UNDERSTANDING THE ROOTS
OF
JEALOUSY
What makes you jealous? Possessiveness. Jealousy itself is not the root. You love a woman, you love a man, an you want to possess the person just out of fear that perhaps tomorrow they may move with somebody else. The fear of tomorrow destroys your today, and it is a vicious circle. If everyday is destroyed because of fear of tomorrow, sooner or later the person is going to look for some partner because you are just a pain in the neck. And when the man starts looking for another woman, or the woman starts looking for another man, you think your jealousy has proved right. In fact it is your jealousy that has created the whole thing.
So the first thing to remember is, don’t be bothered about tomorrows. Today is enough! Somebody loves you. Let this be a day of joy, a day of celebration. Be so totally in love today that your totality and your love will be enough for the other person not to move away from you. Your jealousy will push the other person away; only your love can keep him or her with you. The other’s jealousy will push you away; their love can keep you.
Don’t think of tomorrow. The moment you think of tomorrow, your living today remains half-hearted. Just live today and forget tomorrow; it will take its own course. And remember one thing, that tomorrow is born out of today. If today has been such a beauty of experience, such a blessing, why be worried about it?
Someday the man that you have loved, the woman you have loved, may find somebody else. It is simply human to be happy—but your woman is happy with somebody else. It does not make any difference whether she is happy with you or happy with somebody else, she is happy. And if you love her so much, how can you destroy the happiness?
A real love will be happy even if the partner feels joyous with somebody else. In this situation—when a woman is with somebody else, and you are still happy and you are still grateful to the woman and tell her, “You have absolute freedom; just be totally happy and that is my happiness. With whom you are happy is insignificant, what is significant is your happiness.”—my feeling is that she cannot remain away from you too long, she will be back. Who can leave such a man?
Your jealousy destroys everything, your possessiveness destroys everything. You have to understand what you are gaining out of it. You are burning in the fire, and the more you become jealous and angry and hateful, the more you are pushing the other person far away from you. It is simple arithmetic that is not going to help; you are destroying the very thing that you want to preserve. It is simply idiotic.
Just try to understand a simple fact; human beings are human beings. Once in a while everybody gets bored being with the same person all the time. Be factual; don’t live in fictions. Once in a while, everybody gets fed up; that does not mean your love has stopped, it simply needs a little change is needed. It is good for your health, it is good for your partner’s health. You need a holiday from each other. Why not do it consciously? “We are feeling stuck, so what about having a week’s holiday? I love you, you love me; that is such a certainty that there is no fear.”
My own observation is that after even a day ‘s holiday you will fall in love with each other on a higher and deeper level, because now you will see how much you love each other. You cannot even see the sadness that comes naturally by living together.
Don’t possess each other. Keep the freedom intact so that you don’t interfere in each other’s private world and you respect the dignity of the other person. Once this is experienced, that once in a while you can go on separate holidays and come back again, there will be no need to be worried. You will be surprised that when your woman comes back to you after living with some other man for several days, and you come back to your woman after living with some other woman for seven days, you have learned some new things. You can have another honeymoon again. You are new and fresh, and you have learned new tricks. And it is always good to have fresh experiences, enrichment.
You only need human understanding, intelligence, jealousy will disappear.
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Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others, and more particularly about relationships. 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 the person
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 things 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 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 at it as if it is not your problem, so you can stand aside and see the whole fabric of it.
The feeling of jealousy is a by-product 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 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 provided you with a mind that can adjust to marriage. But society found it necessary that there should be some kind of legal contract between lovers, because love itself is the stuff of dreams. It is not reliable; it is here in this moment and the next moment it is gone.
You want to be secure for the coming moment, for your whole future, right now you are young, soon you will be old and you would like your wife, your husband, to be with you in your old age, in your sickness. But for that, a few compromises have to be made, and whenever there is compromise there is always trouble.
Marriage created suspicion. The husband was always suspicious about whether the child born to them was his own or not. And the problem is, the father had no way of being certain, he created more and more walls around the woman—that was the only possibility, the only alternative—to disconnect her from the larger humanity. Not to educate her, because education gives wings to people, thoughts, make people, capable of revolt, so there was no education for women, no religious education for women, because religion creates holy people, and it has been a male-dominated society for centuries and man cannot conceive a woman to be higher and holier than himself.
Man started cutting from the very roots any possibility of woman’s growth. She was just a factory to manufacture children. She was not accepted by any culture in the world as equal to man. All over the world the woman has been suppressed, the more her whole energy has turn sour. And because she has no freedom and the man has every freedom, all her repressed emotions, feelings, thoughts—the whole individuality—turns into a jealous phenomenon. She is continuously afraid that her husband might leave her, might go to some other woman, might become interested with some other woman. He might abandon her, and she is not educated, she is not financially capable of standing on her own feet. She has been brought up in such a way that she cannot go out into the world; she has been told from the very beginning that she is weak.
Indian scriptures say that in childhood the father should protect the girl; in old age the son should protect the woman. She has to be protected from the very childhood to the grave. She cannot revolt against this male chauvinist society; all she can do is go on finding faults, which are bound to be there. Mostly she is not wrong; she is mostly right.
Whenever a man falls in love with another woman, something in him toward the first woman changes. Now they are again strangers, she has been crippled, enslaved, and now she has been abandoned. Her whole life is a life of agony and out of this agony arises jealousy.
Jealousy is the anger of the weak—of one who cannot do anything but is boiling within, who would like to burn the whole world but cannot do anything except cry and scream and throw tantrums. This situation will continue. This situation will continue until marriage becomes a museum piece.
Now there is no need for marriage, perhaps it was useful in the past, perhaps it was not useful, but it was only an excuse to enslave women. Things could have been worked out in a different way, but there is no point in going into the past. Right or wrong, one is good about the past—it is no more!
As far as the present and the future is concerned, marriage is absolutely irrelevant, inconsistent with human evolution and contradictory to all the values we love: freedom, love, joy.
Because man wanted the woman to be completely imprisoned, he wrote religious scriptures making her afraid of hell, making her greedy for heaven—if she follows the rules. Those rules exist for women, not for men. Now it is so clear that to let women live any longer in this poisonous situation of jealousy is against their psychological health. And woman’s psychological health influences the psychological health of the whole of humanity. The woman has to become an independent individual.
The dissolution of marriage will be great, festive event on the earth, and nobody is preventing you. If you love your wife or your husband you can live together for your whole life, nobody is preventing you. Withdrawing marriage is simply giving you your individuality back. Now nobody possesses you. You are not to love to a man just because he is your husband and he has the right to demand it. In my vision, when a woman makes love to a man because she has to make love, it is prostitution—not retail but wholesale!
Retail is better, you have a chance to change. The wholesale prostitution of marriage is dangerous, you don’t have a chance to change. And especially if you have married for the first time you should be given a chance because you are an amateur. A few marriage at least will help you become mature; perhaps then you can find the right partner. And by right partner I don’t mean the right person who is “made for you.”
No woman is made for a certain man, and no man is made for a certain woman. By the right partner I mean that if you have understood a few relationships, you will understand which things create a loving, peaceful, happy life. Living with different people is an absolutely necessary education for a right life as far as love is concerned.
You should first graduate from a few relationships. In your college, in your university, you should pass through a few relationships. And you should not be in a hurry to decide—there is no need, the world is big, and each individual has some unique quality and beauty.
As you go through a few relationships you start becoming aware of what kind of woman, what kind of man is going to be a friend to you: not a master, not a slave. And friendship needs no marriage because friendship is far higher.
When you are feeling jealous it is because you have received that jealousy as an inheritance. You will have to change many things, not because I say to change them but because you understand that a drastic change is needed.
For example, the idea has been spread all over the world that if a husband sometimes goes to some other woman, or a wife goes to some other man, then this is going to destroy marriage. It is absolutely wrong. On the contrary, if every marriage has weekend free it will cement your relationship more strongly, because your marriage is not destroying your freedom, because your partner understand the need for variety. These are human needs.
The priests and the moralist and the puritans first decide on the ideals on you. They want to make you all idealist. For ten thousand years we have lived under a dark and dismal shadow of idealism. I am a realist. I don’t have any ideal. To me, to understand reality and to go with reality is the only right way for any intelligent man or woman.
My understanding is that if marriage is not such a tight thing, not rigid, but is flexible, just a friendship….so that the woman can tell you she has met a beautiful young man and she is going this weekend to be with him—“And if you are interested I can bring him back with me; you will also love the person.” And if the husband can say, not as a hypocrite but as an authentic human being, “Your joy, your happiness is my happiness. You enjoy, I know whenever you come back, enjoying a fresh love will make you fresh also. A fresh love will bring fresh youth to you. You go this week, and the next week I may have my own program.
This is friendship. And when they come home they can talk about what kind of man she met, how he turned out, that it was not great…He can tell her about the new woman he has met…You have shelter in the home. You can go once in a while into the sky, wild and free, and come back and always your partner is there waiting for you, not to fight but to share adventures.
It simply needs a little understanding. It has nothing to do with morality, but just a little more intelligent behavior.
You know perfectly well that however beautiful a man or a woman might be, it starts becoming heavy on your nerves sooner or later. The same geography, the same topography, the same landscape… The human mind is not made for monotony; neither is it made for monogamy. It is absolutely natural to ask for variety. And it is not against your love. In fact the more you know other women, the more you will praise your own woman; your understanding will deepen. Your experience will be enriching. The more you have known a few men. The more accurately understand you will be able to understand you husband. The idea of jealousy will disappear—you are both free, and you are not hiding anything.
With friends we share everything, particularly those moments that are beautiful—moments of love, moments of poetry, moments of music. And they should be shared. In this way your life will become more and more rich. You may become so attuned to each other that you lived your whole life together, but there is no marriage.
Jealousy will persist as long as marriage remains the basic foundation of society.
Just give the man, with your full heart, absolute freedom. And tell him he need not to hide anything, “To hide anything is insulting. That means you don’t trust me.” And the same has to happen with the man, he can say to his wife, “You are as independent as I am. We are together to be happy, we are together to grown in more blissfulness. And we will do everything for each other, but we are not going to be jailers to each other.”
Giving freedom is a joy, but you are turning the whole energy into misery, into jealousy, into fighting, into a continuous effort to keep the other under your thumb.
And it is easy: if you understand yourself, you will be able to understand your partner, too. Don’t you have people in your dreams? In fact, to see your own husband or a wife in a dream is a rare phenomenon. People never see their marriage partners in their dreams; they have seen enough of them! Now even in the night, even in the dream, there is no freedom?
No, in your dreams you have wives of your neighbors, the husbands of your neighbors. You should understand that somehow that we created a wrong society, a society that is not according to human nature. The desire for variety is an essential quality in anyone who is intelligent. The more intelligent you are the more variety you would like—there is some relationship between intelligence and variety. A cow is satisfied with one grass; for her whole life she will not touch another kind of grass. She does not have the mind to change, to know new things, to discover new territories, to venture into new spaces.
The poets, the painters, the dancers, the musicians, the actors: you will find this people more loving, but their love is not focused on individuals. They are more loving, but their love is not focused on individuals. They are more loving but to so many individuals as they come I contact with. They are intelligent people, they represent our creative part. Idiots don’t want to change anything. They are afraid of change because any change means they will to learn something again. The idiot wants to learn something once and remain with it his whole life. It may be a machine, it may be a wife, it may be a husband, it does not matter. You have known one woman, you know her nagging, you have become accustomed to it. Sometimes not only accustomed, you have become addicted, too. If suddenly your woman does not nag you, you will not be able to sleep that night—what happened? What has gone wrong?
One of my friends was continually complaining to me about his wife: “She is always sad, long faced, and I am so worried to enter the house. I try to waste my time in this club and that club but finally I have to go back home and there she is.”
I said to him, “Do one thing just as an experiment. Because she has been so serious and she has been nagging, I cannot imagine that you enter the house smiling.”
He said, “Do you think I can mange that? The moment I see her something freezes inside me—smile?
I said, “Just as an experiment, today you do one thin: take beautiful roses, and the best ice cream available in the city. and go into the house smiling, singing a song!”
He said, “I will do it, but I don’t think it is going to make any difference.”
I said, “I will come behind you, and see whether there is any difference or not.”
The poor fellow tried hard. Many times on the way to his house started laughing. I asked him, “Why are you laughing?”
He said, “I am laughing at what I am doing! I wanted you to tell me to divorce her and you have suggested I act as if I am going on a honeymoon!”
I said, “Just imagine it as a honeymoon…try your best.”
Smiled and then laugh at himself because to smile… And that woman was standing almost like a stone. He presented the flowers and the ice cream and then I entered.
The woman could not believe what was happening. When the man had gone to the bathroom she asked me, “what is the matter? He has never brought anything, he has never smiled, he has never taken me out, he has never made me feel that I am loved, that I am respected. What magic has happened?”
I said, “Nothing; both of you have just been doing wrong. Now when he comes out of the bathroom you give him a hug.”
She said, “A hug?”
I said, “Give him one! You have given him so many things, now give him a goo hug. He is your husband, you have decided to live together. Either live joyously or say good-bye joyously. There is no reason…it is such a small life. Why waste two persons’ live unnecessarily?”
At the very moment the man came from the bathroom. The woman hesitated a little but I pushed her, so she hugged the man and the man was shocked, he fell on the floor! He had never imagined that she was going to hug him.
I had to help him up. I said, “What happened?”
He said, “It is just that I have never imagined that this woman can hug and kiss—but she can! And when she smiled she looked so beautiful.”
Two persons living together in love should make it a point that their relationship is continuously growing, bringing more flowers every season, creating more joy. Even just sitting together silently is enough. But all this is possible only if we drop the old idea of marriage. More than friendship is unnatural, and if marriage is stamped by the court it is killed under the stamp. You cannot bring love under the rule of law.
Love is the ultimate law. You just have to discover its beauties, its treasures. You have not just to repeat, parrot-like, all the great values that make human beings the highest expression of consciousness on the planet. You should exercise them in your relationship.
And this has been my observation, that if one partner starts moving along the right lines, the other follows sooner or later. Because they are both hungry for love, but they don’t now 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. But it is good that we have to discover with our own hands every treasure that is hidden in our life. And love is one of the greatest treasures in existence.
But instead of becoming fellow travelers in search of love, beauty, and truth, people are wasting their time fighting in jealousy.
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 love, it cost nothing to share happiness with somebody you love.
