Envy creeps into our daily thinking, but no situation more so than intimacy. Close friendships, family, romantic relationships. Envy denies intimacy, and if you need any gauge of how much envy affects our mind, look at the divorce rate.
I think it’s worse with romantic relationships, from my personal experience. Oh, I agree. It comes from possessiveness, but this might be surprising because I’m not speaking of possessiveness in the normal way. The baby who says “My Mommy! I want my Mommy!” is doing a right and natural thing. It’s not wrong, and they don’t need a lecture on ego. We have a natural need to claim things. We engage with the world. We are alive, and are meant to be. Things are ours, but things get twisted. We don’t just claim our things and our relationships. We get envious. We get jealous, and this taints everything. “Because my girlfriend is mine, she can’t have friendships.” That is envy. Envy always works on a double standard, and there is no such thing as fair jealousy. “I can have friends, but my partner can’t.” “I can talk to members of the opposite sex, but my partner can’t.” This is blatant foolishness.
Isn’t envy one of the deadly sins? It most definitely is, but we aren’t free of it by not knowing it. The reason jealousy regarding your partner is so foolish, is it invalidates both your professed love for them, and their love for you.
Do you think envy might have aided early man from an evolutionary perspective? I don’t think early man knew any envy. I think he knew desire and territoriality. These did serve, but they are not envy. Envy is a thinking persons twisting of instinct, and a denial. When having a partner you are jealous of their attention being on anyone but you. You fault their character totally, and in faulting their character you find fault with your desire. It’s a spiralling and corrupting process. There is a way that is beyond thinking as we are taught, and as they say in the Bible, the children inherit the sins of the parents. This isn’t a mystical and unfair curse. It’s quite mundane, and we teach our children our thinking.
If as a culture we were meditative, reflective, and self aware, then the teaching would be conscious. We can guide our children with total purpose, but is this the truth of society at large? Not in my experience. We have value systems that condition us to the very sins that we declare are so hurtful. The virtues we were taught, and we weren’t given the privilege of questioning, are also the source of our vices. You can’t take the way of nature apart, and have it still live. I can’t take a dog apart, and have a living dog. You would have dog parts, and it’s pretty permanent. But our society does this to our minds, and mental illness has become as common as discussing the weather has it not? Who hasn’t heard of someone taking meds for depression, and we don’t bat an eyelash. We are experiencing this because we are “keeping the faith”.
Unless we are the ones taking the meds. Indeed, the experience of the person on meds… Well, we don’t hear about it because often the person is too dulled by the meds to complain. It’s very convenient for the establishment, and we often submit to this drugging voluntarily, because we envy those who are well adapted to an envious society. This worlds society right now is built on envy, every war, and all political corruption.
Therapists never understood why I didn’t want to take meds. Maybe you have the wisdom of valuing your lucidity, even if it hurts.
Society doesn’t want us all thinking for ourselves, huh? It doesn’t want us thinking for ourselves, and envy of the rich doesn’t serve you. It serves them. If you envy them, then you will eagerly get into their racket, and then they can control you with the risk of losing your job.
We’re fed envy constantly in advertisements. Even if they don’t say it, they use public opinion which is based on envy like what is sexy. Sex sells, so they link it to a lot of stuff, and even things it doesn’t apply to.
So we can participate in the culture and be “normal”, or what is the alternative? Nature has been very generous to us. It gave us natural motivations, and a mind that can work fine if we recognize its use and actually choose to own it. We can actually follow them.
The alternative I’ve found is don’t pay attention to it? i.e. don’t watch TV for one? True, how fun is TV anyway? Really? We are story telling creatures, and I won’t say TV is evil, but people forget it’s a choice.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~