End Suffering on Jealousy

by Bill Brown

     You have childhood experiences that are more vivid and memorable than what happened to you five minutes ago. Each of those experiences was a revelation in some way about our situation here on earth — we suffer. It was one piece of the scattered spiritual treasure map that Vernon Howard said we had to personally collect and put together to rise above the suffering so we can freely enjoy the life we’ve been given.
     When I was about five years old, I met what Shakespeare calls “the green-eyed monster” — jealousy.  A girl cousin was staying with the family for a few days. At one moment my mother just gave her some normal attention, and out of nowhere I felt intense fear, confusion, anger, and suppressed violence. My whole little world seemed threatened. When my delusory self is rejected in favor of another, even in a very small way, the pain is intense. You have no doubt felt this too.
     Many years afterwards I read this in Vernon Howard’s 1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle, #114: “Awareness of how easily life can hit and hurt us is the first course in the cosmic college.”
     The spiritual journey is to meet one dragon after another inside, try to conquer them yourself and fail, and then gradually allow Truth to vanquish them for you.
     Comedy often conveys the truth about us. In plays, movies, and real life you have heard this exchange in some form: “I think you might be a little jealous.” “I AM NOT JEALOUS!” We laugh at how absurd the denial is. But this humorous scene contains the hint that before we face the jealousy monster, we might have to come face-to- face with a different monster, that of vociferous denial. Recently in a Vernon Howard class in Strawberry, Arizona we received help from his book Secrets for Higher Success for doing just that:
     “Consider the words ‘seriously’ and ‘lightly.’ In higher thinking, these are not opposites, but the natural and productive way of meeting everything. It means to meet every event of life with a deep thoughtfulness which does not include negativity…. To think seriously-lightly means to meet everything with a new mind, a mind without hardened judgments formed by past experiences. Experiment with this. Today, take everything seriously-lightly.”
     What keeps our suffering in place, whether from jealousy, anger, fear, depression, or any other negative state? We can approach this question seriously-lightly, which will help us to take on the DENIAL DEMON. This malicious force takes people over and makes them deny that they suffer or that they’re jealous or that they have any responsibility for unconsciously inviting heartache — and this force will attack anyone pointing this out. Have you not seen this in other people or in yourself?
     The DENIAL DEMON says to anyone who tells me the truth about myself — regardless of their motive — “Who are you to tell me that?” The DENIAL DEMON will go all out to try and negate any truth said about me, for instance: “She said I was petty, but she is disorganized, therefore her criticism can be ignored.”
     If I try to conquer the DENIAL DEMON by thinking about what to do, I will fail. The seriously-lightly conquest begins when I simply become deeply thoughtful, relaxed and alert in the presence of any negativity or defensiveness.
     Vernon Howard told us that we need all the help we can get and that when you are dealing with human nature it is always worse than you think. When it comes to jealousy there is a motion picture that dramatically captures this and is worthy of study. Leave Her to Heaven was one the biggest films of the 1940s. Visually, it is a bright, sun-lit movie done in Technicolor. But it enters deep into the darkness of someone possessed by possessiveness, dominated by suspicion, whose jealousy knows no limits. This may seem too extreme and remote from us, but then I remember my jealousy at five years old produced suppressed violence.
     You will neither forget the ending of this movie nor will you dismiss it, especially with the guidance we get from Vernon that says when you understand human nature, you are never surprised by anything it does.
     Leave her to heaven was an instruction taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet on how to deal with a specific person’s evil. Evil is separation from God. Suffering is separation from God. Almost everything in us and out in the world relentlessly conspire to keep us separated from the permanent source of power. We are learning from these teachings that in order to end this separation, we must leave everything to Heaven.