The beautiful spirituality of Jealousy

When jealousy is a blessing….
—❄️—

7 times 5, 35 years old, and you can see I have a pretty good life — relatively delicious and very enviable.
The most enviable thing is that I am very “rich” in freedom. I am free in material, in spirit, and even free from finding the meaning of life.

Yes, people often advise each other not to be jealous. I want to be the first to tell you: be jealous, it is not bad. And if you are looking for someone to be jealous of, please be jealous of me.

And when you are jealous of me, please be jealous a lot, please be very enthusiastic, please be very passionate. That is very good.

Yes! Today I want to tell you something that you may have never heard before: jealousy is very good. Learn to use it.

Jealousy is good because it carries transformative energy — magical alchemy energy that should not be wasted.

—🎶—

We are always told that jealousy is bad, that we should not be jealous…
But what is jealousy? Why is it bad? Why should we not be jealous?

If you look deeply into jealousy — look deeply with awareness — you will see that jealousy is beautiful and extremely necessary for our growth in this life.

And here is the secret I want to tell you: deep down inside jealousy, there is a very innocent desire — the desire to know.

Specifically:
You see someone rich — you are jealous — because deep down inside you long to know what it feels like to be rich.
You see someone successful — you are jealous — because deep down inside you long to know what it feels like to be successful.
You see someone in love — you are jealous — because deep down you long to know what it feels like to be in love.

This longing to know is good, very good.
It makes us act, it makes us find ways to make that longing come true.
It makes us start taking responsibility for transforming our lives.
It makes us start participating in the process of “creating” life.

—🎶—

Jealousy is bad when you only want but do nothing.
And because you do not do anything, you never know.

This not-knowing status is the very “Ngu Hanh Son” – huge-mountain that weighs down the soul, burdens the soul, making people live in a prison of sadness, misery, unsatisfy, uncompleted, static — and energy gets stinky in its own way.

Jealousy is bad when it only creates bad-energy in you.

Jealousy is good when you look deeply into it, realize that there is something you want to experience — want to know — then you try everything to experience it.

And when you have experienced it, you know what it is, and you will be freed from the desire to know: you are free.

—🎶—

You envy the rich because you have never known what it is to be rich.
Once you have experienced wealth — known what it is, tasted all the joys it brings, and tasted all the troubles and fatigue it brings — you will no longer envy the rich, because now you know.

“And the knowing will set you free!”

You envy the famous because you have never tasted fame.
But if you had once been famous — if you had once tasted all the flavors of fame — you would find it bitter, not at all sweet as you thought. You would no longer envy the famous.

You would even feel sorry for them because they seem to have no privacy and no freedom.
Life without privacy and freedom is just a miserable prison. What is the meaning of living like that?
But you will not know this — because you have never tasted fame.

Ignorance is the prison that holds us.

—🎶—

“And knowing shall set you free!”

Most of us, ordinary people, can only learn through our own experiences.
However, there are many things in this life that you do not need to experience but can still learn from.

For example:
You do not need to be burned by fire a few times in your life to know that you should not jump into fire.
You do not need to drink poison a few times to know that it is not something to drink.
You also do not need to eat sand to know that sand is not eat-able.

These are gifts of instinct — and instinct is the knowledge we inherit from the long learning process of countless generations of human ancestors.

And of course, there are many things in life that, if you don’t experience them yourself, you will never know.

For example:
The divine sweetness of love — if you never love, you will never know.
The ecstatic feeling of creating — if you don’t do anything creative, you will never know.

There are countless experiences, countless emotions and flavors of this life waiting for you to discover — and how precious:
Jealousy is a magic mirror that helps you look into and know:
what experiences are lacking in your life.

——🎶
Jealousy is the voice of the mind, telling you what your soul wants to experience.
——🎶

So, stop telling each other: “Don’t be jealous” — this sentence is meaningless.
It’s like meeting someone who is thirsty and telling them to stop being thirsty.
How can thirst stop just because you tell it to stop?

Don’t say “jealousy is bad.” Jealousy itself is an emotion. Emotions are neither good nor bad — they are just signs for you to recognize yourself.

And if you find yourself full of jealousy, that’s a good thing.
It means you have a lot of energy — start doing something with this jealous energy.
Use it as a mirror, use it as a tool to learn more lessons from this life.

——🎶

“Nắm và Buông” in Vietnamese:

“Nắm” = Taking, holding, grasping or hold-on tightly with effort, metaphorically

= and it also means making-the-fist, closed-the-hand effortly, or a fist literally

“Buông” = Releasing the hand, the fingers, hand-opened, free-the-fist – literally, and given-up, let go – metaphorically

So:

“Nắm và Buông”, “Fisty-hand and Releasing-hand” = “Hold on and Let go” — They are the two most important lessons in life.

When you are young, you learn how to hold: how to hold effectively, to get more, to hold better.

Then, when you feel you have enough, you will have to learn how to let go.
No one can hold anything forever.

But before you can let go, you must have something in your hand.
If your hand is empty, what can you let go of?

So, jealousy is not bad — it is a good start.
It helps you see: “Ah, someone else is holding that — something I don’t have. And I also want to know what it feels like to hold that.”

Then, you will find every way to get that, to hold what you want. That is the beginning.

But for those who see others holding and feel jealous, yet do nothing to actually hold it, their holding simply becomes a fist that punches themselves: punching themselves, hurting themselves, and never growing up.

Blind jealousy dulls one’s energy. It destroys one from within, because they are hurt twice: once where the punch lands, and once where the hand hurts too.
Stupid! Immatured!

——🎶

So, the problem is not to stop being jealous.
Jealousy is like thirst — you cannot stop it suddenly. You have to do something to quench that thirst, if you really want to end it.

So the rule of the game is: look deeply, identify clearly the nature of jealousy that is arising, know what you are jealous of, know where it comes from, from what darkness (the space created by the not-knowing) and then, you will know what your soul is really craving, what it truly wants to experience.

Once you know — find every way to experience it. This is the only way to heal the thirst of the soul.

——🎶

“Knowing” is the pure water/the antidote to the thirst of the soul.
Meditation/Zen is both the means and the goal of that knowing.
Meditation/Zen is the antidote to the thirst of the soul.

——🎶

Phi Tuyet
(collection “Philosopher, Poet and Mystic”)