Envy in the masculine world is the desire for others' traits, status, abilities, or situations. From this place arises a whole set of masculine realities, from comparison to hierarchy. The masculine presumption is twofold: happiness is located in circumstances, and if they have it, we cannot.
Eros doesn't buy this.
First and foremost, Eros, with its X-ray vision, is well aware that rarely do people's interior worlds match their external circumstances. In addition, in Eros, whatever we love, we already own. We can own this entire world with our love, regardless of whose name is on the deed of any particular place.
We may not be able to sleep in a particular bed, but we can own the world, so we can definitely sleep in one we enjoy. The masculine cannot see this, as it looks at the world through a separate lens.
We can love, tend to, and care for everything. We can grow wealthy in our relationship to anything. When we shift the reward from outcome to process, a whole world opens.
It can be a challenging metric, as every masculine individual wants his castle to fortify his fragile identity. Eros says we get our identity from what we add to this life, from what we bring. Then, our identity is admirable to all. This way, we receive all that we are looking for in ownership, but in a way that can never be taken from us and without all the challenges.
Money is not freedom. Money is a game to play with. Enjoyment does not come from getting money, it comes from playing well. We become free in the play. The same is true for the whole of life.
Who owns the company? The people who get to have the thrill of working and creating, of taking ownership of their work and what they create? Or, the person with their name on the document? When we live in process, when we determine we own whatever we engage with, we are liberated from the chains of comparison. We own the world of experience. We own our process of engagement, and we own everything we touch with love. We may not actually possess it, but, in the world of Eros, possession is overrated.
The masculine mind will often say, "But I want mine." This is the bane of the masculine existence because it does not just want "mine," it wants a room with a collection of "mines" that no longer bring gratification. It wants "mine" to the exclusion of it being "yours."
It thinks it can only love what it possesses and has rights to. But that is not love, that is control. The masculine mind—feeling insufficient from lacking Eros—will look at what others have and determine joy must inherently exist in it. Or perhaps it will look at what it perceives others would want—the trophy items—and say, "I will be sufficient if I have that."
What is lacking in this equation is the deepest Erotic truth: the only thing that will ever gratify is us becoming fully ourselves. The attention we put on what others have or do not have is precisely the attention we need to use to look inside ourselves to activate our deepest self.
We need to listen to what is truly required and support ourselves in the realization of our deepest selves. There is an us that only we can be. We spend our lives first discovering who we are, then cutting away what is not that, and then allowing what is that to come in, even when it is not a trophy.
When we do this, we discover the true miracle. People who change and move the world are the ones who are lit from within—not the movers and shakers and collectors of titles and people and goods they wear like a big external ego.
What is so unimaginably compelling about those lit from within, what makes us want what they have, is that they are who they are and they want what they have. Every single person on the planet can do this.
The only envy worth having is over someone who has done the work to become who they are. This is a good envy because it is an inspiration for us to do the same. It is another kind of fuel that powers our capacity for realization.
Once we get some footing in this place—when we are filled with enough of ourselves to want what we have—another Erotic dimension opens. We are strong enough to have genuine connection with others. When this happens, we have discovered the trick of the masters to live in a constant state of wealth; we are able to scale ourselves into many bodies. When we are able to genuinely connect with another, our nervous sys- tem has the exact same response as they have—we get to have all of their experiences.
This is challenging to understand from the rational mind because it sounds like we are merely earnestly celebrating the success of others. Eros does not work that way. The success of others becomes our success, in a very direct way. After having truly become who we are, it becomes the most enjoyable experience available to have enough friends, enough nervous systems we are plugged into that we experience the whole variety of life by extension. We lend our power to their experience.
We have ours because we have ourselves, and that is the only "ours" worth having and giving.
The part of us that envies is the same part that wants to withdraw from life. It wants to collect the goodies, make the money, have the partner, and no longer be beholden to entering life.
That mind does not understand that acquisition is not the reward, it is actually a burden. To live without connection to anyone else's desires or to be beholden to no one is a lonely, cold, under-extended world. Alone in our room with our rights and our toys and our spiritual enlightenment is actually the booby prize.
We may not be up for it, but Eros offers us a way to vanquish envy. We can be who we are and connect to every nervous system possible. The people who do this will be the ones who inspire and enliven those who are disillusioned with worldly success.