Dear Circle,
As my wife and I were driving yesterday she asked me a question...As I look at people, she said, I see them trying to do what is best for their children, spend time teaching them, driving them around, working hard in order for them to live better...We are all fundamentally good at heart, why don't we get along better? To which I responded with an answer I didn't expect. I said it and then thought about it after I said it, it was a bit odd, kind of like the saying that I don't know what I think until I say it.
My answer was - The reason why we don't get along is competition. Let's look at schools and see what is the main theme of our education starting very early in our lifetimes...one must compete. We are being graded for everything...praised for being the best and punished for doing poorly. We are judged on everything, the homes we live in, cars we drive, clothes we wear, music we listen to, friends we have, etc, etc, etc. Then we turn on the TV and see that reinforced - athletes, celebrities, lawyers, doctors, White Color, Blue Color...we are being programed that in order for us to have the things we need we must "be the best" even if that means others suffer. And then we are surprised at all the people behaving negatively towards each other. We think of others as competition not as one of us. That underlying thought form permeates our whole life. Even in marriage when we are supposed to be thinking of each other as ONE we compete (one of the reasons I suppose why divorce rate is so high).
Please understand me correctly. I am not against all competition. I love sports and I want to compete. However, we fail to realize that the drive we so long for shouldn't come from incentives of a grade or money, it should come from deep yearning to learn and experience from within. Only then we will truly drive ourselves to become better not inspite of others but with them....and maybe make this world a better place to live for all.
5 comments:
I like this idea. It is not new. But still fresh. And definitely is a great idea. But what is the way how to change this. We can not change the competitive world. We can only change ourselves. So, how to improve us? This is a question :)
Thanks Anonymous for your posting! I don't believe there are any new ideas, we just open up to them and they are new to us :) As to how we can change the world and ourselves is to start with education and change the way we teach our children. Don't talk about Unity on holidays only but show it in everyday life. By teaching children we can change where this world is going to go and by showing them the way we will remind ourselves of the way.
Why isn't there a fight between a pointing finger and a thumb? They have many things to fight about - who is more important, who is used the most and when, who is better looking, who has a prettier nail, etc.. The above seems ridiculous because the two fingers are all of the same - one hand/one person. Similarly, if more people saw life as representation of one of the same (call it God, one spirit, etc), it would be simply ridiculous to fight or compete with each other... But since people take themselves very seriously (to your later post about taking things personally) and view themselves as individuals, that is separate from the rest, it seems natural to continue thinking "us" vs. "them".
Great point Anonymous! To add insult to injury people even compete using different fingers to express their feelings...you know what I mean. Thanks for posting :)
Competition is something we simple cannot eliminate being in physical bodies. I think maybe some very advanced people completely removed from Earthly things can, but the rest of us still function on Earthly laws, even if we keep looking inwards to our soul.
I think that competition is at the heart of physical being. We start off racing with millions of other sperms for one egg (which by the way was in a race of its own to see which develops earlier). We compete for "mates", we compete to have our genetic signature continue to exist on this planet. We will save our child first before we save somebody else's (in a way a competition of sorts, based on those genetics again). We want our kids to win. We compete in traffic, trying to save minutes of our valuable time. It's not that we don't care about others, we just want to look out for ourselves. No matter how much we talk about competition being bad, if there was a shortage of food, who would you share the food with? You family. If you had enough for the family, you would probably begin including close friends. In a way, it's not even competition all the time, it's setting priorities based on survival instincts. getting somewhere first, getting more of something, all of it results in a positive result for you and your family. And that is a priority to us, even though all souls are related and equally important. Yet we ourselves and those close to us seem a little more important, so physical instincts will always kick in. We want those who are "like us" to survive.
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