The dumbest interpretation of this quote is, naturally, the one most frequently offered:
Don't compare yourself to others. Gauge your life in-situ and without reference. If you dig your Playstation, don't torment yourself with the thought that your neighbor has a better one.Sooooo true! What an insight! Just wow!
But Twain wasn't talking about a specific sort of comparison. If so, he'd have used a term like "status". Sam knew how to write, and if he declined to modify "comparison", it's because he was discussing comparison generally.
Zen talks about Shoshin (aka “beginner’s mind”). This is when you allow yourself to perceive the world freshly and guilelessly, without weaving momentary experience into some overarching mental model. You can always choose to experience naively. Like a beginner.
Walking into an unfamiliar room, you scarcely notice the chairs, because you've already categorized them. Melted into an abstract class, the chairs lose their unique actuality. There's no need to waste time noticing them. You know what chairs are! Once you've deemed something "ONE OF THOSE", any notion of its essential uniqueness is discarded (we do this with people, too).
Say you hear me play a bluesy lick on my trombone. You might immediately associate it with all the other bluesy licks you've ever heard. "Oh, Jim's kinda bluesy!" The actuality of what I'm playing is lost amid the cross-referencing, comparison, and labeling. You don't need to pay attention. You know what bluesy licks are!
Categorization usurps reality. There is no prospect of being delighted by my unique rendition because, having compared it to previous experience, you’ve bailed out of the immediacy. No matter what, it will not move you.
Name it and it essentially disappears. Just like Rumpelstiltskin.
It's possible to startle people into taking notice of a thing as a unique thing, rather than as a member of a class of things. You can disrupt their mental processes - assumption, expectation, judgement, comparison, etc - coaxing them to perceive freshly for a brief moment. But at this point, artists of all disciplines have tread so far down the gangplank of surprise-conjuring that it feels like there's nothing left to do to jar people into paying real attention. To allow themselves to be entranced.
There's nothing wrong with assumption, expectation, judgement, or comparison. Humanity has accomplished great things with our flair for taxonomy. But that shouldn't be all we do. There are times to compare, and there are times to appreciate. When I offer a bluesy lick straight from my heart and you can't really receive it because you're all up in your head comparing it to previous, superficially similar-seeming bluesy bits, that's a shame. You've killed the joy of it. You're not really listening, you're inhabiting an abstract mental model. You know too much to really get it.
"Beginner's Mind" covers all that, but it's most often used to help meditators get past a common obstruction. You may feel certain, sitting placidly on your meditation cushion, that you're building to some sort of climax. Enlightenment, or whatever, is right around the corner! You're experiencing some very auspicious and high-powered shit, the sort of thing you've read about in spiritual writings. It matches your assumption of how "it" will happen. And it's about to really happen!
No. It's merely projection and association. Just more wordy/thoughty mental foibles. Meditation is letting go, and you can't let go while hanging on to the tantalizing breakthrough around the corner. The obstruction, hilariously, turns out to have been your expectation of imminent unobstruction; your impulse to compare your experience to a mental model rather than to experience freshly.
If you're meditating toward a shattering revelation, you will subconsciously keep comparing your experience to notions you've harbored of What It Will Be Like. So you're just tediously chasing your own tail. Ugh, what hell!
That, alas, is what many meditators are doing, even the fearsome-looking ones locked away in Himalayan caves. They're "getting good" at this meditation thing - an aspiration that's like the kiss of death.
Zen urges simply letting go of all that (you can use the same "delegation" technique I recommended for insomnia, though it's best if you can refine the move as more of a reframing and less of a mental narrative), and experiencing freshly, come what may. Like a baby. Like a beginner. Stop looking for a target to shoot at. Drop your bow and arrow and let the universe have its way.
Remember the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Genesis? The peril isn't knowledge, per se. There are no bonus points for clinging to ignorance. But if you get so tied up in what you know - processing everything through your mental glut of canned expectations and assumptions - you can forget you ever had the ability to experience freshly. And you will lose the zest of life.
Comparison is the death of joy.
I noted here that "if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty." So why do we take them for granted? Because they're "just trees"! We know what trees are, so rather than see each tree as a uniquely gorgeous assemblage of matter, they dissolve into an abstracted cognitive background. We make them disappear.
Thinking You Know leaves you unappreciative. Joyless.
Joy requires the ability to key in on a beginner's earnestness; to clean one's slate. Stop reflexively comparing, and just take it all in. Unmediated reception of the love and beauty of It All is Heaven - a momentary choice of perspective, not a post-death locale.
Let's come at this from a different angle. Consider my posting on The Visualization Fallacy (which took a sharp detour midway through, spinning up into a whole cosmology outlined over a series of difficult postings). Skipping the detour for now, consider the initial upshot: "When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization." Examples will help:
Aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.It’s possible to clean that slate… at least somewhat. It helps to be a bit more suspicious of the abstract modeling. At bare minimum, learn to recognize that you do it!
Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization...
If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.
It serves a purpose, of course. Faculties such as expectation, cross-referencing, taxonomy, and intellectualization are adaptive, in terms of evolution. They help us cope with a confusing world. You know what's not adaptive? Freshly perceiving each and every fern in the jungle as a unique and gorgeous manifestation, distracting you from the blood-thirsty tiger popping out of the underbrush.
If we inspected each chair with immersive fascination, we'd never get our taxes done. Our senses helpfully deprecate the familiar to starkly emphasize the thing that doesn't belong - which may present danger or opportunity. So it's not "bad" to perceive through a filter of assumptions and shortcuts. I'm just proposing that babies get lost with that bathwater. There are other ways of experiencing.
Add "beginner's mind" to your short list of framing options. It's not a "better" way, but it's a nice magic trick to keep up your sleeve. If you can pause knee-jerk mental comparison, letting yourself experience freshly, you'll find yourself inhabiting a whole other world.
Seeking order amid chaos, we compare to try to understand. It's a fabulous process, but isn't the only process there is. If that's how you habitually place your attention, you'll miss out on feeling galvanized and inspired. Exactly how much pleasure did you derive from the last tree you walked by (not the last one you consciously noticed)?
Comparison peers backward at previous experience. But you can't look back mentally while fully experiencing the present. And all joy is in present experience.
If we inspected each chair with immersive fascination, we'd never get our taxes done. Our senses helpfully deprecate the familiar to starkly emphasize the thing that doesn't belong - which may present danger or opportunity. So it's not "bad" to perceive through a filter of assumptions and shortcuts. I'm just proposing that babies get lost with that bathwater. There are other ways of experiencing.
Add "beginner's mind" to your short list of framing options. It's not a "better" way, but it's a nice magic trick to keep up your sleeve. If you can pause knee-jerk mental comparison, letting yourself experience freshly, you'll find yourself inhabiting a whole other world.
Seeking order amid chaos, we compare to try to understand. It's a fabulous process, but isn't the only process there is. If that's how you habitually place your attention, you'll miss out on feeling galvanized and inspired. Exactly how much pleasure did you derive from the last tree you walked by (not the last one you consciously noticed)?
Comparison peers backward at previous experience. But you can't look back mentally while fully experiencing the present. And all joy is in present experience.
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