johnmdemarco posted on June 24, 2010 18:10
“I am envious because I want to be as beautiful as you are,” writes Krishnamurti in the classic work, Think on These Things. “I want to have the fine clothes, the elegant house, the high position that you have. Being dissatisfied with what I am, I want to be like you…”
Krishnamurti, whose 1964 book is a collection of talks given to students, must have been looking 50 years ahead to mass consumerism America. Our marketing culture hinges on this sort of unhealthy dissatisfaction, promising various techniques, products and surgeries as the panacea in exchange for money better invested elsewhere.
“But if I understood my dissatisfaction and its cause, then I would not want to be like you or long for the things that you have…once I begin to understand what I am, then I shall never compare myself with another or be envious of anyone. Envy arises because I want to change myself and become like somebody else. But if I say, ‘Whatever I am, that I want to understand,’ then envy is gone…and out of the understanding of what I am comes integration,” he continues.
Whatever I am, that I want to understand.
Seeking to understand what is truthful about us, and then respond accordingly, is the greatest threat to this toxic dissatisfaction upon which rests so much of our fragile economy. Self-awareness is the antidote to compulsive comparison, and is the path chosen by so few because it is harder, less convenient and slower to produce tangible results.
You and I will never fully understand ourselves if we are expending so much energy trying to imitate someone else. And even if we acquire much of the style and even part of the substance of this admired third party, something about us will always ring false. Perhaps false is too harsh; but unfulfilled authenticity certainly would be a fitting description of our vain, rotting efforts to live up to another’s identity.