Comparison

You Are Unique

Just to be ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in the world because everybody wants to be extraordinary.

Nobody wants to be ordinary. To be ordinary is the only extraordinary thing. Very rarely does somebody relax and becomes ordinary. If you ask Zen masters, ‘What do you do?’ they will say, ‘We fetch wood from the forest, we carry water from the well. We eat when we feel hungry, we drink when we feel thirsty, we go to sleep when we feel tired. This is all.’

It does not look very appealing – fetching wood, carrying water, sleeping, sitting, eating. You will say, ‘These are ordinary things. Everybody is doing them.’ These are not ordinary things, and nobody is doing them. When you are fetching wood, you are condemning it – you would like to be the president of some country. You don’t want to be a woodcutter. You go on condemning the present for some imaginary future.

Carrying water from the well, you feel you are wasting your life. You are angry. You were not made for such ordinary things.

You had come with a great destiny – to lead the whole world toward a paradise, some utopia. These are all ego trips. These are all ill states of consciousness.

Just to be ordinary – and then suddenly what you call trivia is no longer trivia, what you call profane is no longer profane. Everything becomes sacred. Carrying wood becomes sacred. Fetching water from the well becomes sacred.

When every act becomes sacred, when every act becomes meditative and prayerful, only then are you moving deeper into life – and then life opens all the mysteries to you. Then you are becoming capable. Then you are becoming receptive.

The more receptive you become, the more life becomes available.

But everybody is after being extraordinary.

Everybody is after being extraordinary. That is the search of the ego: to be someone who is special, to be someone who is unique, incomparable. And this is the paradox: the more you try to be exceptional, the more ordinary you look, because everybody is after extraordinariness. It is such an ordinary desire.

If you become ordinary, the very search to be ordinary is extraordinary, because rarely does somebody want to be just nobody, rarely does somebody want to be just a hollow, empty space. This is really extraordinary in a way, because nobody wants it. And when you become ordinary you become extraordinary, and, of course, suddenly you discover that without searching you have become unique.

In fact, everybody is unique. If you can stop your constant running after goals for even a single moment, you will realize that you are unique. Your uniqueness is nothing to be invented, it is already there. It is already the case – to be is to be unique. There is no other way of being.

Every leaf on a tree is unique, every pebble on the shore is unique, there is no other way of being. You cannot find two identical pebbles anywhere on the whole of earth.