Any pattern you create before the age of seven is the root pattern. Any pattern created after the age of seven is a parasite pattern.

First you will have to work on completing with the parasite patterns and then completing with all the root patterns. The moment the parasite pattern of envy or jealousy enters your being, authenticity disappears, purposelessness disappears. Again, you fall into social conditioning and you start running behind goals like a rat. Kṛṣṇa is asking Arjuna to bring śraddha or authenticity in action to the peak possibility of what he perceives as himself and what he projects as himself, without the parasite pattern of envy, anasūyanto.

Comparison or jealousy is the root from which inauthenticity justifies itself and continues to exist in you!

When you bring yourself to your peak, there is no wastage of inner power, there are no parasite patterns that can attack you. When you waste your love, it becomes lust. When you waste your responsibility, it becomes jealousy. The lower dimensions of you are nothing but rejected parts of your higher dimensions. When your higher dimension is not materialized, your lower dimension is empowered!

There is a beautiful idea from tantra about māyā śakti (the power of illusion). Illusion makes us all dance with this one stick, jealousy. Have you seen guys who make money using monkeys in India? On the road- side, they perform a small show with monkeys. With a small stick they make the monkey dance and do whatever they want it to. In the same way, the power of illusion is making you run as it wants with just one stick called jealousy. The moment you compare, you just jump into your lower dimensions, the same rut which I call the purposeful life. Then you become a karmi, not karma yogi.

The man who lives in eternal consciousness, Nityānanda, and allows his body and mind to work according to their nature, is centered in eternal consciousness. He is called a karma yogi, one who has espoused authenticity in action without attachment as the ultimate renunciation. But the man who acts out of jealousy, enters his lower dimensions of social conditioning. He is caught in the rat race, and is called a karmi, one who is focused on inauthentic action arising from patterns of greed.

A karmi is an inauthentic person who rejects his highest possibility. A karma yogi is one established in authenticity in action, empowered to live his highest possibility. The difference between a karmi and a karma yogi is this: The man who is driven by inauthenticity, his lowest possibility, jealousy is a karmi, and the man who allows authentic action, his highest possibility, the eternal consciousness to drive him is a karma yogi. One more thing: When we do things out of comparison, we do only foolish things. Our intelligence stops working and our performance falls short of our peak potential, because we now use someone else’s productivity as our measuring stick. If you do things out of the parasite patterns of jealousy, you will end up being inauthentic in your actions.

Comparison or jealousy is the root from which inauthenticity justifies itself and continues to exist in you! Do not allow it. Tell yourself very clearly, ‘Whatever others do is their responsibility and my life is my responsibility. At the end of the day, even if he is not responsible, I am responsible for his irresponsibility!’

Each one of us is unique. There is no need to compare with any other person. You are unique.

The main problem is that you compare only with the nearest person, five inches above you and five inches below you. You don’t compare yourselves with Bill Gates or Buddha, do you? Why?

The problem is not failure, the problem is your worry about failure. That is why you don’t aim for unreachable goals. You aim only for reachable goals. All your joy, the very bliss of living is swallowed by this one illusion called comparison. Jealousy and comparison have no absolute existence, they are delusory patterns. There are two levels of reality: comparative reality and existential reality. If you build your life based on existential reality, you will never suffer. If you build your life based on comparative reality, you will continuously suffer till death. Not only at the time of death, even after death.

When you are in conflict, you will naturally suffer. People constantly say, ‘I am in suffering because of his or her inauthenticity!’ Wherever you are in conflict, be very clear you are in conflict, even though you point at others’ inauthenticity. If life is not continuing to happen in the seed, it is dead! If authenticity is not continuously happening in you, you are not a possibility, you are dead! Constantly make authenticity happen in you, in your work, in your thinking, in your health! Constantly expand your thinking, constantly expand your perception!

Constantly practicing authenticity brings you to the space of possibility. Śraddha or Authenticity continuously connects you with yourself and your highest possibility. Life is for realizing that possibility. Life is for realizing the Self. Life is for realizing itself.

Authenticity is Life! Life is continuous expansion! Add authenticity to your thinking in every step. Constantly go on expanding! Don’t settle down with the lower perception. What you know about humans, what you know about the world, what you know about you is all imperfect perception, comparative reality. When you settle down with comparative reality, you make the most horrible mistake of your life. Don’t build your inner space on comparative reality. Let your inner space be built on existential reality which is the space of highest possibility. If you build your life on existential reality, you will live your life blissfully in eternal consciousness, as a karma yogi.

By nature, a person with a body and mind has to act in one way or the other. If you follow your nature with authenticity, you can be comfortable and flow in tune with Existence. When you are relaxed, when you are blissful, you express yourself beautifully. When you become possessed by the root pattern of greed or fear and try to be what you are not and project yourself to be what you are not, you suppress yourself and become inauthentic. What can suppression do? You cannot suppress energy. You can only transform energy. It can never be destroyed or suppressed.

Neither expression nor suppression is the solution, only completion with your inauthentic identities is the solution. The solution is to infuse śraddha, the courage of authenticity into this process. For example: your reaction of irritation has nothing to do with what the person has done. If you look a little deeper, you can see it is how you choose to react based on your root and parasite patterns that decides what you feel about the person. You choose to get irritated by what he is doing. Why should you allow yourself to get worked up about the other person’s actions? Also, factually the person may have a completely different intention. Yet you are already biased by your own past perception about him.

Authenticity is the key. If you bring authenticity to what you perceive as you, to what is happening within you and what you project yourself outside you, you will not be controlled by your unconscious patterns. You will be able to see clearly when lower emotions arise or unconscious reactions arise. The awareness of your inauthenticity will itself bring you to your peak capability. Then, you will naturally drop all your lower level emotions and live what Kṛṣṇa calls as śraddhāvanto anasūyanto, authenticity without envy, the space of possibility.

source: chapter 2, Bhagavadgita Decoded verses – 3.30 to 3.32