Manifest what you need | Sunday Observer

Manifest what you need

22 November, 2020

“Those who do not have any sense of their competence are the ones who become competitive. Because their only pleasure is being one step ahead of somebody else”. - Sadhguru

Sadhguru is a Yogi and a mystic who is one of the 50 most influential personalities in India. He addresses global audiences on the contemporary issues related to socio-economic development, leadership and spirituality in different contexts. Sadhguru’s realisation about the human’s urge for competition is a broad and deep concept that one must endeavour to grasp.

The urge for competition has almost become a part of human life from the moment they start to experience the world. From early childhood, every child has been fed with bundles of information naming it as ‘Education’ for a certain period.

Later, he is placed on the racing track to check how far he is better than the others. The adults, who cheer them, do not do any kind of good, but only a disaster as they are forming the next generation in such an unhealthy manner.

Education is the first and the largest influential institution which instills the notion of overtaking through competition. The seed of competition is implanted in human mind when they step out to the college for education.

Human perception

According to Sadhguru, “education is basically about enlarging the horizons of human perception. But today, education has shifted into a mode where heaps of information are being enforced to the human mind. Information is useful in a certain way to earn your living, but it doesn’t help you to proceed in your life or to enlarge your horizon.

Since contemporary education relies on ready-made answers and information, the actual education has been neglected which enables us to activate intelligence in a way constantly urging to search, seek and look at everything in every possible way. Above all, education means to know the joy of wondering about life, not having ready-made answers for everything”.

A competitive mindset is designed to exceed someone else’s capability to a certain extent. In this phenomenon, probably, the person could become on top of everyone and have the feeling of reaching the peak of his life.

On the other way around, being competitive could place you behind everyone else and leave you depressed and miserable. Being competitive is just like being blind because it deceives your intuition to avoid exploring all kinds of possibilities of what you could do and become.

Human potential is distorted as people believe that you’ll not propel yourself to your fullest if you are not in a competition. This false idea is cultivated. Now, it is rooted in many societies.

Winners and losers

“The process of education prevailing today enforces the student to admit the high scorers are winners and the rest are losers. The concept of placing oneself in a higher position and the other in a lower position is a discriminatory process that conceives a prejudiced world. Concepts, such as race, religion, nation, languages, culture, or even gender have turned into a discriminatory process in the competitive social structure.

A competitive person is determined and focused to be on top of anything. But his inner self is afraid of failure as he believes it will lessen his ‘value’ as a person in society,”Sadhguru said.

Whether achieving knowledge or success, the process becomes joyful if ‘you and only you’ exist in the process. Competition never has influenced people to invent, but to regenerate something which is already there in a little better than it was.

The future of the world would depend on inspired innovative people instead of informative competing ones. The repercussions of being competitive make you pay a high price in the end. Forcing one to be competitive, or becoming one, either way, would abandon you in an illusion.

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