A blessed day

Most people believe that in this day and age, it is easier to find a needle in a haystack than to find a person who is without envy. Because of the fruitlessness of the search they simply give up and say that perhaps no such a person exists. In fact because enviousness is so common in everyone, some even think that to be envious is actually good to some extent. It serves, as some would put it, as spice to our endeavors. It helps to drive a person to achieve, to struggle, to succeed. 

Today is a most glorious day. Because today I have known a person who I can say is free of envy. While it is easy for most people to declare "I'm not envious," for the sake of simply showing people how holy one is, the actual state of freedom from enviousness naturally surfaces as symptoms of related behaviors like humility, tolerance and respectfulness. When these are present then most likely envy is not. I have already heard from people the glories of this person's character, and it has been my constant prayer that I'd also be able to see, even just a glimpse, what they had seen in him that was so great. Today I felt that God finally answered my prayer. I have come to a sort of an affirmation of belief. 

I am an envious person, and although I am suffering from it, I'm completely clueless of how to get the feeling out of my heart. It comes automatically. I feel it is beyond my power to rid myself of this disease of envy. But listening to him today, something in my heart tells me that "this is the person who can teach me how not to be envious ever again." I've heard him talk many times as a teacher, and I politely listened like a regular student, but I believe it is only today that I have trully appreciated, and in the depths of my being accepted a Teacher. 

The amazing thing was that what he had said was not really something new even, he had been telling me those things long before. In a different manner, he reiterated the principle of humility, of feeling oneself to be lower than the straw in the street as an absolute requirement in attaining success in spiritual life. A person who actually feels he is lower than the dirt in the ground cannot be envious. He is not envious because he cannot find in himself the feeling that he is a worthy person. He feels instead that he is the most fallen, the most undeserving of respect, and the lowest. Ordinary people may say that they also feel that same way, that they feel that people are above them. Yes, people may also feel that way, especially if in truth they are actually that way: most fallen. But instead of humility what they will feel is envy towards those above them, because they feel they deserve to be above, they feel they deserve respect, etc.  After all, isn't it a basic human right to be protected from being belittled or insulted based on his low status? But the feeling of being the lowest, felt by a truly humble person doesn't necessarily come from being the most sinful or the most wretched, but is out of the grace of God and the mercy of His devotee. Only by the grace of God and the mercy of His pure loving servant can we overcome enviousness and the arrogance borne out of pride. We cannot simply immitate or cheat other people, for the sake of collecting followers or admirers, into believing that we are humble or that we are without envy. Eventually, because we are not getting any happiness from pretending, the hiding behind the mask will exhaust us. 

If one wants to be free of the envy that poisons the heart with anger, jelousy, arrogance and other inauspicious elements, then one must simply look for a person who has already freed himself from all these things, accept him as a teacher, render some service unto him, and surrender at his feet all one's self-centered notions about life, and instead approach as someone who doesn't know. That is the proper way of learning how to be free not only of envy but of all other undesirable things in one's life that hinder us from tasting real happiness.