Questioner: My fellow students feel jealous of my progress, though I don’t have such feelings for them. What to do?
Pujyashri: It is always so. Competition happens between people found on common ground. We don’t care about cars that are already ahead of us, but about those that are sharing road with us drawing our attention and causing problems. A diamond merchant will feel jealous of a fellow diamond merchant and not a steel trader.
Who feels jealous? It’s the ego that feels jealous and those people who are narrow minded! People with broad mind never feel jealous. On the contrary they wish others to prosper and applaud their hard work. Natural law is that the jealousy felt by us will block our own strength. But if we wish well of others, the very feeling will remove obstacles impeding our own development. Dada Bhagwan has taught me that, we should appreciate good qualities in others if we want to improve our own performance. Your appreciation of fellow student securing good marks in various subjects like History, Maths, and Science will result in unveiling your own strength to perform better in those subjects. But if you reason that he is a rich man and can afford tuition or wish him ill health and under-perform, your capacity to develop will shrink. Negative feelings will drag you further down deep and damage your skills. We should always remain positive towards him. If he keeps negative feelings for us, in that case, we should pray to his ‘inner soul’ to impart right understanding to him and not feel jealous. This is how we should protect ourselves from negativity taking hold on us. It will further help him to overcome jealousy.
Questioner: We do maintain good relations with them and they do reciprocate. It goes well for few days and then it’s all the same again.
Pujyashri: That means there is some hitch from our side. ‘Ego’ has taken note of his jealousy in our mind and maintains a revengeful attitude. This will enhance his jealousy towards us. Therefore, we must maintain positivity and pray to his inner self to give him strength to overcome this weakness. We must firmly maintain that we do not want any ill feelings about him and maintain equanimity. Our positive vibes will gradually help him to come out of negativity towards us. If we maintain grudge against his adamancy, the matter will only worsen. Therefore, we should let go from our end and remain positive.
Questioner: We may let go once or twice. It is painful when it becomes a regular habit. In such case, we feel negative even if we don’t want to!
Pujyashri: That’s how it becomes effective. Jealousy will deepen further. We must do ‘pratikraman’ (repentance) for any negative feeling from our side, “God, I whole heartedly repent for the negative feelings that crops up in me. Give me strength to remain positive towards him.” Make it a regular practice to repent for each negative thought that may arise in us in a ratio of 1:10 i.e. ten times ‘pratikraman’ for one negative thought. This will gradually slow down reactions and jealousy of the other person towards us and would finally stop.
Try this way. It has worked for me. I used to do ‘pratikraman’ for 50 and even 100 times for each incident, “Oh God. I don’t want to be a medium for jealousy to arise in other person, causing him distress and pain.” Such a massive repentance gradually melted the other person’s negative feelings towards me. This is the remedy!