According to Osho, when you stop comparing, growth doesn’t cease; it becomes authentic, organic, and inward. Freed from others’ measures, your unique potential unfolds by its own strength, like a rose drawing its own nourishment. Comparison breeds madness and violence; non-comparison centers you in “I am as I am,” enabling right direction, natural creativity, and inner flourishing without feverish chase.
If you stop looking at others and just be yourself, you’ll grow naturally like a plant, from your own strength.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
A friend has asked: Osho, in your talk on the first day you said that socialism turns a human being into an animal. But man today has become worse than an animal; so if man does become an animal, what is the harm?
If someone forcibly makes us good, that will be worse than being bad. In a prison no one can steal, no one can murder; there is no freedom to do anything bad. Even so, we would not choose to live in a prison. Outside, there is freedom to do evil—along with it, there is freedom to do good. If no one can steal in a prison, neither can anyone there discover a way to take life higher. A prison is dependence. Socialism can try to turn a whole country into one big prison. It has built prisons. And by making prisons, many conveniences do arise. But those conveniences are a very expensive bargain; we lose a great deal in them and gain nothing. Therefore I would say: let man acknowledge his capacity to be animal, preserve freedom, and yet strive in the direction of not becoming an animal. And why…
Osho, you feel, sir, that the education we are giving in schools and universities, which is based on comparison, is harmful. If it is harmful, what measures should we take so that we can bring about a humanity without fear?
Certainly, education based on comparison is extremely harmful—poisonous, toxic. The moment we teach a person to think in terms of comparison, the moment we compare one person with another, we create inferiority, fear, ambition. He becomes afraid. For when we compare, we tell A, “B is superior to you; you must rise above B.” Instantly, we sow fear in A. He becomes frightened of life: how to get ahead of B? And even if he goes beyond B, what is the difference? C is standing ahead. There are thousands in the line ahead. He must be at the very front. The person becomes terrified, anxious. And when we compare a person with someone else, it means we do not accept that person. He is rejected in that very moment. As he is, he is not acceptable; only if he becomes something else will we accept him. We have insulted his…
Beloved master,you say unenlightened persons cannot be compared. But I compare and evaluate myself constantly with other people. I feel this constantly brings clouds and a distance between me and them. What can be done about it?
Veetdharma,I have said that unenlightened people cannot be compared, because they are utterly different from each other. Their histories are different, their biographies are different, their pasts are different. They have moved through different terrains, different lives, in different ways; their karmas are different. They cannot be compared. It will be like comparing a stone with a rose flower, or a rose flower with a star. People are so different from each other, they cannot be compared. Only unenlightened persons can be compared, because they are no longer different at all, because they ARE no more. Emptiness can have only one taste When two rooms are utterly empty, what is there to compare? They are so alike. If you want to compare, you can compare; you can say both are empty. Otherwise there is nothing in them to compare. When both the rooms are full of different furniture and paintings,…
Question: BELOVED MASTER, HOW CAN I BE MYSELF? Drop comparison. You are unique. Nobody else is like you, nobody else has ever been like you, and nobody else is ever going to be like you. You are simply unique -- and when I am saying you are unique, I am not saying you are better than others, remember. I am simply saying they are also unique. To be unique is an ordinary quality of every being. To be unique is not a comparison, to be unique is as natural as breathing. Everybody is breathing and everybody is unique. While you are alive, you are unique. Only corpses are all alike; alive persons are unique. They are never similar -- they cannot be. Life never follows any repetitive course. God never repeats: he goes on singing a new song every day, he paints something new every day.
There is a great difference between longing and desire. Desire is of the mind, longing is of the heart. Desire is greed, longing is not greed. Desire is never fulfilled, it cannot be fulfilled; it always goes on asking for more. But longing can be fulfilled. Everything else that you want in life is a desire. Only when you start longing do you start moving towards god. Only god can be longed for, everything else is a desire. God cannot be desired because he can never be made an object of your thoughts, imagination, ego. When all these have disappeared, when you are no more functioning as a head, when you are overflowing with love, then suddenly, as if a lotus has opened in your heart, a longing opens up. That longing is fragrant, that longing in itself is a tremendous joy.