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.

Instead, 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 and the jealousy has to be dissolved. Then nobody can hurt you. Be very clear, 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 god on earth. Don't believe the limiting things that you have been made to believe about yourself. Just look in! Experiment, explore and discover the truth for yourself. Then you will simply radiate all of these qualities effortlessly.

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. And 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.