A friend just got the thing I've been working toward — and I hate that I can't simply be happy for them.

Read the ranking again. Not the yogi with the deepest trance or the hardest discipline — the highest of all, paramo mataḥ, is the one who sees by ātmaupamya (आत्मौपम्य): the analogy of one's own self. Others' sukha (सुख) — joy — registers as their joy. Others' duḥkha (दुःख) — pain — registers as their pain. The wall between 'mine' and 'theirs' has simply worn through.

The tradition reaches for the most ordinary image there is: your own body. When one limb is hurt, the rest of you doesn't deliberate about whether to respond — the hand goes to the wound on its own. The supreme yogi tends another person's trouble the way you tend a limb of your own body: automatically, without first checking whether they deserve it.

Now run the image the other way, because it cuts both directions. When your right hand finally heals, your left hand does not feel passed over. Eyes don't resent the feet for touching the ground first. Within one body, a win anywhere is a win everywhere — and that, says the verse, is what seeing other people can actually become.

Here is the diagnosis hiding in the commentary tradition: ordinary affection is sentiment, and sentiment dissolves the moment self-interest enters the room. The Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas were cousins, raised in one palace, trained by one teacher — brotherhood held right up until a kingdom was on the table. Your friendship didn't grow a scoreboard because you're a bad friend. It grew one because the prize you both want walked into the room, and sentiment alone was never built to survive that.

So the instruction 'just be happy for them' fails for the same reason 'just be calm' fails — it commands a result while leaving the machinery untouched. The machinery is comparison itself: the habit of computing your position from other people's coordinates. As long as worth is calculated that way, their rise is your demotion by definition, and no amount of willpower makes the arithmetic feel good.

The verse doesn't ask you to suppress the result of that arithmetic. It replaces the arithmetic. Seeing by self-analogy isn't a nicer feeling you manufacture — it's a different accounting, in which what happens to those you love is happening on your side of the ledger too. The flicker of envy isn't a moral failure to punish. It's a measurement error to correct.

First, drop the second charge. You felt the flicker — that's the comparison reflex, older than you, arriving uninvited. What poisons the week isn't the flicker; it's the trial you hold about being the kind of person who felt it. Name it once — 'comparison, doing its thing' — and decline to convict. Both the love and the sting are real. You are large enough to hold a contradiction for a few days.

Second, borrow the win on purpose. Once this week, ask your friend for the whole story — the phone call, the moment they found out, who they told first — and listen the way you'd retell your own news. This is ātmaupamya as a practice rather than an attainment: you are deliberately letting their joy land where your own would. Joy taken by analogy is the one prize that costs no one anything.

Third, unhook your road from their milestone. Their news says exactly nothing about your timeline — different road, different terrain, different clock. The hours you'd spend measuring the gap are hours the work loses. Come back to the next task on your own path, and let the only comparison you run this week be against where you stood last month.