Love and Jealousy

Misunderstanding about love creates jealousy.  People do not know what love is, although they think they do. By “love” people mean a certain kind of monopoly, some possessiveness toward someone or something.  The moment I possess a living being I have killed that person.  Life cannot be possessed, like some thing that I hold in my fist.  If I want to have it, I have to keep my hand open. 

For centuries, it has been ingrained in us so much that we cannot separate love from jealously.  They have got mixed up and almost become one energy.  In fact, they are poles apart.  A mind that can be jealous can not be loving, and vice versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous. 

What causes the feeling of jealousy in love?

A Rich Man

A rich man spends his whole life gaining money because he does not know of the implications of his wants.  He never thought of what he would lose, including everything that could make him happy—and it just because he has always pushed all these things aside.  He has no time and the competition was tough.  In the end, he finds his heart stales and his life meaningless.  Tension has become his discipline and at the end of life, when he has all the money he ever wanted and he cannot relax.   He is a looser. He loses his relationships with his children, his wife, his friends; he destroys his health (mental, physical, emotional, physical), his sensibility, his sensitivity.  All because he has no time for things that do not produce dollars.  In the end, he wishes that he could buy all these back with the money he earned.  But he found out his money cannot buy what he wanted. 

Enjoyment is something that has to be nourished.  It is a certain discipline, a certain art—how to enjoy.  And it takes time to get in contact with the great things in life.  But the man who is running after money bypasses everything that is a door to the divine, and by the time he realizes what he has lost, he is at the end of the road and there is nothing ahead of him except death. He was miserable his whole life.  He tolerated miserable, ignored it in the hope that things were going to change, because tomorrow there is only death and nothing else.  (ha) 

The richest man, in a way, is the poorest man in the world.  To be rich and not to be poor is a great art.  To be poor and to be rich is the other side to the art.  There are poor people whom you will find immensely rich.   They don’t have anything, but they are rich.  Their richness is not in things but in their being, in their multi-dimensional experiences.  And there are rich people who have everything but are absolutely poor and hollow and empty.  Deep inside there is just a graveyard. 

OSHO

Perfectionism

My personal experience with perfection was of anxiety, tenseness, nervousness, uneasiness, and much conflict.  I was always in agony.  Whatever I do or have done for me was not good enough.  I was constantly discontent with myself and those around me.  I felt that I have to be somebody, do something, going somewhere, and constantly on the go go go!!!  I criticized those around me for not being just like me.  I lived in the state of anxiety, of constant striving to be more, to do more and the present moment is never good enough. 

A fault finder cannot find anything right even if she is in the right time and in the right place.  Everything seems to be just a mess.  Just recently I have become aware that I am quite neurotic.  I have inflicted a lot of pain and suffering upon myself and those around me in my constant striving toward perfectionism.  I have become aware of an idealist in me.  I condemned the real for the unreal and the unreal for the real.  And this ideal pulled me towards the future, out of the present. 

Since then I have learned not to create ideals for myself. Life is so complicated.   I have learned to be kinder towards myself and others.  Life has been creating enough problems.   But life problems can be solved.  If my house got flooded away, I can get another house.  If I loose my job, I can find another job.  If my man left me, I can always find another man.  But the problem idealism gives I cannot solve.  They are impossible.  I cannot be a Jesus or a Buddha.  I can only be myself.  I can only be whole.  Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I do it totally.  I let it become my meditation.  If it is whole, if it is total, it is enough.  I know it is not going to be perfect, so I don’t worry about it being perfect.

Be whole.  Be real. Be here.  Be total. Don’t bother about perfectionism.  You will be imperfect but your imperfection will be full of beauty within itself.  Perfection is not humanly possible.  Nobody has ever been perfect and nobody can ever be perfect.  But don’t try to be imperfect because even that can become an ideal!!!  If you are perfect accept that too. 

Try to love yourself.  Don’t condemn.    Remember that a person who cannot love herself because she goes on condemning herself cannot love anybody else either.  A perfectionist is not only a perfectionist herself, she is about others also.  A woman who is hard on herself is bound to be hard on others.  Her demands are impossible. 

Compassion

Compassion basically means accepting people’s flaws, not expecting them to behave like you, society rules, or gods, because that expectation is an inner violence, cruelty. 

One of the fundamentals of compassion is to dignify everybody.  Compassion is very understanding.  It understands that nobody is a hopeless case, nobody is unworthy, that whatever they have done to you, they have done it an unconscious state.    And if you don’t forgive them, who is going to forgive them?  It is the finest understanding that is possible to man. 

Remember, being compassionate does not make you higher or better than the person that you have compassion for; otherwise it becomes an ego trip.  Remember not to cripple another person’s growth or humiliate this person in your state of compassion because this is not being compassionate. Behind the actions and the words, your acts of compassion are tainted by a subtle sense of self-importance and desire for recognition. This can become very destructive to other people; in the name of compassion, you can destroy and create bondage.

One of the aspects that I have been aware of is enlightenment without compassion.  This can be extremely selfish.  There are lots of enlightened people, but very few are masters, very few have compassion.  

Morality

Morality is concerned with the good and bad qualities.  According to morality, a person is good if she is honest, truthful, authentic, and trustworthy; and bad if she is lying, stealing, untrustworthiness, dishonesty, and violence. 

Morality is needed by society otherwise life on earth would become impossible.   But observe a good person and you will see that her life is not one of joy.  She is in continuous conflict.  She continuously makes judgments.  Her mind is full of condemnation and judgment.  Because she is trying so hard to be good, she is judging others also by the same criteria.  She cannot accept you as you are, only if you fulfill her demands of being good.  And because she cannot accept people as they are, she condemns them.  They are all sinners. 

Are these the qualities of a moral, good person to you?    

Very interesting perspective!

    


       

     

 

    

 

   

Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.
It is more than 1000 light years away.

Now TRY to wrap your mind around this………

Below is a Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field Infrared view of countless
ENTIRE galaxies that are billions of light-years away!!

         

AND … below is a close up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above!

        

                                                      

                 AMAZING!!!!

                               Where does it all end??? 

                                And how do we fit in? 

 

Sin

Humans are miserable because we are not aware of what we are doing, thinking, and feeling.  We give in to our bodily impulse.  We continuously contradict ourselves each moment.  For examples: we max out the credit cards knowing that we shouldn’t; we consume excessive amount alcohol knowing that it hurts our body and make driving dangerous for us and others; we stuff ourselves with fatty foods knowing that it is bad for our bodies; we engage in inappropriate behavior knowing of the negative consequences.   Action goes in one direction, thinking goes in another, and feeling is somewhere else.  We fall apart.  We loose integrity, unity; and then we feel more miserable.  And there are many painkillers available: Alcohol, prescription drugs, legal and illegal drugs, food, sex, and other entertainment.  It takes guts to be alert, aware, and stay conscious.  The latter path is much more harder.

Why do we sin?    

Admitting the Mistakes

Why is it so hard to some of us to admit our mistakes?  I look back at my life and I too rarely say “I’m sorry,” especially to my children.  To the ego, saying “I’m sorry” is like draining the air out of a tire.   And because I didn’t admit my mistake (confess), I held onto my guilt and continued to rationalize or justify my mistake.  I covered it up.  This got exhausted and, after a while, I disliked myself. 

When Jesus invited us to confess our sin, he meant for us to admit that we have made mistakes. It was an opportunity to be humble and learn.    It was not an invitation for blame and punishment.  He tried to help us realized that being “wrong” is not bad.  We are not condemned by our error.  It was just being human.  We all make mistakes. That is just the way it is.   The hammer is not going to drop by the God of the Old Testament.  Jesus wants us to know that God is not an angry God.  He doesn’t want to punish us.  He just wants to help us learn from your mistakes and we can’t learn if we don’t admit our error. 

I pay more visits the halls of confessions these days.  When I know I am wrong, I admit it.  Apologize. Make amends.  I ask for forgiveness.  If I can’t admit it face to face, I’d write an email. If the person is not very forgiving, then I know that I have done my part in forgiving myself. I have to accept the facts that this person is not going to forgive me at this time.  I give him some space to heal.  I let go and let God.  It takes a lot of courage to tell the truth.  I am surprised to see how easy it is for people to forgive me when I am honest and take responsibility for correcting my mistakes.  I found that I make more friends than the time I was denying my guilt.  Maybe it’s not so terrible to be wrong.  May I can be wrong and still be a good person. 

Sometimes it’s wrong to be right.  I can really beat someone else up with the truth.  Self righteous behavior does that.  And sometimes it is right to be wrong, because I become humble and willing to learn. 

How to be The Watcher of what happens inside you

Here is a profoundly powerful yet simple way to learn how to be a watcher of what happens inside you, taught by Eckhart Tolle from his book The Power of Now.   He doesn’t put it like I did because he doesn’t like methods, techniques, or anything that has to do with something like: eight powerful ways of learning how to be a watcher of what happens inside you.   This potent tool allows me to enter into the portal of the Now and witness my past pain as it comes up or the “pain-body” as he called it.  It could be taught to kids in school.  I am sharing this with you.  Hopefully this will help you to deal with your “pain-body.”  Once you have understood the basic principle of being presence as the watcher of what happens inside you, you have at your disposal the most potent transformation tool.  This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence.

1.      Focus attention on the feeling inside you.

2.     Know that it is the pain-body.

3.     Accept that it is there.

4.     Don’t think about – don’t let the feeling turn into thinking

5.     Don’t judge or analyze.

6.     Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it.

7.     Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.

8.     Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of the “the one who observes, the silent watcher.

You may encounter intense inner resistance to dysidentifying from your pain.  Why?  When you identify with your emotional pain, you make it a as a large of who you are.  There is a fear of loosing your identity (the mind-made fiction of who you are.) Unconscious fear of loosing your identity will create strong resistance to any disidentification.  In other words, you would rather be in pain than take a leap into the unknown and risk loosing the familiar unhappy self.  If this applies to you, do this and the resistance will cease and make it conscious:

1.      Observe the attachment to your pain. 

2.     Be very alert.

3.     Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy.

4.     Observe the compulsion to talk about or think about it.

A few months ago, while staying at our house, my step son called his mother to pick him up because he felt that he was not being appreciated at our house.   His mother couldn’t come because she had taken some sedative medications and was unable to drive.  He had also occasionally mentioned phrase like “nobody loves me.”  The next morning before school, I decided to give him a short talk about acknowledging the good that is already in life (abundance) instead of lack (scarcity).  I basically told him this: