Osho International Foundation - Jealousy: the psychological ignorance about yourself

ISBN: 978-0-88050-081-4

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Jealousy: thepsychological ignorance about yourself, by Osho

From a series of OSHO Talkstitled: Sermons in Stones, Chapter #13

This OSHO Talk iscomplete in itself.

The series Sermons in Stones is available in book and audio format.

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OSHO MEDIAINTERNATIONAL

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OSHOINTERNATIONAL

www.osho.com/oshointernational

ISBN: 978-0-88050-081-4

Jealousy The Byproduct of Marriage

I have just one question, maybe its nothing spiritual butfor me its quite something my jealousy.

Would you please tell me the very roots of jealousy, how Ican deal with it, or even go through it?

Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychologicalignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, aboutrelationship.

People think they know what love is they do not know. And theirmisunderstanding about love creates jealousy. By love people mean a certainkind of monopoly, some possessiveness without understanding a simple fact oflife: that the moment you possess a living being you have killed him.

Life cannot be possessed. You cannot have it in your fist. If youwant to have it, you have to keep your hands open.

But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; ithas 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 anotherwoman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if youdont feel jealous you will be in much more trouble then you will think youdont love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous. Jealousyand love have become so mixed up.

In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannotbe loving, and vice-versa: a mind that is loving cannot be jealous.

What is the disturbance? You have to look it as if it is not yourquestion somebody else has asked, it is somebody elses problem so that youcan stand aside and see the whole fabric.

The feeling of jealousy is a byproduct of marriage.

In the world of animals, birds, there is no jealousy. Once in awhile there is a fight over a love object but a fight is far better than to bejealous, far more natural than to be caught up in jealousy and burn your heartwith your own hands.

Marriage is an invented institution, it is not natural; hencenature has not provided a mind that can adjust to marriage. But man found itnecessary that there should be some kind of legal contract between lovers,because love itself is dream-stuff, it is not reliableit is there this momentand the next moment it is gone.

You want to be secure for the coming moment, for your wholefuture. Right now you are young; soon you will be old and you would like yourwife, your husband, to be with you in your old age, in your sickness. But forthat, a few compromises have to be made, and whenever there is compromise thereis always trouble.

This is the compromise that human beings have made: to be secureabout the future, to be certain about the tomorrows, to have a guarantee thatthe woman who loves you is going to love you forever, that it is not atemporary affair.

Thats why religious people say that marriages are made inheavena strange kind of heaven, because if these marriages are made inheaven, then what can you make in hell? They dont show the signs, thefragrance, the freshness, the beauty of heaven. They are certainly disgusting,uglythey show something of hell certainly. But man settled for marriagebecause that was the only way to have private property.

Animals dont have private property they are all communists,and far better communists than have appeared in human history. They dont haveany dictatorship of the proletariat and they have not lost their freedom, butthey dont have any private property.

Man also lived for thousands of years without marriage, but thosewere the days when there was no private property. Those were the days ofhunting; man was a hunter. And those people thousands of years ago had nocold-storage system, no technology whatever food they got they had to finishas quickly as possible. They could only hope that tomorrow they will get somefood again.

Because there was nothing to accumulate, there was no question ofmarriage. People lived in communes, tribes; people loved, people reproduced,but in the beginning there was no word for father. The word mother is far moreancient and far more natural. You will be surprised to know that the word uncleis older than the word father because all the people who were the age of yourfatheryou didnt know who your father was. Men and women were mixing joyously without any compulsion, without any legal bondage, out of their free will. Ifthey wanted to meet and be together there was no question of domination. Thechildren never knew who their father was, they knew only their mother. And theyknew many men in the tribe; someone amongst those men must have been theirfather, hence they were all uncles.

As private property came into existence with cultivation. Withhunting, man could not survive long. People have destroyed complete species ofanimals. Hundreds of species which once used to dance and sing on thisearthman has eaten them up. Something had to be done because hunting was notreliable. Today you may get food, tomorrow you may have to be hungry. And itwas very arduous. The search for animals did not allow man to develop any ofhis other talents, his genius. But cultivation changed the whole life of man.

You must be reminded of the fact that cultivation is thediscovery of women, not of men. The woman was confined she was not able to gohunting. Most of the time she was pregnant, she was weak, she was carryinganother soul within her. She needed care, protectionso she was living in thehouse. She started making the living space more beautiful and this you cansee even today, after thousands of years.

If you enter into a bachelors room you can immediately say thatit is a bachelors room. You may not be able to decide by seeing the bachelorwhether he is bachelor or not, but his room certainly is a bachelor! The woman,her touch, is missing. The house of a bachelor is never a home, it is just aplace where he sleeps. It is not something with which he feels a certainintimacy, a certain creative relationship.

The home, the village, the city and the whole civilization arebecause of the woman, because she was free from hunting and she had differentvalues of the heart and of the mind she was more aesthetic, more graceful,more earthly, not at all interested in hell and heaven and God and the deviland all that crap! No woman has written a single religious scripture. No womanhas been a philosopher thinking about abstract, faraway things.

Womans consciousness is interested only in the intimatesurroundings she would like a beautiful house, she would like a beautifulgarden. She wants to create a small world of her own cozy, comfortable. Sheimparts a certain quality to a dead house and it becomes a living home. It is amagical transformation.

Man continued to hunt, and the woman started looking aroundtheman had no time. He has always been busy without business, but the woman hadall the time there is. The basic work of hunting was being done by the groupsof men and the woman started looking around. She discovered cultivation becauseshe saw wild fruits growing, she saw many other things growing and she also sawthat every year the crop dies, the seeds fall back into the earth and when therains come, again those seeds sprout in thousands of plants. She startedexperimenting to find what was edible and what was not edible. Soon, as huntingwas becoming more and more difficult, men had to agree with women: We have toshift our whole economic focus. We have to go for cultivation, for fruits, forvegetables. And these are in our hands we can produce as much as we want, aswe need it, and there is tremendous variety.