Osho,
I have been with my boyfriend for two years and we still enjoy being together, but if he goes with other women I freak out. Would you please tell me the very roots of jealousy, how I can deal with it, or even go through it?
“Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship.
People think they know what love is – they do not know. And their misunderstanding about love creates jealousy. By ‘love’ people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness – without understanding a simple fact of life: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.
Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If you want to have it, you have to keep your hands open.
But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; it has become ingrained in us so much that we cannot separate love from jealousy. They have become almost one energy.
For example, you feel jealous if your lover goes to another woman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if you don’t feel jealous you will be in much more trouble – then you will think you don’t love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous. Jealousy and love have become so mixed up.
In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannot be loving, and vice-versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous.
What is the disturbance? You have to look it as if it is not your question – somebody else has asked, it is somebody else’s problem – so that you can stand aside and see the whole fabric.
The feeling of jealousy is a byproduct of marriage.
In the world of animals, birds, there is no jealousy. Once in a while there is a fight over a love object but a fight is far better than to be jealous, far more natural than to be caught up in jealousy and burn your heart with your own hands.
Marriage is an invented institution, it is not natural; hence nature has not provided a mind that can adjust to marriage. But man found it necessary that there should be some kind of legal contract between lovers, because love itself is dream-stuff, it is not reliable… it is there this moment and the next moment it is gone.
This is the compromise that human beings have made: to be secure about the future, to be certain about the tomorrows, to have a guarantee that the woman who loves you is going to love you forever, that it is not a temporary affair….
That’s why religious people say that marriages are ‘made in heaven’ … a strange kind of heaven, because if these marriages are made in heaven, then what can you make in hell? They don’t show the signs, the fragrance, the freshness, the beauty of heaven. They are certainly disgusting, ugly… they show something of hell certainly. But man settled for marriage because that was the only way to have private property.
If there is no marriage, jealousy will disappear automatically – which is almost a cancer of the soul. Every man is jealous, every woman is jealous, and jealousy is pure poison; it destroys your love. You become each other’s jailers. What we have done up to now has not been a blessing to humanity. Things have to be changed from the very roots.”
OSHO Talk, Jealousy – A Byproduct of Marriage
|
|
