I discovered a song last week that caught my attention. It's called "Genghis Khan" by Miike Snow. The track is upbeat, catchy, and fun. I first heard the song at a festival where an art exhibit was playing the music video with a controller that could manipulate the visuals of the video interface. The music video depicts a James Bond-style villain and hero in a tiff, where the hero is tied to a chair, and the villain is about to shoot the hero with a giant laser beam. I won't spoil the twist of the video, but I was really charmed by the whole thing.

A couple of lyrics caught my attention: "I get a little bit Genghis Khan, don't want you to get it on with nobody else but me"; "It's a cheat somewhere, 'cause I don't really want you girl. But you can't be free, 'cause I'm selfish. I'm obscene."

Something about the notion of not wanting someone you like/love/etc. to be with other people is intriguing. It's primal. I want this object; no one else can have it. It contrasts with a higher notion that humans are not possessions but their own autonomous beings. And yet, the intellectual knowledge of the non-objectness of humans is not enough to stop such a feeling. It must be a core piece of us that feels threatened when someone we want (or at least want on some level, even if not long-term) cannot be ours.

I imagine different people have varying degrees of jealousy towards their current, former, or future lovers being with someone other than them. Those who are more poly-minded may have little to none -- perhaps supplied by other lovers to offset jealousy or having found ways to transmute their jealousy through conversation or self-work.

The more interesting question to me is how does one transmute that jealousy, diffuse it to a point where it goes from fire, to ember, to smoke, to gone. I can think of a few mechanisms: the passage of time, replacing one person-object with another, devaluing the person-object -- if at one point they're seen as valuable, pedestaled, or someone amazing, changing one's view to see them as not so great after all.

Perhaps the most potent form of transmutation is withdrawing attention altogether from the jealousy by focusing on oneself. Remove the stimulus. Focus on one's own life independent of the object of jealousy. Don't breathe life into the fire -- attention is its oxygen. The fire has started. Perhaps its too big to put out by a more powerful force. Let the fire burn till its only an ember. The ember is still dangerous, don't feed it. Eventually that last bit of fire and light will turn into smoke and fade away.