[Here is the true story of such an old dear friend of mine!]
What is jealousy?
In the beginning, there is an experience.
You are children, and with your brother or sister, you are doing stupid things, and your parents are only blaming you. You are angry with your parents and jealous of your brother or sister.
You are in a relationship with this man or woman whom you say you love and whom you say “yours”, and he or she laughs out loud – lol – with this other than you. You are angry with him or her, and you are jealous of this stranger.
You are at a dinner party, and you notice this solar person, his or her way of being, of speaking, of moving, and how he or she gets attention. You blame yourself for not being to your advantage, and you envy him or her, unless you desire him or her, which is one and the same thing, we will come back to that.
These experiences are the seat of strong feelings and emotions.
In inquiry mode, your brain pins in your memory the image of each of these experiences, and attaches the verbal traces of these sensations, of these emotions: injustice, anger, desire, and jealousy for instance.
In triage mode, your brain then sorts the “good” and the “bad”, to maximize its quest for the former and its desire to flee and avoid the latter at all costs.
In judgment mode, your brain will designate those responsible for these good and bad feelings. The good ones will be crowned with positive images. The bad ones will be held responsible for your misadventures. “It’s your fault” you will say to your brother, to your sister, to your partner, to yourself. What they are sure to tell you – in the mirror and in echo – is “it’s your fault”. 1:1, the ball in the center!
In firefighter mode, your brain tries to repair the damage, to find a solution to no longer fall victim to these types of unpleasant feelings and emotions for two reasons, the initial annoyance, followed by the boomerang accusation behind, trying to avoid them, to control them, to resist them, to suppress them.
Obviously, you will make efforts to improve yourself, you will invent a lot of stratagems to protect yourself. And, of course, this will only last for a while, and time and pressure cooker effect will do the rest. Freewheeling you towards the dead end of these topics, that will never really get resolved, until your dying bed.
The scene will repeat itself, not once but hundreds and thousands of times, convincing you that you really are a looser, and mirroring that the others are really losers too, and so on.
If, as we have seen previously (see article xxxx), thoughts do not create the first set of sensation and emotion, it is your thoughts which maintain and develop this discomfort and this disorder over time, sometimes by trying to escape it, and sometimes by indulging in it. A homeostatic chaos of sorts.
In other words, it is our inability to live and to die to these thoughts and emotions, which are at the origin of this condemnation by ourselves, to the perpetuity of these so painful feelings.
Put more simply, jealousy is just a (re-) production in your brain. Even simpler, please consider that jealousy has absolutely no existence. Literally, it is NOTHING (just a virtual idea). “I am jealous” is indeed a double lure since “I” is a production of thought, just as is the attribute “jealous”, which reduces me and condemns me to this thing, is a production of thought too, that is to say “I” / “myself” created, for the better and – above all – for the worse, and that “I” / myself henceforth maintains… Jealously, it is the case to say it!
Why then does thought perpetuate jealousy?
Out of desire, because thought thirsts for this person who has given it pleasure, by his or her gentleness, by his or her attentions, by his or her care. And you therefore wish to renew this experience without sharing it. “She / He is mine”. Like the child and his toy, his “thing”.
Out of possessiveness, because not only does your brain want to appropriate this object of desire so that it does not escape, but also because you feel very lonely, and you want to flee this solitude that you do not know how to tame, and which terrifies you when you approach the abyss, that of your own finitude.
Out of domination, because your brain craves power and, along with sex and money, jealousy is a weapon of choice in power games.
Out of accusation, because if the other is guilty, of being jealous of you or of making you jealous, it relieves you of all responsibility “it’s his or her problem, not mine”, “it” is his or her fault, not mine. ”
Out of identification, because you brain does not know who it is and who you are, and you are ready to identify or to submit to anything and anyone, and preferably something or someone labeled “beautiful”, at any cost, and in particular AT THE PRICE OF THE REAL: a God, a man, a woman, a plastic, a professional success, in short, anything, really, as long as I THINK, and that therefore I AM!
Out of fear, finally, because your brain does not want to find itself more alone than alone, and jealousy seems unconsciously to it a way of fighting against the risk of losing the other, when it is quite the opposite, since jealousy makes running the risk of never knowing and meeting the other, other than through this image that we have formed of him or her, was she the ugliest or the most beautiful image, it is un-real.
And why therefore does your thought simultaneously want to flee from jealousy?
Because your brain realizes, by the painful test of the facts, that there is nothing good about jealousy!
Because you are ashamed of yourself, of course you are.
Because you do not want to suffer, of course you do not.
Because you do not want to hurt anyone, deep down.
But then, at what price do we accept to be jealous and to make jealous?
At the cost of suffering, inflicted on oneself and on others.
At the cost of life, since this story is beautiful and totally virtual, in the strict sense of the term.
At the cost of love, since it is quite impossible to love when you are in pain, right?
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And here is the thought, as we have described it in these notes on several occasions, caught in the pincers, between flight and complacency, to weigh the pros and cons, to accuse oneself and to accuse the other, to excuse oneself and to excuse the other, before relapsing, without succeeding in extricating yourself from this jealousy, never totally, and therefore never definitively.
Because the emotions are not useful here as elsewhere for any good, in the internal and external psychological affairs, personal ones and relational ones, and because the thought is just as null in the matter, the question is where we shall look to enquire if it is possible and how to eliminate all jealousy, at the root, in one go!
Observe jealousy like a thousand-year-old tree.
Intensely. Fully. Passionately. Radically.
Not through any filter whatsoever.
To observe it as the child his mother and as the mother her child,
To become one with it,
Sorry, to be one with it, since there is no becoming here, just what is.
Understanding that we are jealousy. Full stop.
And not that we are fighting for or against it.
Stay with it. Be it. Fully!
And contemplate what is, deeply, in all dimensions.
See there is no distance between it and yourself. THAT IT IS ME. THAT IT IS YOU.
What then happens?
When I am it, when I melt into it, when I no longer run away from it, when I no longer use it as a means of obtaining such and such a favor, such and such a power?
When you look at yourself and you look at each other like that? So directly.
The branches of jealousy are manifold and the strongest are called anger, hatred, violence. Whether they appear to you physically and or psychologically, that is what jealousy really is.
The roots of jealousy coincide with the very structure of thought: jealousy indeed results from a vicious and archaic mechanism of comparison. Comparison of everything, all the time. And the comparison refers to time, to the past, to what is no more, to the image of what is, what has been and what could be, and in this completely disconnects us from reality.
The reality of this sister or this brother of yours and of your parents who love you, the reality of this woman and this man who are simply happy to laugh and be together without you interfering, the reality of this life celebrating Instagramized appearance of success and which, too, distances us from True Life, the real one, and whose life, the little glittery life, is much less enviable than it seems.
The core of jealousy is the fear of losing. Losing the love of your parents, of your siblings, of your partner. Losing his or her attention. Losing the goods that we have accumulated, losing those around us. The fear of being naked, with nothing and no one. Without attachment or compass. Without goal. The fear of dying. The fear of emptiness., The fear of meaningless.
There are also hidden corners of this tree of life. This corner, this hiding place of the one who does not think he or she is jealous, for example, and who is often the most alone and the most to be pitied, and the most jealous of the gang… He or she has cut himself off from the world, one way or another. Like the monk sometimes, like the diva, like the star. They advance masked, without noticing it sometimes. Unconsciously placing themselves above, or below, and often both at the same time, to dominate others again, to dominate the world, their world, which escapes them! Forgetting that he or she is the world and that he or she is in the world. That we are in the world, and that we are the world, no matter what.
So is there a way out and how can we eradicate jealousy?
If jealousy is possessiveness, is it possible to let go of all attachment?
If jealousy is domination, is it possible to detach from any quest for power?
If jealousy is accusation, is it possible to detach yourself from the judgment of anyone and anything?
If jealousy is identification, is it possible to get rid of any banner, any label?
If jealousy is fear, is it possible to let go of all fear?
If jealousy is desire, is it possible to be detached from all desire?
Until the penultimate assertion, the program of celebrations was still edible for some…
How would we meet – without running away from it – the idea that it is about giving up pleasure?
And all these ideas and consequences, adjacent and subjacent…
The detachment we are talking about here is not an escape.
Pleasure dominates the world because pleasure dominates us.
This race for pleasure.
This race for pleasure which we can called desire.
Now, what is desire?
Desire, like jealousy, is the result of an action of thought.
Desire is a virtual construction.
Desire does not exist in the REAL WORLD, only in the intellectual world, before it transitions into emotions again… into this infernal cycle!
We’re not going to redo the chapter and jump right to the conclusion. Intellectually at least.
And desire is attachment.
Material attachment, attachment to people. Attachment is not love.
And attachment is indeed a prison, an enslavement. The prison can be gilded, and the prisoner, like his jailer, completely accomplices and consenting. The prison remains, and the freedom is no more.
Is a chosen prison a prison? Obviously!
Why not this path, then, if everyone is happy with it?
If everyone is happy with it, there is no problem, indeed! But who is ? The issue we have is NOT that we do not suffer, the challenge we have is we prefer to suffer than trying to eradicate suffering to the potential cost of our comfort, of what we know. How often do I hear this so-sad statement “I might be living a shitty life, but at least it is my life”. Submission to a life of appearance, to a life of attachment, to a life that “looks” OK or even beautiful, to a life that “feels” safe, when there is absolutely no safety in REAL LIFE, rather than running the risk of loosing it all – which you will all do anyway – rather than running the risk of walking into the unknown…
What is real life?
Real Life is a dead end. Death, as well as birth, is a part of this fantastic process. Not looking at it face to face, not being fully conscious of it, at any minute, not being living with it, is being at fantasy land.
Real life is here and now. Everything is here and there is no other place to be looking for. There is nothing to look forward to tomorrow. Nothing to understand from yesterday. There is just what is, this freedom and this immense gem of being alive now. And to have the mega power to do whatever you want with it.
Real Life is freedom and love. Desire is not love. The fear of losing another is not love. And the pain of losing another, too, is still not love. And one cannot love in suffering state, in fear state, in desire state, in despair state.
Is it possible that we live a real life, that we reconnect to the real world?
Why not?
Can we live in love and freedom?
Can we be in the world?
Can we be born into the world, and can we die into the world every single day?
Can we carry nothing on our backs and in ourselves except this tremendous energy of the moment?
Can we recreate a world, the world, our world, on radically new bases?
Of course we can!
Because the world is what we are, the world is who we are.
So maybe time has come to transform the world.
It is possible, it truly is.
If we managed to…
Build pyramids, towers, cathedrals, stupas, mosques, and synagogues,
Invent google, facebook, and the football world cup,
Throw all these materials and even body into the space system,
If today we are technically so well connected like never before,
Technically, on the surface, on the form… we already accomplished so many miracles.
So why shouldn’t we be able to reinvent ourselves?
Psychologically … Inward and Outward… Profoundly…
Whether these observations are an expression of Reality or not, makes no difference.
Cause these observations will land in any case as thought within our brain and will be treated as such, and get lost into the messy cloud of our thoughts and emotions.
The map is not the territory.
That’s the reason why only your personal quest counts.
Only your personal observation of all these mechanisms of ours,
Only your own confrontation to your brain, to your emotions, and to the reality of the world,
May get you somewhere beyond the words, beyond your thoughts, beyond your fears, beyond your desires, into the virgin territory, of the unknown.
It is impossible to detach yourself from all this, without really, deeply, physically, emotionally, rationally confronting yourself – daily, tirelessly – with what some call the desert, what others call your inner castle, what we simply call LIFE. Confronting yourself, nose to nose, body to body, soul to soul, eye to eye, with life.
Brute LIFE.
True LIFE.
This is journey out of any comfort zone.
There is nothing reasonable in this invite.
Once again. There is no escape to the story anyway.
The only questions left are, in which territory will you decide to play your own symphony?
And… Are you ready to fly and to be all in, no matter what?
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Have a good trip, good winds and maybe at a crossroads,
Namaste!
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