Jealousy is the byproduct of not being capable of deepening a relationship sufficiently enough to bind it together with deep roots. We want intimacy, but we don’t want to work the process that causes our connections to deepen and solidify. Sure we’ll put effort into obtaining superficial variety, but we will not exert effort into deepening what we already have, especially within ourselves.
What exactly is deepening? For example, critical thinking and philosophizing is the process of asking questions, finding their answers, and then asking new questions that their answers raised, and this results in the continual deepening of our mind’s ability to think. Just as critical thinking deepens our mind, we are able deepen other areas of our lives as well, such as our emotional intelligence, body awareness, and our external relationships, utilizing our curiosity, questions, and living a life of process — this strengthens our capacity for depth in each area of our lives.
For instance, I can exercise to make my body look attractive, so that I can feel good enough about myself to secure a woman, or I can exercise to deepen my awareness of my body, and get to know it better. In both cases I am exercising, and in both cases I am probably going to look good, but the first builds a superficial relationship with my body, and uses it as a tool to get women, while in the second case, I am building a relationship with my body, and allowing that relationship to deepen in a process together. As for the relationship between me and my body, the deepening process will build awareness and intimacy, and has the potential to achieve some amazing results; the command that Bruce Lee had over his body is one such example of this kind of body-awareness.
We often see a potential romantic partner as an answer to our question of lacking love and intimacy, but we are actually hoping that they are an answer to our inability to experience satisfaction and abundance. The initial problem though is with our inability to deepen our relationship to our own self, because we are answer driven rather than question driven in our thinking. Answer driven thinking causes superficial experiences and relationships, and the need for variety / novelty, while question driven thinking causes a continual deepening of our experiences and relationships, and needs much less variety.
Superficial thinking means that we will require a variety of things to consume, taste, try, and experience to maintain the illusion of satisfaction and abundance, but process driven thinking means that we can pick even just one thing (or person), and dive deeper and deeper into a relationship with it/them, and experience things we never dreamed possible. Becoming bored and unsatisfied after the initial honeymoon phase of a relationship is due to our inability to deepen into our relationship, because if it was indeed in constant motion, the relationship would never become stagnant, and there would never be a need to look at another person to find novelty. Novelty / variety is a workaround to our inability to go deeper into our relationships — and while it provides temporary results, more and more variety is needed to maintain the illusion of satisfaction and abundance. When variety is needed, jealousy for not being satisfying and “perfect” enough is not far behind.
For more on the Duality to Unity Feelings Wheel, click on the photo.
Since jealousy (and it’s opposite: lust) comes from the need for novelty, and the need for novelty is the effect of being unable to deepen, it is important to see jealousy and lust as messengers communicating an area of our lives where we are superficial, stagnant, and unable to deepen, rather than something that somebody has caused us to feel. Jealousy is not our enemy, it is an effect that has a reason, and that reason is inside of us! Maybe we have a trauma blocking us, and we are too afraid to face it, or maybe we had superficial relationships modeled to us as children, but in any case, we can reverse this patterning, and start the process of deepening that aspect of our lives. Intimacy is the connection that results from processing our experiences, asking questions, and refining our understanding; and this deepens our ability to connect. This is truly satisfying, and allows for abundance in all of our endeavors.
How are you stagnant? In what ways are you able to go deeper? In what areas of your life is jealousy arising, and communicating to you that you are superficial?
