Instead of becoming fellow travellers in search of love, beauty and truth, people are wasting their time in fighting, in jealously. Just become a little alert and start the change from your side don’t expect it from the other side. It will begin from the other side too
Someone on the internet defines jealousy as: ‘An emotion experienced by one who perceives that another person is giving something that s/he wants (typically attention, love or affection) to a third party. For example, a child will likely become jealous when her parent gives sweets to a sibling but not to her. On an interpersonal level it is a threat felt from an outsider to an important relationship in which one is involved and produces feelings of anger and fear. It is a state of fear, suspicion or envy over one’s possessions.’
This is just one aspect of jealousy there are several other aspects of this emotion also that we suffer from in our daily life. A man becomes immediately jealous when another man attracts his woman and the same is the case with woman also.
This does not happen only to ordinary men or women, this happens to all, and even to those rare scientists who are able to reveal the deepest mysteries of the universe, and to those great thinkers and philosophers who reveal to us the greatest mysteries of our mind. It happens to everyone who is human.
Here I would like to quote what scientists have discovered recently (Courtesy Daily Mail): ‘Scientists discover the jealousy lobe: The green-eyed monster that lives in your brain. It is a vice that few can avoid but that nobody craves.
Now that area of the brain which controls jealously has been found, scientists have announced. It is the same part which detects real physical pain perhaps explaining why feeling envious of your lover’s philandering ways hurts so much. The spot which makes people delight in other’s misfortune called schadenfreude was also located by the team.
‘It’s interesting the part of the brain which detects physical pain is also associated with mental pain,’ said Hidehiko Takahashi, who led the research. ‘Assessing these feeling of jealousy will possibly be helpful in mental care such as counselling.’
‘Envy is corrosive and ugly, and it can ruin your life,’ Richard Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky told The New York Times. ‘If you’re an envious person, you have a hard time appreciating a lot of the good things that are out there, because you’re too busy worrying about how they reflect on the self.’
In the experiments, 19 students were asked to talk of a more successful rival while having MRI scans, which monitor brain activity. A part of their frontal lobe became more active when the students felt jealous of their rivals, the Japanese study showed. They then read a story in which the subject of their envy suffered a series of misfortunes, including food poisoning. Their scan data showed the mishaps sparked greater activity in the ‘reward reaction’ part of the brain, which normally lights up when receiving social and financial fortune. ‘We have a saying in Japanese, “The misfortunes of others are the taste of honey,”’ said Mr Takahashi. ‘The ventral striatum is processing that “honey.”’
And there appears to be a relationship between jealousy and schadenfreude. The scientists noted that the more jealous one person was of another, the more schadenfreude they felt at that person’s downfall. ‘We now have a better understanding of the mechanism at work when people take pleasure in another’s misfortune,’ said Mr Takahashi.
‘This is the way other needs-processing systems like hunger and thirst work,’ Matthew Lieberman of the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote a commentary that accompanies the report, told The New York Times. ‘The hungrier or thirstier that you feel, the more pleasurable is when you finally eat or drink.’
“It is good that we have to discover by our hands every treasure that is hidden in life…and love is one of the greatest treasures in existence. But instead of becoming fellow travellers in search of love, beauty and truth, people are wasting their time in fighting, in jealously”
There’s so much to write on this subject that one would need thousands of pages. But if we just remember one point, we won’t need thousands of pages to understand and that point is jealousy is there because love is missing:
Osho points out: Love is the ultimate law. You just have to discover its beauties, its treasures. You have not to repeat, parrot like, all the great values which make man the highest expression of consciousness on this planet. You should exercise them in your relationship.
‘And this has been my strange experience: If one partner starts moving on the right lines, the other follows sooner or later. Because they both are hungry for love, but they don’t know how to approach it.’
No university teaches that love is an art and that life is not already given to you; that you have to learn from scratch. And it is good that we have to discover by our hands every treasure that is hidden in life…and love is one of the greatest treasures in existence. But instead of becoming fellow travellers in search of love, beauty and truth, people are wasting their time in fighting, in jealously. Just become a little alert and start the change from your side don’t expect it from the other side. It will begin from the other side too. And it costs nothing to smile, it costs nothing to love, it costs nothing to share your happiness with somebody you love.
By Swami Chaitanya Keerti
