Explaining with both hands

He raises this more now than he used to, and the reason is obvious enough. Devotees arrive at satsang measuring themselves against lives they have only ever seen edited: the family that appears settled, the friend whose career photographs well, the marriage nobody has been inside. The comparison is between your interior, which you know completely, and someone else's exterior, which is the only part on display.

The comparison is not merely unkind, he argues, it is invalid, and the invalidity is what he wants people to see. You are comparing a full account, including every fear and every failure, against a summary that was assembled to be looked at. No conclusion drawn from those two sets of information can be worth anything, whichever way it comes out.

He notes that it also fails in the flattering direction, which people forget. Someone who concludes they are doing better than the person next to them has run the same broken calculation and arrived at pride instead of despair. Both are the product of judging an interior against a surface, and the pride is at least as damaging because it feels like good news.

There is a specific consequence he keeps naming. Comparison converts what you have into what you are missing, without changing anything about it. The same house, the same work and the same family are experienced as adequate or as failure depending entirely on what they were just measured against, and the measuring took a few seconds and cost you the month.

He does not offer this as a reason to stop wanting things, and he blocks that reading when it appears. Wanting to earn more, to do better work or to build something is ordinary and fine. What he objects to is the source of the wanting: an ambition that came out of a comparison is chasing somebody else's edited summary, and arriving there does not settle anything, because a new summary is always available.

What it asks of you is to notice the moment of measurement, which is usually brief and usually happens with a screen in your hand. When you catch yourself running the comparison, do not argue yourself out of it with reasons why your own life is better. Put the name there instead and let the thought go unfinished. An unfinished comparison does no damage; a completed one sets the tone for the rest of the day.

The rest of his most repeated sayings are on the quotes page, the teaching they belong to is set out on the teachings page, and the questions devotees bring him about anger, money, family and grief are answered on the questions answered page.