"Competitive mind" is not so bad. Now a lot of people think, "Hey, wait a minute!" But the question regarding, "Competitive mind", though, is who are we competing with? OK, if you are competing with yourself, that is where the competitive mind is very helpful, because you want to improve yourself. If you don't know who you are today, how can you try to improve? How can you try to actually do better? You are looking at someone who was a very competitive athlete (many of you have heard this before). My main sport was swimming, and swimming is a very good sport for competing against yourself. For example, if I won a race but it was a crummy time, I wasn't satisfied. If I lost a race, but I had my best time, I would be thrilled. So competing against myself was much more important than just winning against somebody else.
To have a competing type mind against yourself, that's OK, we feel that's healthy. Competing against others though, we would like to let go of that. And we have to watch out for it, in the sense of: Which way we are competing? If we see somebody who is better than us, we want to change it into Sympathetic Joy, we want to change it into inspiration, "I want to copy that, I want to do what that person is doing." If we see somebody who is not as good as us, then we will want to look at them more with Compassion/Lovingkindness, and remind ourselves "Oh, I don't want to do it that way, that is something I used to do, I don't want to do it again." So, if you are thinking of competition, and you actually are looking at others, we would like to change it into either Sympathetic Joy on one side, or Compassion/Lovingkindness on the other.
Going back to the beginning of this, as to a good standard to see the growth of the Paramis, and see which one needs to be developed more. What happens when you are standing at line at breakfast to get your food, and you are near at the end of the line, and you watch somebody take four pieces of pineapple? That is the time you are going to test your growth! It is not so much "sitting on a pillow" that you test your growth. You are going to test it when you are standing in line, you are going to test it when you are walking into the hall and somebody took your sitting mat and so on. You are going to test it all through that. As to seeing your growth, we encourage you to look at it in your daily activities, as to what your growth is.
In the sense of which one needs to be developed more, later in this retreat, we intend to teach you a way to reflect on the ten Paramis, and it is specifically designed to help you see for yourself where you have to develop more of your Paramis.