Part II — Jealousy
Jealousy: a sad story for all
The other day a spiritual person came and spoke to me while I was in the car. At that time I was very displeased with my disciples because they were cherishing unbearable, unthinkable jealousy. So when this spiritual person came and asked me who my good disciples were, I said, “My good disciples are those who cherish jealousy.”He asked me, “How can it be? Your good disciples are those who cherish jealousy?”
I said, “Yes.”
He then asked me, “Who is your best disciple?”
I answered, “My best disciple is the person who cherishes the most jealousy.”
Then he said, “How can it be? How can that person be your best disciple?”
I said, “It is absolutely true, because that person who has the most jealousy is helping me to withdraw from the world.”
Each disciple has very good qualities. There is not a single disciple who does not have very good qualities. But the undivine quality which you all cherish to such a harmful extent is jealousy. This jealousy is ruining all your possibilities and destroying your inner potentialities. Depression is a very negative force. With your depression you can ruin your own life. Also, since depression is a contagious disease, it may enter into others. But when you are depressed you are destroying only your own capacity. However, when you are jealous, then unconsciously or deliberately you are trying to destroy others’ good qualities as well.
But jealousy will not succeed in destroying the good qualities of others, because if others have come into the world with some capacity, it will only increase. What you should do is to try to increase your own capacity. If you try to destroy the capacity of others with your jealousy, the inner punishment which you will reap will be most severe.
We are jealous of people because they have done things that we have not been able to accomplish. But let us see how far jealousy has taken us. If we meditate on ourselves to see what we have accomplished in the mind, in the vital or in our life by being jealous, we will see that our only accomplishment was to invite the undeserving guests of limitation, imperfection and destruction into our system. Jealousy can never expand our consciousness; on the contrary, with jealousy we see that limitation enters into us. When limitation enters into us, we come to feel that imperfection, his friend, has also come. Limitation first comes in and opens the door, and then imperfection, our second undivine friend, comes in. Imperfection is always followed by destruction. So this is what happens when we become jealous of others. These three brothers come in one after the other — limitation, imperfection and destruction.
Sometimes jealousy comes from a feeling of competition. In the inner, spiritual life there is no competition, but there is a necessity which we call progress. Let us say that we want to make progress; we want to transcend ourselves. If somebody else is with us, then immediately his mind or our mind thinks that we are competing. In the ordinary life we compete with others to show supremacy, but in the spiritual life we are not in competition with others. We want only to transcend our own capacities; but while transcending our capacities sometimes others feel we are competing. They may think we are competing with them or we may feel there is a competition, but this is not the case.
Let us separate ourselves into two beings. Imperfection is one half and our sincere cry for perfection is the other half. Let us try to reach our perfection. Let our inner cry for perfection run towards its destination. Only as it reaches its goal will it become fully illumined. When it becomes fully illumined the dark and ignorant forces will also experience a flood of illumination. Before we reach the destination, the dark forces challenge us and we are afraid and scared to death. But once we reach the destination, the ignorant forces do not dare to enter into us because they feel that they would be totally lost.
Once our jealousy is gone, immediately we will feel that the person we were jealous of is now a perfect friend. We will feel kindness and love for him or her. More than that, we will feel that we are ready to become the slave of that person. If that person asks us to do something, we will gladly do it because inwardly we will feel a kind of remorse. We will feel that since we attacked that person, we now deserve punishment. Finally, since jealousy is like an arrow, once it has gone away, we will feel relieved that something painful has been removed from our system.
Women frequently have a little more jealousy than men. When jealousy comes into a woman, her life is finished. Women’s jealousy binds them and then they don’t want to see anything else. Their jealousy won’t allow others to grow.
But men also have their own difficulties. The difficulty with men is often ego. Their ego wants to be destructive. It says, “This has to be done the way I want it to be done; otherwise I will break it.” When men want to destroy something, they need courage and strength, so they aspire. If a man is aspiring, then he is fighting against fear, doubt and jealousy. Men cry for power and most of the time they use it for the wrong purpose — to destroy. So men are breaking and women are binding — both are equally undivine.
Women don’t want to acquire anything. They are jealous because they see that somebody is surpassing them. They want to pull them back. They say, “You can’t go if we can’t go.” If women used the time that they waste being jealous in cultivating their own lives, they would surpass those of whom they are jealous.
When men start showing their ego, they usually want to get something. When they know that they have something to do, then they think of how they can pull the other person down; and for that they need strength.
