Facing Your Own Horizon

Facing Your Own Horizon

Dear friends,

Here is a recap of our learnings so far:
 

• In  The Divided Heart, we saw a heart pulled in two directions, towards desire and aspiration.
   
• In The Awakening of Purpose, we met a heart that had stopped moving, not because energy was lacking, but because purpose was missing.
   
• In Building a Strong Foundation, we encountered a heart that could not trust its own ground, doubting the very transformation it had undergone.
   
• In Reaching For The Sky, we saw a heart that had mistaken its enclosure for the sky, the ego crystallizing around attainment until growth itself was sealed shut.
   

Now we meet a heart with a different wound. This heart is neither divided, nor lifeless, nor doubting, nor enclosed; it is bleeding. And the strange thing is, the wound does not belong to it.

Two Unique Talents

Two musicians studied under the same master. One was gifted with a voice that could make stone weep. The other possessed a technical precision that left audiences astonished. Each was extraordinary. And each spent their energy not celebrating their own gift but mourning the other’s.

The singer envied the technician’s discipline. The technician envied the singer’s natural grace. Between them, they had everything. But within each, there was a lack.

This is the peculiar arithmetic of jealousy: it subtracts from what you have by adding what you do not have. The ledger always shows a deficit, regardless of how full the treasury actually is.

If they had faced their own horizons and explored the possibilities of their unique talents, maybe one day they would have met in the limitless sky beyond the gravity of individuality. But this requires inner work.

The Sideways Glance

In The Awakening of Purpose, we drew a distinction between two engines of movement. One is pulled by love, and it has a destination. The energy flows towards something luminous, and the body follows because the heart has already arrived. The other is pushed by pain, and it has no destination, only an escape. Jealousy is entirely pain- pushed. But it pushes in a direction we have not yet examined.

→ Desire pulls forward, towards what you want. 

→ Laziness leaves you standing still, without a reason to move. 

→ Doubt pulls you backwards, away from what you have already found.

 → Ego compresses you into an enclosure. 

→ Jealousy pulls sideways. It fixes your gaze on someone else’s horizon.

In The Divided Heart, we explored the ancient distinction between Preya (प्रेय) and Shreya (श्रेय), the pleasant and the good. Desire is a battle between the two: Should I choose what feels gratifying now, or what will help me grow? But jealousy abandons the question of what is good for the self entirely and replaces it with a different question: Why do they have what I do not? This is not dissatisfaction with your own life, which can push you to grow. It is dissatisfaction born of comparison, and comparison does not light a fire. It slowly eats away at you instead.
True aspiration looks at the horizon and says, “Further.” Jealousy looks sideways and says, “Unfair.”

The lazy person in The Awakening of Purpose needs to look up. The jealous person needs to stop looking sideways and look towards their own horizon. The direction of the gaze determines the direction of life.

The Mechanism of Unrest

Peace is not the absence of difficulty, but the presence of inner order. When consciousness is settled, when each element of the inner life occupies its rightful place, there is a stillness that external circumstances cannot disturb. Jealousy attacks precisely this inner order.

The Sanskrit term matsarya (मात्सर्य) describes not merely wanting what another has but suffering because another has it. The distinction matters. Aspiration looks at another’s achievement and says, “That is possible. Let me work toward it.” Jealousy looks at the same achievement and says, “That should have been mine. The universe has been unjust.”

This sense of cosmic injustice poisons the wellspring of peace by placing the centre of one’s happiness outside oneself. When my contentment depends on having more than another, or at least not less, I have handed the key to my inner sanctuary to every person I encounter. Each one’s success becomes my failure. Each one’s joy becomes my sorrow. I become a hostage to the fortunes of others, and the ransom demanded is the very peace I seek.

In Building a Strong Foundation, we saw how doubt manufactures its own evidence, selectively noticing every reason to distrust and ignoring every reason to believe. Jealousy operates by the same dishonest accounting. The jealous mind notices every advantage the other person possesses and every disadvantage in its own situation. It keeps a meticulous ledger, but the ledger is rigged. Assets on the other side are inflated, while the assets on your own side are written off. The balance always shows a deficit, because the purpose of the ledger was never accuracy, it was suffering.

The Unrest Among Seekers

Here is something few spiritual traditions openly discuss, but every spiritual community knows: jealousy does not vanish at the ashram gate, it refines itself.

In Reaching For The Sky, we explored Chariji’s observation that the field of spirituality is so soft and yielding that it becomes fertile ground for pride. The same softness makes it fertile ground for jealousy. In the material world, jealousy has obvious objects: money, position, appearance and success. In the spiritual world, the objects become subtler but no less potent. Who is closer to the Master? Whose sitting lasted longer? Whose condition seems deeper? Who was recognized, promoted or given responsibility? Who was mentioned by name? These are the vishayas of the inner world, the sense-objects of spiritual life.

In Building a Strong Foundation, we quoted Ashtavakra’s warning: Vishayanvishavat tyaja. He tells us to abandon the objects of the senses as we would abandon poison. This quote applies here with full force. In addition to the outer world’s distractions and doubt’s inner corrosion, jealousy among seekers reveals a third dimension of the same poison:

It is not distraction, the outer world pulling you away from yourself. It is not doubt, the inner mind turning against its own experience. It is comparison, born of jealousy that distorts perception and seeds unrest.

The spiritual community can turn into a hall of mirrors, a place of comparison, where you become more aware of everyone else’s journey than your own. Instead of helping you look inward, the community can become a space where you are constantly looking sideways.

The chain is precise. In Reaching for the Sky, we traced how unchecked ego creates a sense of spiritual entitlement. When that entitlement is disappointed, when someone else receives what the ego expected, jealousy ignites. And once jealousy ignites, it generates comparison, comparison generates competition, and competition generates the very politics that spiritual life was supposed to dissolve. Then, pride builds the ceiling, and jealousy burns the house down.

The Root Cause

Jealousy is never really about the other person. It is about an unexamined belief that what you are and what you have are not enough. It is a wound of insufficiency, and it borrows the other person’s success as a mirror in which to see its own perceived lack.

This is the same wound we examined in Building a Strong Foundation, seen from a different angle. The woman who meditated for eleven years could not trust her own transformation. She said, “Is this real?” The jealous seeker makes a parallel error. Instead of doubting what they have found, they deny that it is sufficient.

Doubt says, “What I have experienced is not real.” Jealousy says, “What I have been given is not enough.”

One is a crisis of trust and the other is a crisis of contentment. Both prevent the soul from resting in what has already been received.

Jealousy is the ego’s shadow, its inseparable companion. In Reaching for the Sky, we described the ego as a greenhouse of identity. Its shadow, jealousy, cannot tolerate seeing another tree growing taller in the open sky. The jealousy is not really about the other tree. It is about the ceiling, the glass enclosure that the ego constructed and now cannot bear to acknowledge.

This is why jealousy cannot be cured by getting what the other person has because the goalposts move. The person who envied another’s position, upon receiving the same position, will find someone else to envy. The wound is not in the absence of the thing. The wound is in the belief that the thing would make them whole.

The Heartfulness practice of evening cleaning directly addresses this. When we sit each evening and allow the impressions of the day to lift from behind, we are releasing not only the events but the interpretations we attach to them. The colleague’s promotion was an event. The burning in the chest when you heard about it was your interpretation, fueled by your wound, filtered through your belief that someone else’s gain is your loss.

But here is the difficulty, and it echoes what we discovered in The Divided Heart. Cleaning removes what the heart is willing to release. When a tendency is secretly cherished, when some part of the psyche holds onto it with hidden affection, cleaning meets resistance. Jealousy is among the hardest impressions to release because admitting you are jealous feels shameful. We will confess to anger, to laziness and even to doubt, but jealousy? To say “I am jealous of that person’s spiritual condition” requires a humility that the jealous ego is precisely unwilling to offer. The wound stays hidden because looking at it would mean admitting that the selfimage is cracked. And so it festers, year after year, at a depth that evening cleaning alone may not reach, not because the technique is insufficient but because the heart is not yet willing.

What Stabilizes Peace

Contentment, santosha (सन्तोष), is neither resignation nor a defeated acceptance of less. It is the profound recognition that what has been given to you is precisely what is needed for your journey; not someone else’s journey, but yours.

A seed does not envy the tree. It becomes a tree by being fully a seed. The process cannot be rushed by looking at what others have become. It can only be lived, stage by stage, with patience and with trust that the intelligence governing the universe has not made an error in what it placed within you.

In The Awakening of Purpose, we explored the Japanese concept of ikigai, the reason for being, the reason to wake up in the morning. The person who has found their ikigai does not compare. Comparison is what happens when purpose is borrowed rather than discovered. You envy what others have because you have not yet uncovered what is uniquely yours. The borrowed wound is also a borrowed purpose: measuring your life against someone else’s script because you have not yet written your own.

When meditation deepens, something remarkable happens to the jealous mind. It begins to see that every person is walking a path shaped by their own samskaras, their own accumulated impressions, and their own particular curriculum. What appears as another’s advantage may be their greatest test. What appears as your disadvantage may be your most potent teacher. The universe is not a competition, it is a school, and each student has a different syllabus.

Had the two musicians understood this, they would have recognized that their gifts were not in competition. The voice and the technique were two expressions of the same music, each incomplete without the other, each enriched by the other’s existence. They were not rivals, they were halves of a harmony only possible together.

The Heart That Knows Its Own Depth

Peace returns when you stop reading someone else’s script and begin living your own. The pen is already in your hand. The page is already before you. What remains is the willingness to write what is yours to write, without glancing at the page beside you.

Babuji described the humblest person as one who can lead a richer life than a king, a heart that conceals the ‘wonder of wonders’ without anyone knowing it. Such a heart does not envy the fate of those recognized by the world as great. Not because it has suppressed the impulse, but because it has tasted something so deep within itself that the surface accomplishments of others simply cease to register. The wound heals when you discover that you were never lacking what you thought you were lacking. You were only looking in the wrong direction.

The heart that has tasted its own depth does not covet another’s surface. Sit long enough in meditation, go deep enough into your own being, and you will find something there that no one else possesses and no one else can take away. From that place, jealousy is not suppressed, it simply finds no reason to arise.

Let us summarize: 

• In The Divided Heart, we learn that desire divides us till we learn to choose wisely. 
   
• In The Awakening of Purpose, inertia stalls us till we light the fire and find our purpose.
   
• In Building a Strong Foundation, doubt corrodes us till we see right through it and learn to trust our own experiences. 
   
• In Reaching for the Sky, ego encloses us, and humility sets us free.
   
• In Facing Your Own Horizon, we learn that jealousy changes our inner compass to point sideways, away from the goal, thus turning someone else’s success into our injury. Jealousy is not pain arising from our own reality, but created by comparison.

There are five poisons, and each one takes you away from the goal:

Desire says, “I want what is over there.”

Laziness says, “I cannot get to where I need to be.” 

Doubt says, “Where I have arrived is not real.” 

Ego says, “Where I have arrived is mine.” 

Jealousy says, “Where they have arrived should have been mine.”

The antidote to all five is the same quiet revolution: to be fully, unreservedly, courageously here in this heart, in this breath, in this life that was given to you and no one else, for reasons that only your own journey will reveal.

Face your own horizon and walk your unique path with courage. 

With love and prayers, 
Kamlesh

Message on the occasion of Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Yogashram Shahjahanpur Batch 4: 24 to 26 February 2026