Question: My question is regarding the role competition plays in the lives of the youth and adults. Growing up, I was involved in various typical activities such as academics and arts. But I could have been more competitive and exceptionally high achieving. However, now that I work at a university and am taking graduate classes, I have been struck by the intense competition among students who always want to be number one. At times, this competitiveness can border on obsession and lead some students to be judgmental towards others they perceive as less intelligent. I have seen positive results with a competitive mindset, and while I greatly admire these students’ intelligence and high achievement standards, something about their mindset seems to clash with spiritual values. I would like to understand better how a spiritual person can cultivate the proper attitude towards achievement in an academic setting where competition is often the norm.
Answer from the Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Easter Webinar.
It is clear, as you also see, that competition has some very specific effects on people. There are, of course, countries that are more pulled into this competitive mindset, and the United States is certainly one of them. But even South Korea and some Asian nations are very much into this achievement in school where students from a young age are driven to achieve more and more and more. The problem with this is, of course, that just like with rich people who want to accumulate more and more money, when do you stop? Where does it end? And what has been created in many countries in educational systems is this never-ending spiral where in order to be at the top, you have to focus your entire life on this—just winning, being better than others.
And this, of course, is an extremely stressful state of mind to be in. And basically, we can say that there are people who have gone through a university education, starting, of course, all the way back in the kindergarten stage, and when they are done, they actually suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. They are burned out in many cases. Sometimes, they cannot even function in a job when they get a job. Or sometimes, they manage to function in a job for a time, but before the retirement age, they burn out. They cannot make it anymore. They cannot keep that pressure up. They cannot stand the pressure.
And this is, of course, unhealthy, and it is, of course, not something that should be there in a democratic nation. But should not be there, even from a pragmatic standpoint of businesses, wanting to have better educated employees. What is the point in having an employee who burns out after a few years? How is that going to be a long-term business model?
It is an example of how this has simply run amok, and the democratic nations have not yet become sufficiently alert of the need to stop the trend. Some have, to some degree, a less competitive educational system, such as Finland, for example, is one example of this, but there are others of course. Eventually, the democratic nations will have to deal with it.
What can you do individually? Well, you can simply decide what is most important to you. Is it important to walk the spiritual path and focus on your spiritual growth, or is it important to be better than others in this highly artificial environment? It does not mean you cannot go to university. It does not mean you cannot strive to do well. But you are striving to do well so you can function well in a job and also function in your life, have a balanced lifestyle—not in this meaningless competition game of who is better, who gets the higher grades, or who has the higher IQ. As a spiritual student, you can, of course, see that the measures that are applied for measuring people’s intelligence, or how well they do in an academic setting, are completely artificial.
In essence, they come from the fallen beings, who want to set themselves up as superior, and intelligence is, of course, one of them. Some fallen beings are very intelligent according to the standard intelligence measures. But who created those measures? The fallen beings. They created them to validate themselves, and they are based on the qualities that the fallen beings have developed over many lifetimes. And this, of course, will not help you walk the spiritual path. It will not help you get into the spiritual realm that you live up to a standard created by the fallen beings. But as we said many times, what the fallen beings really had to do to mess things up on earth was to create this idea that there is a standard that all people have to live up to. Of course, you can also see that the standard creates this division between the haves and the have-nots. Those who have intelligence and those who have not intelligence. And this is, again, against democratic principles.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels