According to Osho, when we truly face the "snake" of vanity and jealousy, we discover it isn’t in the body but in the subtle mind—ultimately an imagined knot maintained by belief. Crude self-mortification can’t touch it and only feeds the ego; only delicate, inner understanding, witnessing, and skillful suggestion dissolve the illusion and free us.
Don’t hurt your body; look calmly inside and you’ll see the scary snake is just a thought, and it fades.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, how can I take sannyas? I cannot get jealousy, ego, anger—anything at all—out of my mind. And you keep appearing before me day and night in dreams! What should I do?
Why does jealousy arise? Because someone seems to be getting ahead of you. Someone has bought a better sari, more beautiful jewelry, built a new house, gathered more money in a safe. Jealousy is born because your ego is bruised. A fire flares up inside, smoke begins to rise. You climb onto your own funeral pyre. Anxiety is born inside you. Anger means someone blocks your ego. You set out on a journey of conquest and someone stands in your way, a stone falls in your path because of someone, someone shoves you aside—someone becomes an obstacle. Anger erupts. Anger and jealousy are not very different—two sides of the same coin. Anger is a bit crude; jealousy a bit more civilized. I have heard a Rajasthani tale. A proud Rajput, full of swagger, would twirl his moustache all day long. His arrogance was such that he never allowed anyone else…
You speak a lot about the ugliness of jealousy. Yes, it is quite ugly, but any suggestions to us sufferers of the disease who aren't enlightened on how to diminish it?
First, diminishing it is not going to help. You can diminish it to such proportions that it will almost become invisible, but that is not going to help. Diminishing simply means that you are throwing it into the unconscious and it goes into your basement of being more and more deeply. It becomes invisible. You may not be able to see it, but it will go on working from the back, it will go on pulling your strings from the back. It will become more subtle. Please don't try to diminish it. The first thing to remember: rather than diminish it, magnify it so you can see the whole of it. That is the whole process of all the groups going on around here -- Gestalt, Encounter, Psychodrama. The whole process is that whatsoever the problem is, please don't diminish it but magnify it. Bring it totally as it is…
Deva means divine, nirmoh means non-possessiveness -- divine non-possessiveness. And one of the greatest problems for the human mind is how to drop possessiveness, because the human mind feeds on possessiveness. It wants to possess more and more, it wants to possess everything. The more it possesses, the more it feels secure. So it hankers for money, it hankers for prestige, power. Even in relationship it starts possessing people. And to possess a person is to destroy him, because the moment you possess a person, the person is reduced to a thing. One should not even possess things, but people are even possessing persons. That's why in the world you see so many robots: they have all been reduced to machines, things. The day the child is born the parents start possessing him; they cripple, they destroy. Then the church possesses the child; immediately he is to be baptized.
A friend has asked, Osho, even after receiving divine vision, why does Arjuna still fail to accept the Divine in His totality? Why is he afraid?
To encounter God, to accept Him wholly, one must be prepared to lose oneself completely. The experience of the Divine is the experience of one’s total death. Only the one who is willing to be effaced can accept Him in full. If there is even the slightest hesitation about dissolving, rejection begins—and with it, fear. There is only one fear: that I may be annihilated. And that fear is the final obstacle. Hence those who have known, like Jesus, have said: Whoever tries to save himself will lose; whoever is ready to lose himself will find the Lord. To save oneself is the sin on the path. The effort to preserve oneself is the one and only hindrance. So Arjuna stands before the threshold; the doors to the Cosmic are open. But though he does not say it in words, he is haunted by, “What if I am wiped out?”…
What is jealousy and why does it hurt so much?
You know your interiority, and only you know it, nobody else. And you know everybody's exterior, and their exterior people have made beautiful. Exteriors are showpieces and they are very deceptive. There is an ancient Sufi story: A man was very much burdened by his suffering. He used to pray every day to God, "Why me? Everybody seems to be so happy, why am only I in such suffering?" One day, out of great desperation, he prayed to God, "You can give me anybody else's suffering and I am ready to accept it. But take mine, I cannot bear it any more." That night he had a beautiful dream -- beautiful and very revealing. He had a dream that night that God appeared in the sky and he said to everybody, "Bring all your sufferings into the temple." Everybody was tired of his suffering -- in fact everybody has prayed…