Competition
Competition is the most essential part of this society which helps in trimming and shaping the individuals of society morally, spiritually and socially. Nobody in this society is left from it. It starts from the very day child is born, and grows day by day with him. One faces the competition at his home, at school, at college, at workplace. In short every aspect of life is somehow related to competition and it is good in some manner since it continuously inspires an individual to move forth. A competition that is administered properly adds up pleasure to the life of people and acts as a stimulus for the attainment of better quality. But when the sense of competition modifies to defeat someone it leads to discontentment, distress in people. It then acts as a mediator to broaden the bay separating the dominant and weak.
There can be numerous forms of competition that is evident at different levels of an individual’s life. It begins to take form when the life starts striving with the need for success. In the competitive world of today, the human morals have been substituted by exchange morals completely and this has affected the lives of children tremendously. The moral and spiritual growth of the children is depressingly affected when they see the world around them and learn of that money is the actual reality and everything else fake. They start believing that the eventual or uplifting reality of today’s world is wealth and this starts transforming them into models of money instead of morals and spirituality.
Children, now have more or less been transformed into artifacts of emblematic marketing. This is the consequence of artifact or utilization publicity. Even when people are not in a position to purchase new products emblematic marketing lure them to buy latest products because the human hunger for emblematic marketing can never be fulfilled. And to it, the broadening bay between the poor and rich adds up spice to this tendency.
Apart from that the school going children are taught right from the day they start going school to compete, to compete with their friends, with their classmates. A small child is like clean paper upon which we can write anything. The things that are written upon it, becomes the teachings that the child follows throughout his life. Unfortunately, we teach the lesson of competition unknowingly to our children. And this however in not our fault, we also have been taught the same things from this society since our childhood and we have assumed this fallacy to be the truth of life. Apparently it may appear that the feeling of competition is cascading upwards from the childhood to the later spheres of life but this is a fallacy. Instead the feeling of competition is transcending downwards penetrating from the higher levels towards the lower spheres of life and poisoning the lives of children. It is because our lives are connected to each other. Our children get poisoned because we are poisoned.
This competition starts taking more intentional shape with our life and goals becoming cognizant. Every competition includes striving but that does not that if we are striving we are competing. A winner is a winner as long as loser feels like a loser, thrive of the winner is lost with a smile of the loser. Once there was a wrestling competition between two wrestlers. Everyone expected one of them to be the clear winner by analyzing his built and the records of his winnings. However, he lost the match and the other wrestler managed to win somehow. Everybody there was completely shocked including the two wrestlers. After being silent for two minutes, the first wrestler starts laughing. When asked upon why was he laughing he replied, “I laughed because nobody expected this to happen, not even me”. The crowd rejoiced for his spirit and everybody enjoyed.
It is important that we do not forget ourselves. When we start getting into the evil spirit of defeating someone, we start losing ourselves. We cannot be happy for what we are who we are. Instead we get happy because we managed to win over somebody, we get sad because we lost by somebody, our life is always affected by somebody around us since we always contrast ourselves with people around us. Life is like a ladder but the humorous thing about this ladder is that it is joined by its two ends, that is, it is circular. We always find people who are above us and we compete with them in order to pull them down. However if we somehow succeed in doing so, we find some other people above us and this continues. Because there will always be someone above us and someone below us and we stay in the middle of this ladder always. Now you may wonder jumping off this ladder this is also not possible for us sadly, because when we see other people below us we feel contentment and this contentment do not allow us to jump off.
In this vicious circle of competition we tend to forget ourselves, our competencies. When we see someone playing beautiful flute we wish to master that art. And then we see someone earning loads of money through investment and we wish to be rich. However in this whole process of competition we fail to analyze the things we are good at.
We sometimes falsely understand competency to be competition. Competency is what you possess while competition is for something that you wish to possess. People who are short of competency are always in competition with others because they lack sufficiency. Not all times, but in respect to today’s assumption, competition reflects scantiness. Competence reflects a positive emotion since it reflects a requirement of the soul of the being while on the other hand competition only leaves back the individual single and lone. By cultivating competence within us we can cultivate confidence but competitions rely on other attenuation. Competition is a mere abstract quality based upon fallacy of strength and intellect.
The concept of competition can be traced back to the theory of Charles Darwin stating, “Struggle for Existence”. But this is a very minute and restricted aspect of it. Since then the face of competition has ever changed. Human tend to compete with others because they wish to be superior to others. Superiority gives contentment to people. We feel that if we beat someone we become superior to others. Winning has become a need today we feel that if we win then we are right and that we are supreme and the one who loses is wrong and is inferior to us. It does not matter to and to people that how did we achieve this winning, once we win we are right, the method does not matter. This is a fallacy and we come out of it day our doings come back in front of us in some other form. People have developed a tendency that those who can never rule and they are left with no choice but to follow. Everybody today is in a race to lead and not follow, but in this race of life we tend to forget that everybody cannot lead there has to followers.
This does not mean that competition is bad in its every form in fact in its purest form it is good and essential for the growth of society. Several important inventions could take place because of this feeling of healthy competition. A healthy competition, in fact, is rooted at the origin of all natural sciences. Change is the basic nature of this world and this can only continue if we compete with each other in a healthy way. But when this competition takes the form of a matter of winning or losing, superiority or inferiority then it only brings stress, misery, worries to the life of people because this competition is not a competition in its purest form rather a superficial competition which is only intended to put someone down. The foundation of this competition is the false perception of the ego which is against the nature of the competition.
This competition if brought back into its actual shape, can transform our society to remove the miseries and distress. Meditation is an important tool that can help us achieve this goal. We are not the way we think instead we are like something that observes our thinking. Take for example; if we are thinking for our enemy then we are not our enemy. This trick can be beneficially applied in our daily thinking to remove negativity from us. Like if think of competing then we are not competing. This technique of meditating is called the free will technique. Often we suffer because we do not identify our observance but rely on our thoughts which bring miseries to our life. To control our reactions, we should observe our thoughts and our inner conscience. Once we understand the technique to control our thoughts we can remove the feeling of competition from us.
Light a candle in front of you, approximately three to six feet away from you. Your gaze should fall upon it naturally, is required us a table for this purpose. Concentrate on its flame, and think of this flame only remove all thoughts from your mind just relax and concentrate. This will help you build up and strengthen your inner conscience and develop your ability to judge. After few minutes close your eyes and watch that flame dissolving place all your negativity into it and let it be dissolved with it. Follow this practice several times and the more you practice the more you will able to come over your negativity.
It is not possible to remove the spirit of dirty competition at the lower spheres of life until it is removed at the higher spheres of life. Transformation can only be noticed when people accept to change their mindset and remove the spirit of dirty competition from within and we observe the true spirit of competition. Egoism and self-indulgence within a system is the central promoter of the dirty competition spirit and this cannot be removed until we face it and we all, try to remove it.