Why Jealousy Hurts

 

Photo Credit: Fractal Enlightenment

Why Jealousy Hurts

The feeling of jealousy is aroused when we compare ourselves with others. Since childhood we have been taught to compare. Look at your brother, he always comes first, look at so and so he is so well dressed and so on and so forth. Somebody has a better house, better car, more beautiful body, more money….. Compare, go on comparing yourself with everybody and the only outcome will be great jealousy!

If you stop comparing jealousy just disappears. Then you are just you and nobody else. We don’t compare ourselves with nature, else we would be jealous all the time – why are we not green, why don’t we bear fragrant flowers – why has existence been so hard on us? It’s good we don’t compare ourselves with birds, mountains and rivers – if we do, we will suffer more. We compare ourselves only with human beings, because we have been conditioned to do so since childhood.

Comparison is very foolish, simply because each individual is different, with different skill sets, unique and incomparable. Even though we accept the uniqueness of an individual we end up comparing our achievements and then the achievements of our offspring – a never ending cycle. The moment we stop comparing, we are just ourselves, nobody has been like me and nobody will be like me. And I do not need to be somebody else either. Existence creates only originals – no carbon copies.

With jealousy we create hell and because of this mindset we become mean and vindictive. Because of jealousy you are in constant suffering; you become mean to others. And because of jealousy we start becoming phony, because we start pretending. We start pretending things that we don’t have, we start pretending things which we can’t have, which are not natural to us. We become more and more artificial. Imitating others, competing with others, what else can we do? If somebody has something and we don’t have it, and we don’t have a natural possibility of having it, the only way is to have some cheap substitute for it.

But why does the idea of the other enter in our head in the first place? It is because we have not allowed our own juices to flow; we have not allowed our own blissfulness to grow, we have not allowed our own being to bloom. Hence we feel empty inside, and we look at each and everybody’s outside because only the outside can be seen.

The jealous man lives in hell. Drop comparing and jealousy disappears, meanness disappears, phoniness disappears. But we can drop it only if we start growing our inner treasures; there is no other way. Grow up, become a more and more authentic individual. Love yourself and respect yourself the way existence has made you, and then immediately the doors of heaven open for you. They were always open; you had simply not looked at them.