Although it may seem like my possessions can be taken away and my positions degraded, those things aren’t real and substantive anyway, so they hold no inherent value. The real value lies in the experience.
I remember Carolyn Myss saying during a lecture that we’re often willing to help people catch up to us, but we won’t help them pass us. Is this true for you?
In The Joy of Sadness, I explained how even negative emotions can be transformed into positive ones when you can move beyond the ego’s perspective and see reality from the perspective of a higher consciousness. From this perspective, jealousy would be like having your left hand accuse your right hand of stealing its ring. That would be silly. What sense does it make for your hands to fight with each other? A jealous reaction does make some sense from the perspective of an individual hand, but it makes no sense from the perspective of the larger body.
Consequently, if you’re jealous, it’s because you’re thinking of yourself as a hand, forgetting that you’re really the whole body. Everything you see and experience IS you. So in this sense, if anyone has anything, then you have it too.
I know this perspective can be difficult to grasp. I’m not suggesting it’s something you’ll pick up overnight. Just play around with it. Allow yourself to imagine the possibility that all of reality is in fact you. You’re not just a body with a brain. You’re actually the whole consciousness that’s experiencing this reality from a first-person perspective. This is your dream, and you’re the dreamer. There’s no past and no future. There’s only this present moment. From this perspective there can be no jealousy because there’s nothing outside yourself to be jealous of.
So that’s my stab at explaining how to overcome jealousy. Stop thinking of yourself as such a small, limited piece of reality, and expand your consciousness to encompass all that exists. That may sound like a wacky solution, but I can attest that it works. How can you be jealous of a dream character when you know you’re the dreamer?
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I remember Carolyn Myss saying during a lecture that we’re often willing to help people catch up to us, but we won’t help them pass us. Is this true for you?
In The Joy of Sadness, I explained how even negative emotions can be transformed into positive ones when you can move beyond the ego’s perspective and see reality from the perspective of a higher consciousness. From this perspective, jealousy would be like having your left hand accuse your right hand of stealing its ring. That would be silly. What sense does it make for your hands to fight with each other? A jealous reaction does make some sense from the perspective of an individual hand, but it makes no sense from the perspective of the larger body.
Consequently, if you’re jealous, it’s because you’re thinking of yourself as a hand, forgetting that you’re really the whole body. Everything you see and experience IS you. So in this sense, if anyone has anything, then you have it too.
I know this perspective can be difficult to grasp. I’m not suggesting it’s something you’ll pick up overnight. Just play around with it. Allow yourself to imagine the possibility that all of reality is in fact you. You’re not just a body with a brain. You’re actually the whole consciousness that’s experiencing this reality from a first-person perspective. This is your dream, and you’re the dreamer. There’s no past and no future. There’s only this present moment. From this perspective there can be no jealousy because there’s nothing outside yourself to be jealous of.
So that’s my stab at explaining how to overcome jealousy. Stop thinking of yourself as such a small, limited piece of reality, and expand your consciousness to encompass all that exists. That may sound like a wacky solution, but I can attest that it works. How can you be jealous of a dream character when you know you’re the dreamer?
Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum.
If you find this site helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too.
