Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

#01) ENVY ENTRENCHES ENMITY …
Essentially, envy is a feeling of thinly veiled anger towards another person – a “minihatred”
that comes from us not only desiring what another person has, but also feeling
like that person is keeping us from having the same. This mentality has us developing
subtle, yet very powerful, subconscious feelings of enmity towards all others who are
perceived to already have what we wish we had, but do not yet possess. Often without
even realizing it, we begin to believe everyone experiencing even a moderate level of
success to be our adversaries.
Of course, such perceptions are always warped, and never accurately represent how life
truly is for those others. Even though it appears to us that the “wealthy” and the “lucky”
and the “beautiful” and the “powerful” have fantastic lives – lives that we often wished
we could have ourselves, they too have their own unique sets of challenges, traumas,
trials and difficulties. In fact, it is often because of their very “successes” that these
people experience highly intensified feelings of loneliness, fear and meaninglessness. As
such, it is they who actually end up suffering even more than those of us who do not
possess their level of “good fortune”.
And yet, because we have chosen to envy what they have, we tend to treat them as
competitors, instead of reaching out to them to Care … Because we have chosen to crave
what we lack (instead of sharing what we already have), our lives -- instead of being
bathed in the soothing shower of solidarity, become filled with the cold fear of enmity.
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