Should We Care So Much About What Others Think of Us? Should We Compare Ourselves with Others All the Time?

Being a conformist can sometimes be so painful. In fact the more you grow older, the more you think whether it was a waste of time doing what pleased others! To compound the things, being a conformist would soon lead to a situation where one compares and assesses oneself with all other conformists. This is a vicious cycle, and it has the potential to devour all of one's life.

For me, it was, and is, the root cause of all the anxiety, envy, and unhappiness. The problem at minimum was two-fold. First, you end up with having a very little or no time to do things for your own self. And secondly, the resistance, that comes to surface each time you did something to please, exclusively, the other, accumulates, and becomes a pain-body - a term I read in Eckhart Tolle's "The power of Now." This pain-body can do monstrous harm to the psyche. Not only it invokes envy, but it can transmute one's personality in such a way that you actually begin to enjoy misfortunes of the ones you envy.

The root cause of the problem lies in the fact that we really do not believe either in our uniqueness, or to the notion that all the human beings are essentially part of the same consciousness. Believing in any one of these premises could have solved the problem outright.

But how can we believe in such ideologies, when we clearly feel the pain of not having the big penthouse that the fat boss has? How on earth am I supposed not to lose my sleep, when the guy next door is having a live-in relationship with a babe that I fantasize about, and I am forced to share my apartment with my mother-in-law?

The trick, probably (yes probably, since I am still experimenting), is to understand the solution in whole, and not in piecemeal - as we are more inclined to do. The trouble with most of us is that we do not want to take a plunge, when it comes to spirituality, or whatever you call it - the art of making life easy and wonderful. We nod in agreement, when somebody brings our attention to the fact that all this is Maya - the illusion, and there is no end to it. But, two hours later we pray for a salary raise. Half an hour later we fret over the fact that we are still living with our mother-in-law, and the guy next door is having a great time.

The nature, broadly, can be understood in two macro theories. The one at sub-atomic level tells us that we all are made of exactly the same sub-particles, call them quarks, strings or whatever pleases you. The other theory explains that for the universe to function the way it is, there has to be a single and universal flow of knowledge, or consciousness.

So, materialistically and otherwise, we are the sum-total of these particles, and this consciousness. We are actually made of the stuff that only dreams are made of!

To elaborate more, the knowledge preserved in a seed that one day it will have a metamorphosis,