move in freedom, move in total freedom, and each moment remember to drop the past. It accumulates like dust. Each moment you have experienced something, and then it goes on accumulating. Don’t accumulate it. Just go on ceasing as far as the past is concerned, dying as far as the past is concerned, so you are totally alive, throbbing, pulsating, streaming, and, whatsoever comes, you face it with awareness.

Synthesising Happiness

We have been evolving since the last two million years , and one significant change that has taken place is that our brain has tripled in size. It was not just simple fat that was added but also the structure of our brain changed. The frontal lobe was added in which is something called the pre frontal cortex. The major function of the pre-frontal cortex is an experience simulator. With an experience simulator – you can have an experience of something before you actually try it out. Just like pilots have to go through flight simulators before they are allowed to actually fly a plane. So, you can experience something in your mind even before you actually do it. And by the way no animal can do this, no other species on this earth can do this and it is a unique quality which only the human species have the privilege to have.

Lets try out a simple experiment, I want all of you to imagine & try to simulate such an experience - 2 situations – 1st situation – You win 10 million (whatever currency you want) and 2nd – you meet with an accident and become permanently disabled. In which situation do you think you will be happy? I don’t think you will need even a second to decide your preference.

But there has been extensive research conducted on this and the results are very interesting. A person having actually won a large amount of money after about a year’s time and a person who became disabled after a year, the level of their happiness or unhappiness is more or less the same. So why is that? We need to understand two things – First what is called “The impact bias”. Now what is this impact bias. It is the tendency to overestimate the impact of future events. Let us take a few examples of future events - getting married, passing an exam, winning an election, getting a promotion – all these events have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than what people expect to have.

Second is that we human beings have some kind of inner system that helps us to change the view of the world that they we find ourselves to be in. We can actually synthesize or manufacture or produce happiness but we are under the false illusion that happiness has to be found. Sir Thomas Browne wrote “I am the happiest man alive, I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity and I am so invulnerable that fortune has no place to hit me”. Also Shakespeare has said “There is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so”.

Be the master of your own destiny, synthesise happiness, spread happiness -it's all in your hand.

Our Collective Responsibility

Our universe is about 14 billion years old, our planet is about 5 billion & the human species is about 200,000 years old and therefore as far as the evolutionary history of the universe is concerned, the human species is still in its infancy. For thousands of years we, human beings have survived due to the fight or flight response, but then this response became so well ingrained in us, we have now become the predators on this planet. But there is a saying – a permanently victorious species risks its own extinction. The time has come to replace “survival of the fittest” with the “survival of the wisest”. Predatory relationships have to be surpassed by symbiotic relationships if we have to move further into our next phase of evolution. It is now our collective responsibility to nurture the very web of our existence, our eco system.

Very soon, the playing field for violence will be considerably reduced; soon the superpowers will become irrelevant because conventional weaponry & warfare will not matter. As technology becomes more sophisticated in its diabolical creativity, a single individual with a mobile phone sitting in some remote cave anywhere in the world may be able to cut off electricity to some place, or hijack a plane or interfere with air traffic signals or suffocate people who are on pacemakers or cause the nuclear plants to leak – all this just by moving electrons inside a mobile telephone. Modern capacities and ancient habits is a devastating combination. This is a moment of crisis because we risk our own extinction. If insects disappeared from our planet then all life would stop within 5 years because insects are such an important part of our ecology that we just can’t do without them but on the other hand if human beings were to perish today, then life would flourish on this planet. And nature would simply say that “Human beings were a good experiment that didn’t work”. Technology by itself is neutral, it all depends on us what we do with the technology. We can use the technology to restore the ecosystem, to bring economic empowerment to the poor, eradicate poverty, to create cross cultural exchanges through fine arts – books, poetry, music, entertainment, to harness the power of collective intelligence.

So, now it is up to you and me and all of us to spread this message of becoming responsible for our planet, our eco-system and our environment. If all such like minded people connect and communicate with each other, then one day together they could form the tipping point from where mankind would take a giant leap forward and completely transform this world.