I was reading Think on These Things, by the independent spiritual thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti, when I came across a passage that struck me:
Questioner: What is jealousy?
Krishnamurti: Jealousy implies dissatisfaction with what you are and envy of others, does it not? To be discontented with what you are is the very beginning of envy. You want to be like somebody else who has more knowledge, or is more beautiful, or who has a bigger house, more power, a better position than you have. You want to be more virtuous, you want to know how to reach God, you want to be something different from what you are; therefore you are envious, jealous. To understand what you are is immensely difficult, because it requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else. The desire to change yourself breeds envy, jealousy; whereas, in the understanding of what you are, there is a transformation of what you are. But, you see, your whole education urges you to try to be different from what you are. When you are jealous you are told, “Now, don’t be jealous, it is a terrible thing.” So you strive not to be jealous; but that very striving is part of jealousy, because you want to be different. (Think on These Things, Harper & Row 1964, ISBN: 0-06-080192-1. Emphasis added.)
I had always thought of jealousy as rising from the desire to be like someone else, but Krishnamurti stabs deeper into the problem — it is not just the desire to be like someone else, but the desire to be like something else at all, the desire to change yourself, that inspires jealousy.
For example, I am intensely jealous of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of the social networking site Facebook. This jealousy informs every single action in my life, and manifests itself in my wanting to mimic the magnitude of his achievements, something that I know I can do — a desire to change myself from what I am doing right now to something that will allow me to better mimic the work of someone before me.
This requires that I do not accept myself as what I am, that I continue to run away from myself in shaping myself as another. What if I just let go of wanting to change myself? Would that kill my ambition, reduce me to a complacent slob? Or would it, as Krishnamurti suggests, induce “a transformation of what you are”? There is only one way to find out, and that is for me to drop the desire to change myself, to accept who I am, to transform my ambition that is focused on the external object of Mark Zuckerberg to an internal competition — not a jealousy of another, but a jealousy of myself. I accept myself, and then change myself.
Post a comment about something that makes you jealous, and consider if that jealousy would still exist if you let go of the desire to change yourself. Consider if jealousy is harmful to you, or if it actually inspires you to work harder. And if you can’t consider these things because you’re beyond jealousy, then please post a comment explaining how you got there!
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