Osho,
I want to tell you that I am totally turned on to you, and it’s just far out being with you. I have just one question, maybe it’s nothing spiritual but for me it’s quite something – my jealousy. I have been with my boyfriend for two years and we still enjoy being together, but if he goes with other women I freak out. This emotion is so strong that I’m afraid I will destroy this beautiful thing which is between us.
Would you please tell me the very roots of jealousy, how I can deal with it, or even go through it? And I also want to say thank you for everything but the words don’t express what I feel for you. My heart is beating with love for you.

Jealousy is one of the most prevalent areas of psychological ignorance about yourself, about others and more particularly, about relationship.

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

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

But the thing has been going on a wrong path for centuries; it has 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 another woman. You are disturbed by it now, but I would like to tell you that if you don’t feel jealous you will be in much more trouble – then you will think you don’t love him, because if you loved him you should have felt jealous. Jealousy and love have become so mixed up.

In fact, they are poles apart. A mind that can be jealous cannot be 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 your question – somebody else has asked, it is somebody else’s problem – so that you can 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 a while there is a fight over a love object but a fight is far better than to be jealous, far more natural than to be caught up in jealousy and burn your heart with your own hands.

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

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

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