Words From The Master - 21 April 2008

The many perils of comparison

A poor man had no land and prayed to God for some land. God appeared to him and told him that all that he could cover from dawn to dusk would be his land.

The man set off the next morning without sleeping a wink. Though he had covered enough land to satisfy his needs, very soon, he began to run and run filled with a desire to own more land, more than anyone else.

By dusk he had covered a lot of land. But he fell down dead, exhausted.


Usually this is the story of most of our lives.

Desires that are real and are born out of a genuine need will have their own energy and will sustain them.

However, most of our desires are created out of jealousy and have a negative energy.

When we are not able to bear the excellence of others, we get jealous. Comparison is the seed, jealousy is the fruit.

Comparison and jealousy are actually non-existent. We create such thoughts ourselves and talk endlessly on how to overcome them.

Imagine that the room you are in is dark. Can you remove it if you wanted to?

Can you take it to another room? Of course not.

The reason is that darkness has a negative existence. It does not really exist.

If you bring light into a room, the darkness will at once cease to exist. In the same way, jealousy has a negative existence. You cannot deal with it directly. Even if you tell yourself repeatedly not to feel jealous, you cannot overcome it. If you queue up all the people in the world in an ascending order of money, where would you be?

You will be somewhere in the middle. You will not even be able to count the number of people who are on either side of you in the queue. Now, you will have to decide if you are going to look at the queue in front of you and feel jealous or look at the queue behind and feel relaxed and grateful to God.

Everything is in your hands.

We will never face failure if we live our lives competing with ourselves. Win yourself with yourself, never with others.

Every minute of comparison with others is a waste of time in the path of progress. A great problem in the rat race is that even if you win you are only a rat. To stop comparisons, you need to be aware of your own worth; you need to realise your uniqueness without being proud. Meditation leads you into that awareness of who you are and what your potential is.

You will then soar beyond comparison; for you are freed from jealousy.