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jealousy is strange
betaboy
Veteran
We like someone, and that someone likes someone else. We become jealous - it is a spontaneous reaction, like experiencing fear at seeing a snake. It is not a learned behavior. It feels so intrinsic to one's nature.
Isnt that strange?
Isnt that strange?
0
Comments
Add a little mindless violence in there for the full effect.
Its no fun anyway.
I agree, jealousy is not fun...been there done that...and not something I have admired in myself when it has popped up.
I was just saying that I don't see anything strange about jealousy...seems like a rather logical emotion...albeit one that we would be better off without in most cases.
Instinct is evidence for a universal type of intelligence. I think jealousy goes hand in hand with curiosity.
Let us say I have but a mild interest in a person. This person is having fun with a few other people. Watching this, I am in pain. Is this jealousy because I can't bear to see this person with someone else - or is it just that my ego can't understand how others can make this person happy (rather than me)? Or are they interconnected?
This is why I said jealousy is interesting. It comes from nowhere, like an instinct rather than a learned behavior, plus sometimes (like the instance above) you don't even know if it is jealousy or something else entirely.
@betaboy, I know where you are coming from. I don't know if it's instinctive or learned. It certainly feels instinctive sometimes. But, I think that human beings have a distinctive advantage over other animals because we can conquer our instinctive reactions.
I heard a meditation teacher say this once: Imagine a small child who is sad. You have an ice cream cone. You give the child your ice cream cone and the child becomes happy, beyond happy -- ecstatic. Now you are happy! You've derived far more happiness from giving away something that belonged to you than you would have from keeping it to yourself.
If you think about this or situations like this, you can cultivate feelings of generosity and goodwill towards others while also letting go of possessive feelings.
Also, I think about possession a lot. If someone puts on your shoes and walks away in them, your shoes don't say, "hey, we don't belong to you!" For all intents and purposes, the shoes are now owned by the thief. Finders keepers and all that. Considering that, how could we ever think that we "own" anything, let alone another human being -- which is essentially all that jealousy is: a perceived ownership of another person.
I'm rambling. I truly hope that your situation works out.
_/\_
I know that when I've felt jealous, I felt insecure simultaneously
A being is born, to begin with, precisely because they are impure. He taught that if we were pure, we would not even be born to begin with. Hence the term "freedom from death and rebirth" upon getting enlightenment. He taught that we are born impure. It's the 2nd noble truth of the 4 noble truths. A "human being", by definition, is a being that is impure. However, that does not mean that a human being don't have the capacity to remove impurity, they certainly do.
But the cause of human birth is clear, the cause is impurity. Unless you are a fully realized Bodhisattva deliberately returning to help others.
Unless you are a fully realized Bodhisattva deliberately returning to help others.
:om: It is! It's the original sin of ignorance that has kept us stuck in samsara for countless eons and continues to keep us stuck until it is purified, etc.