This is an edited version
of the original, longer version, found here.
For an even more succinct read, just read the highlighted
sections below.
Imagine this: You're very much in love with someone, and you have to go out of town. You know your lover's habits; you know he or she likes to go to bed fairly early, and that he or she gets up and goes to work in the morning. So you go away on your trip. You're gone for about a week, and then one evening you call, and there's no answer. Awful pictures rush into your mind. With great forces of will you stop them. The next morning, you call at eleven in the morning. His or her roommate answers the phone and says, "Gee, I'm sorry, She's not up yet, She's sleeping late." Oh god. Something is fishy. Something's going on. You don't know what it is, but your stomach is starting to churn. You're jealous.
What do you do when you're jealous? In a fever, you may try to find out if your lover has been with someone else. If he or she has, you go into a rage, a frenzy of blame.
It's an immediate response. You are angry. You feel violated. You want revenge. You want to stop what is happening, control the situation, manipulate whatever is necessary to protect yourself.
If you can cool down, if you can get hold of the internal automatic reactions that accompany jealousy, you might find out that you can indeed fix the situation by simple communication. ... Such solutions of diplomacy are important, but they remain superficial. A deeper opportunity is missed.
RELATIONSHIP FOR TRUTH How you see the relationship will affect matters from the beginning; for instance, what you share with each other about your realities. If both of you are there to create a safe and secure relationship, you will tend to conceal anything that might threaten it. Many couples come to live completely mendacious lives together. Gradually, they smother themselves in compromises. Love energy -- eros -- cannot pass between two lives lived in lies. Only truth is erotic.
If the relationship is seen as a means to knowledge, the paradigm shifts: The discipline is to learn to live uncompromisingly in your truth and to love the other without qualification. Everything real has to be shared; everything else has to be dismantled.
Here is a simple test to see where you are in this matter of relating. Write down all the things you have not shared with your partner. Contemplate this list, and there you will see the limits you place on the relationship, the degree of your commitment to the way of the lover.
LOVE AND ATTACHMENT Loving someone is glorifying who they are in their uniqueness. Consider a flower. You see a flower that is really beautiful to you. You want to glorify that flower in its own natural setting, or else you want to pick it and possess it. Those are two entirely different ways of being. Love creates a thankful glorification of the flower. You love the other you want to see the other thrive, enjoy, and grow. You want to see them become more of who they are, no matter what that entails. That's the truth of love. It is unconditional.
Attachment is quite different. You want to pick the flower, sever it from its roots, and make it yours. [[jonathon's note: Is this article based on a false dichotomy? Is it attachment if we can give it better soil, so we bring it home to care for it, roots included?; Is it non-attachment if we leave it in its original setting, but we come to it every day to care for it, nourish it, and protect it? Is it love if we leave it in an original setting that is not the setting it needs?]] You want to appropriate the beloved, make him or her be what you want them to be, conform to what is convenient for you in the relationship. Attachment is not care for the other; it is care for oneself. This distinction has to be understood: Are you loving, or are you attached?
If you are attached, you are going to experience the pain of jealousy. It follows that jealousy becomes the opportunity to see within yourself the truth of attachment.
PENETRATING TO THE CORE ... You always miss the opportunity of jealousy if you blame others. It is not that the other may not be to blame, but that in the matter of inner realities, blame is always irrelevant.
Manipulation of the other is external. Moving inward, we use the situation that created the jealousy as the occasion for clarifying communication and for negotiation. To do so is constructive for the relationship, but still peripheral, still not touching upon the real opportunity presented by jealousy. Moving further inward towards the core, we come to the personal level: yourself and your own reactions. This is the real field for dealing with jealousy: not trying to blame or fix your partner, but seeing who you are.
Really, jealousy is like an onion -- so overwhelming, so pungent, so difficult to be near. It cannot be ignored. It makes you cry. Yet the onion is an important food. In blaming and controlling, you are refusing to see that there is an onion. You are trying to avoid. In trying to see who you are, you take the onion in hand. You take a radical, internal view of what happened to you in jealousy. Now you peel off layer after layer of the onion until you reach its center. There at the core is the possibility of freedom.
DYSFUNCTIONAL BELIEFS The first layer of the onion is your unexamined notions about how one should be in relationship. ... You are not actually in a loving relationship if you think that you possess the other. ... Erroneous beliefs inevitably contribute to the pain of jealousy. Take stock of your beliefs, and drop the ones that aren't functional. That's the first skin of the onion.
PROJECTION The second layer is projection. ...
ENVY Another level that we have to peel off is envy. Envy is often mistaken for jealousy. I have experienced what I thought was tremendous jealousy, when in fact what I was feeling was envy because my partner was having a ball and I wasn't. Well, she's off having a good time with a boyfriend in New York, and I'm out here sitting alone. I want to have a good time with somebody. Envy is the frustrated longing for the other's experience. It is a different, more superficial phenomenon than jealousy.
GUILT Another layer is guilt. Guilt can afflict you if you feel bad because you're jealous. Since the sexual revolution, some would-be liberated people think it's wrong to feel jealous. We are told that we shouldn't feel jealous, we should rise above it. So if you have this belief and you feel jealous, you're going to experience shame and guilt. But judgment is truly irrelevant. Jealousy is jealousy. It is neither good nor bad. It simply is, and it is an opportunity.
We must learn to peel away the skins of illusion, and get to the core. Really, what I'm talking about is awareness. The discussions of projection, envy, and guilt are pointers, but you have to bring to your own internal situation of jealousy your awareness. ...
The outer layers of the onion of jealousy really aren't jealousy at all. They're reactions belonging to other complexes. If you can see them, and separate them out from what you're really feeling, you can sometimes relieve the pain without ever coming to jealousy. What was really going on was moral indignation, envy, guilt or fear, or some other kind of feelings.
Up to this point in peeling the onion, the primary emotions are sadness or anger. Both are created out of expectation. You are angry with your lover, you are sad because he or she has violated your expectations. But you are responsible, because you have created and are holding those expectations. ... A tension is created in your consciousness between whatsoever is and what you would have it be. That tension is the basis of all suffering.
Once the anger and sadness resulting from our fractured expectations are peeled away, once blame is removed from the other and anger disappears, once we see the superficial feelings around ourselves that aren't really at the core of jealousy, we come to fear.
FEAR AND ANXIETY The first fear we come to is fear of loss. Jealousy sees many things that can be lost. The fear of loss of the lover is the greatest. The rest of the fear around jealousy is in fact anxiety; that is to say, it does not have a real object.
The first anxiety comes from the loss of self-esteem. All kinds of self-doubt come up. You don't have enough money. Something's wrong with your body. You start projecting your own inadequacies on the other's actions. If your self-esteem is low, a jealous episode is going to be used as an occasion for proving that you are unlovable.
Examine the ideas that you have. You'll notice that they belong to all the old mechanisms by which you put yourself down. In other words, you were putting yourself down for these things long before the beloved came along to give you an excuse for doing so. Now you're just using him or her as a pretext.
So here's something else that you can do about jealousy: Start being aware that you are putting yourself down and that the inclination to do so is there independently of the jealousy-producing situation. Own your own tendency to put yourself down. Learn to deal with it yourself, and don't lay it on your lover.
Deeper than fear that comes from a loss of self-esteem is fear for the nest. ... that the source of biological or family security is threatened.
INFANTILE ANXIETY Deeper than fear for the nest and close to the core, are anxieties from infancy that are quickened by the present situation. Often, such jealousy is delusional there whether or not there is any occasion for it. ... Later, as soon as your lover goes for someone else, all that early trauma is triggered.
All of these levels of the onion have to do with illusion, not with realities. They're from the past, from childhood, or they're illusions about the present, beliefs that are illusory, that don't relate to here/now reality. This is a very significant aspect of these anxieties that come with jealousy. If you have jealous feelings, and you start looking at them, suddenly you begin to see that they're not real.
THE CORE ILLUSION We are coming closer to the core of the onion. Reactions that are peripheral, the more superficial skins of the onion, are resting upon the core. The core is the source -- the first illusion. The core has to be there for the other illusions to be there.
At the core is fear of a deeper kind. In its first aspect, it looks like fear of aloneness. This fear, too, comes from a childhood situation, from memories of when your parents left you alone. There you were, freaked out in your crib, crying, and nobody heard you.
This core fear has also the aspect of fear of death. Again, something is going to be taken away -- your own being! That's how vulnerable you are. There's something about jealousy, that gut feeling, that is like the fear of death. It's that immediate, it's that real.
Something that's very like fear of death, interestingly enough, is fear of love. When we love, we move so much into the other that we lose ourselves. We use the expression "falling in love" because it's like falling into a great abyss. You lose your identity, your sense of autonomy. And that is exactly what happens when you fall in love. You lose your autonomous sense of who you are.
The fears of aloneness, of death, of love, all have the aspect of fear of abysmal nothingness -- the fear that there isn't anything. Death suggests this to us. When we die, we don't know what's beyond. The only thing we know is that it's not like here. So as far as we're concerned, it's just oblivion. Nothingness is there in our consciousness all the time. Jealousy brings us immediately to this fear of oblivion.
All these fears -- of death, love, aloneness, and nothingness -- all are like the core of the onion. In fact, they all point to this core. The core itself is existential.
The way you relate to this existence is the basis of religion, and this religious matter is the core of the onion. Jealousy in its core exposes how you, as a human being, relate to your existence.
THE EGO In envy you are comparing the I -- which is your ego -- with the ego presented by someone else. Your comparison is based on illusion. The "you" object that you're comparing with some objectified person out there is really a subject -- internal, hidden, uniquely, incomparably yourself. All your subjective reality is being objectified and then compared with an object out there that you perceive to be a certain way.
The feeling of abysmal jealousy is an eruption, a deep catharsis of ego. That's why jealousy is the great opportunity to stare ego right in the face. But it is difficult. It requires ruthless awareness, because ego is usually concealing itself. With deadly subtlety it masquerades as comparison, as blame, as the fault of the other, as problems that you have. It's hard even to have any grasp of it, because its hold on you is so subtle, so magical. It's always casting a spell over you. In fact, you believe that you are ego. That's why it's so hard to see. Thus, when jealousy presents the source of suffering itself directly before you, there is great possibility.
THE ABYSS Let me give you an experience that might give you some sense of this nothingness. When you're waking up in the morning you are in a twilight. You're just coming out of sleep, before your thoughts begin to form, some ground is there. Like a tremendous empty vessel, it's there prior to your thoughts. Things bubble up in it and become realities. They congeal, take on an identity, and form the ego that you think you are.
For existence there are no things that are real. In other words, existence presents us with an undifferentiated flow of experience welling up out of a void, an abyss of the unknown. Only with our minds do we pick out things, interpret them, and say that they are real.
In his great work Being and Nothingness, Sartre said that we as human beings so dread this ground of consciousness, this nothingness, that we have to create ourselves to be something. We are nothing. We are undifferentiated out of the great emptiness. We have no content. But this is so frightening, so abysmal, that we create ourselves to be something namely, an ego. Being and nothingness is ego and existence, jealousy and the abyss. We are something fearful created out of nothing. Since somewhere we always know the something to be unreal, nothing is always present to us threateningly. My sense of my death is that it is always present because nothingness is always there. Death is an accession to nothingness, a return to the source. So here we are, and basically what we come from is emptiness or nothingness. This is our basic angst.
A friend of mine experienced a lot of pain in her relationships. She was very compulsive, and possessive. She asked her teacher, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, about her pain, and he told her this: The ego, which arises out of the nothingness that we basically are, can have a negative or a positive response to the nothingness. The something that we are knows deep down that we're standing on nothingness. All of you know, deep down, that before the whole, you aren't anything. The negative response is subliminal terror. Against this fear of nothingness, you create the illusion that you are something. You back this project by preoccupation with realities, accumulating and possessing. That something illusory that you are is the one that suffers in jealousy. The entire structure is a negative or fearful response to nothingness.
But Bhagwan told my friend that this something-ego can also relate positively to nothingness. Only then can we move out of attachment into prayerful gratitude and heartfelt celebration of the other's being. Only then are we capable of real love. Only by saying a deep yes to nothingness, existence, the whole, do we come to be at home in nothingness. Eventually the positive response enables us to drop the something in favor of nothingness.
You are just a bubble. You were nothing before; you are nothing now. An enlightened bubble is not concerned with its bubbleness. It just is. It doesn't appear anything special, yet it feels all, sees all just as it is. That's why it is said to be enlightened. This is a positive, pure response to our given existential situation.
FALSE IDOLS Most of us don't react positively. Instead, we shore up our ego realities and live in fear. But death goes on reminding us of nothingness; aloneness goes on reminding us of nothingness; and love reminds us of nothingness. All three of these are ways that we experience nothingness right here and now, and they are frightening. If you have a fear response to nothingness, you will cling in your relationships, you will have to be possessive. You will have to control others. These are all tensions and compulsions that reflect this fundamental fear -- this negative response to nothingness.
Thus ego in its fear protects itself from truth. This is the core of the onion. It is this core that you're really dealing with in jealousy.
Given what is so, you have to turn yourself around completely and fall in love with nothingness. This turning brings with it the greatest religious insight: Nothingness is there to be relaxed into and loved. This is what they call in religion, surrender. You surrender to the nothingness and when you do so, it begins to give forth what you need. You have no control. There is no you that can control.
... The ego would have us believe that we must be in control or else there is chaos. ...
When you possess you become possessed. You live in a deep vulnerability based in illusion. The stomach-churning pain of jealousy comes from that vulnerability. That's what you're experiencing. The jealous moment is essential catharsii of this existential complex.
TO THE CORE Now, a relationship with a lover or a relationship with God can reveal the ultimate. Through loving a lover or an image of God you can experience pure nothingness as bliss. But if you possess, if you have a God that you have fixed beliefs about, or if you have a lover that you jealously control, what you're actually doing is blocking your realization. ... Your lover or God is a projection that you created to keep yourself from experiencing fear. ... Out of fear you are misusing that which can give you an experience of bliss. You are so controlled that you cannot be overwhelmed. And the ultimate can only make itself known when you allow yourself to be overwhelmed.
If you are jealous, you are not experiencing love, you are experiencing attachment.
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[[it is not you who suffers and struggles; it is your illusory self. acknowledge that your ego self is illusory, and you will no longer experience pain, you will no longer be 'in sin' (out of God)]]
[[is this advocating that 'since you can't beat death, join it'; 'since you can't beat satan, join it'?]]
[[Jonathon's note: Beyond nothingness is uncertainty; not being able to know whether there is something or nothing, God or nothing. Atheism is an assertion, a something, a belief. Beyond atheism is a kind of agnosticism, Pragmatic Poetry - knowing/assuming that you cannot know whether or not God exists but you can believe and you can choose healthy interpretations, so you engage the power of creativity.
?Beyond that is faith?]]
Extracts from:
A crazy little thing called...
Compersion
By Eric FrancisCompersion begins the first time we are turned on by someone else's pleasure, or the idea of someone else's love for anyone besides us. You may think this is totally out-to-lunch. But for some people it's totally natural. There are those who are not the "jealous type," and then there are those who just love love, no matter who's it is. We all know it's possible. We may have an idea of how good it would feel to dissolve into the safety, freedom and unconditional acceptance of our lovers and all that they are, including the other people that they may love, and how great it would feel to let them experience all that we are, including the other people we may love. This way of being is called compersion.
Taking this journey is all the more appealing if we realize that all the fear and insecurity that emerged when a second love interest entered the picture were already there all along, a kind of festering toxin we were living with in a secret shadow world that always seemed to haunt the relationship. When the light is brought in, and the toxins are purged, and we are seen for who we are, we can really begin living. ...
It is true that if one's lover has sex with another person, or even gets close to another person, they may choose to be with that person and not you. And this is a possibility we have to face no matter what. Living the way of compersion brings this to the surface where we can see it and work with it. ... We must be ready to put love -- real love, which I am calling compersion -- above any given relationship.
Extracts from
The Possible RelationshipWe found that we were consistently "in love with each other." But it wasn't love as we had known it - love as a reaction to another person. It was love that came from simply removing all the resistance to each other.
Is it possible that love isn't something you get from someone else?
Love wasn't an emotion (though wonderful emotions went along with it) and it wasn't a response; it was more like a choice. Love was a space. It couldn't be given or received, only entered.
We found that when any one of us was in the space of love and when another person, through his or her own relinquishing of ego, entered that room of love, then we were "in love with each other" - not as a reaction to that person's looks or personality (these qualities are outside the door), but simply by ending up in the space of love together. All people in love are in the same space.
"I promise that whatever exists in my life outside this relationship will in no way weaken it but will strengthen and contribute to it."
[[This article has many more worthy extracts - I'll add to this when I can.]]
Thought du jour: All of the things people speak of when they speak of family values apply even more to polyamory.
Living in the constant fear of loss and betrayal is hardly safety; it is hardly the security we say we seek; it is a setup for total paranoia, but strangely, sadly, it's called love.
- written by someone for or against polyamory?