About Jealousy

 I think everyone experiences jealousy, but isn't it truly awful to have to listen to someone else expressing their jealousy toward another person?

I have feelings of jealousy too, of course, but the unpleasantness of realizing, "Oh, I'm jealous of someone right now"—it’s just...

"I'm the worst. I have no right to talk about love."

Not being able to genuinely rejoice in someone else's success—it makes me realize just how small-minded I am.

And the unpleasantness of hearing *someone else* express jealousy toward another person...

It’s painful, sad, poignant, excruciating, helpless, and utterly hopeless.

It just leaves you feeling incredibly, deeply sad.

Everyone feels jealousy, I suppose, but it’s best not to voice it to others. It makes everyone around you feel like giving up on everything. It feels like a massive wave of negative energy spreading rapidly within a radius of several hundred meters.

So, where does this jealousy come from? It stems from comparing oneself to others. If you compare yourself to someone and feel inferior, you get jealous. That implies that if you compare yourself to someone and feel superior, you look down on them with contempt. Either way, it makes you a pretty unpleasant person, doesn't it? I guess that applies to me, too.

We seem unable to measure our own worth except through relative standards compared to others. Religion exists to help us break free from that relative standard of value, because religion offers an absolute standard.

Now, as I wrote before regarding the concept of "A Big Life," I believe we are all living out a single "Big Life" together. I picture each of us as a cell within that "Big Life." And every single cell has its own role—some are brain cells, others are foot cells. So, what would happen if a foot cell got jealous of a brain cell, or a brain cell looked down on a foot cell? If they started undermining each other, the body as a whole would stop functioning properly. You can't move with just a brain and no feet; you wouldn't be able to put into action the things your mind conceives. After all, even if you have legs, without a brain, you wouldn't be able to decide where to walk in the first place. You need both. Ultimately, jealousy and contempt impair the functioning of the whole, and that damage inevitably rebounds upon the individual.

People fail to see that the self and the other are interdependent—that their fates, their happiness, and their suffering are inextricably linked.

I suppose that is the very message religions convey when they preach that we are one, that we are all brothers and sisters.

If one truly understood that we are deeply connected to others—that we all share in a single, "Big Life"—one would realize that harboring jealousy ultimately amounts to hurting oneself.

Yet, even as I say this, I sometimes catch myself feeling jealous. Well, I do maintain that no one is a saint—a perfectly good person—so perhaps that impulse never completely vanishes. At the same time, because I believe no one is purely evil, I am convinced there is always hope for breaking free from jealousy—no matter how prone to it a person might be.

Guided by love and mercy

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