Sunday 22 May 2005

Pic of the day: "I must do whatever it takes to get them out of the way" is the essence of envy. It is heavier than sand or stone, it crucified Jesus, and it could come any day to try your heart.

Envy

Today I have something important to say. So important, I need to keep it short lest someone forgets it while reading. If you are a Christian, this is a matter of life or death. But I think anyone can benefit from it. If you already knew this, I am sure you will rejoice in seeing it.

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Envy is perhaps the worst thing to your spiritual life after hypocricy. It is a concentrated evil, and if you are envious you can no more avoid hate and bitterness than a fish can avoid breathing water. But the secret is, you shall not fight it head on. Never.

Envy is like a road sign: "WRONG WAY - TURN BACK!". If you see it, you must immediately return to start. If you forge ahead, disaster cannot be avoided. Disaster has indeed already struck, and you are lost. You must go all the way back and press the reset button of your spiritual life. This may sound harsh, but you are already in Hell, so no price is really too high. And yet, some cannot humiliate themselves such, and they rot on their feet, a life of spiritual pain and a poison to all around them.

The secret to envy is that it is a symptom. It shows without doubt that you see your spiritual life as a competition. But the spiritual life is never a competition. Not in any religion or any form of spirituality that is true to the heart, and decidedly never under any circumstances in Christianity. Jesus himself pointed this out repeatedly.

***

Primates compete. The one with the higher rank gets to pick the first food and mate with the most attractive members of the opposite sex. It makes sense for a primate to compete, fiercely, for status and position.

Our body may be evolved from apes - you believe this or not as you see fit, but it certainly seems like it from the way my own flesh behaves - but the spiritual life should not be that of an ape. It belongs in a different dimension. There is no need to compete for the attention of God, because the Heavenly Father has enough attention for all His children. Most importantly, God does not make his decisions by majority vote. Even if everyone in the world misunderstands you, He will still understand you. And even if everyone in the world thinks highly of you, God knows the truth.

God, Yahweh / Jehovah, Allah, the Holy Spirit, or even the Oversoul ... there is no doubt that this entity knows your heart directly and has no need for recommendations from your fellow believers. What they think of you is of no account, and what you think of them is of no account. They stand or fall before their own Master, and so do you.

If you believe that it matters whether another gets more honor and glory, then you have lost the link to the Most High, the Supreme Spirit, the Source and the Wellspring. Without this, you are nothing. You have died. Game over. Start again?