The Fallacy of "Healthy" Competition

By Lori Lines

The Illusion of Competition & How It's A 3D Construct

The Fallacy of Competition
“There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition!” “He’s so competitive. He’s a bad loser.” The consensus is that healthy competition should be encouraged as motivational and character-building. In contrast, unhealthy competition should be discouraged as unbecoming, maladaptive, and detrimental. This perspective is a result of conditioning. From a young age, birth, in fact, we are compared to our peers. Parents in the pediatrician’s waiting room or the online chat room proudly declare that their baby is hitting milestones ahead of time. “Timmy said mama and dada by 10 months.” “Sarah is crawling at 7 months.”

Throughout our academic years and professional lives, we are taught that a competitive edge is a hallmark of motivation, determination, and ultimate success. However, a competitive drive that causes stress, obsession, rage, “unsportsmanlike” behavior, and social alienation is deemed a step too far. However, this line is arbitrarily drawn; what may be too far to some could be perfectly acceptable to others.

The arbitrary distinction of how much competition is too much speaks to a hidden, fundamental truth. While most deem competition unhealthy once it affects our physical or mental health, no degree of comparison and competition nourishes or even serves the soul. Regarding spiritual health, all comparison is unhealthy and digresses from our higher path.

All Competition is Comparative
When we compare ourselves to others, by default, we deviate from our individual karmic journey and start following a path that was intended for someone else. We lose sight of the lessons we are meant to learn, the healing we are meant to achieve, and the goals we are meant to accomplish. On a path never intended for us, we become lost, hopeless, and inutile, compromising our personal truth and integrity and failing to realize ourselves or our purpose. You can never win when trying to meet someone else’s benchmarks!

“Your only competition is yourself.” This is another fallacy that is perpetuated by society. There are two directions that self-comparison can take, past or future. It is common to compare oneself to who one once was. This perspective measures achievement based on how different we are from who we once were. The trouble with this perspective is that it can be limiting. If we are always looking back at how far we have come, we tether ourselves to the past and curtail how far we can actually go. 

Conversely, there are also pitfalls to comparing oneself to whom we could become. When we compete with who we believe we are meant to become, we risk crushing our spirit under the weight of life’s “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” This can lead to feelings of despair, shame, apathy, anxiety, and depression. Comparison with one’s future self can also lead to a mad dash past important milestones, lessons, and healing opportunities in a rush to meet this future ideal.
 
All competition, be it with oneself or someone else, is comparative. Comparison in any form creates limitations by locking our personhood into a preconceived ideal, denying us the infinite potential of our Divine birthright. The bottom line is, if anything is possible, then why aspire to a prefabricated construct?

The Limitations of a 3D Construct
Before one begins the process of ascension, 3rd Dimensional constructs are accepted as truths. As we elevate into the 4th and 5th Dimensions, we begin to see these “truths” for the fallacies they are. Concepts fundamental to competition, such as otherness (me versus you and us versus them), inherent unworthiness, and being incomplete, are uncovered as the illusions they are upheld by conditioning.
 
In the 5th Dimension, we are complete. We rise to merge with our higher selves; as we rise, our souls integrate. We awaken to the ultimate truth that we enter this world complete and leave this world complete. We lack nothing, and the process of actualization serves not to add to who we are but to release anything that obscures our true selves. As complete beings, there is no need to compare oneself to another because we are exactly as the Divine intends, negating competition altogether.

When we understand how this completion unites oneself with the collective, it further negates the conditioned response to compare.  In the 5th Dimension, while we are celebrated for our individual gifts, we are united with the collective in harmony and love. When one learns, the collective learns; when one heals, the collective heals; And the higher one ascends, the greater the collective ascends. There is no need for comparison because each soul has its own gifts that contribute to the greatest good and highest purpose of the collective.

Revealing the Illusion of Competition
Ultimately, competition is not some benign construct that can become malignant. It is in itself a spiritual sickness that closes our eyes to the capitalist-driven, socially and politically divisive, alienating otherness of the 3D. If we remain distracted by the pride of being better than our colleagues and the shame of being worse than our neighbors, we turn a blind eye to the conditioning that upholds the fallacies and façades of the 3rd Dimension. It is busy work in the face of the solemn undertaking of collective awakening, healing, and ascension, keeping us at odds with each other and ourselves.  Essentially, we cannot ascend when we are divided within ourselves or living divisively from others. The path to the 4th and 5th Dimension is one of soulful integration and loving unity, making competition and awakening diametrically opposed.
 
To those who are awake, competition does not exist, not even within, because we know that as we merge with our higher selves, our best selves, we are nothing short of Divine. Fundamentally, no one can walk anyone else’s path, undertake anyone else’s healing, learn anyone else’s lessons, or become who someone else is meant to be. Yet, we are all connected, and we are all one; The Divine exists equally, impartially, yet non-comparatively in each and every one of us. 

In love and truth,
​Lori Lines
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