Depends on who you're competing with. Competition is healthy in the sense of learning how we can win and lose in this world. We don't always win in this world, do we? We don't always get what we want. Learning how to compete with other human beings as we grow up may be very healthy in that we learn how to win or lose gracefully, so that we our happiness doesn't depend on always winning or gaining and we're not bad losers when things don't go our way. However, when it goes into competing with other people's good qualities and not being able to take joy with them, it goes a little bit too far. If we base our self-worth totally on whether we're able to win over other people and be better than other people, then it can become very ugly. We are not able to take joy with others, we try to pull them down. We feel an unhealthy sense of unworthiness, so we're not able to appreciate our own good qualities or the good qualities of others. Instead, Steve always says, we'd like to be able to compete with ourselves, in that we'd like to continually try to improve ourselves rather than settle on a potential that is low. So competition can bring up the effort to uncover something within ourselves that is greater.
Competition with fellow meditators is very difficult. Sometimes we give our assistants a teaching about different fruits, when they seem to be competing with each other to be better, coming from their conditioning in this world. We ask them, "Well is an apple better than a pear? Is a pineapple better than a banana?" We just see that they're different. This perspective can also help when men and women tend to compete with each other. I always say not superior, not inferior, not equal, different. This helps us to appreciate the good qualities in each of us, not trying to be better or feel we're worse, but understanding and appreciating the differences.
Often we'll say, "Well, you may just have different leading Paramis than them." When we go through the Paramis, sometimes I'll see that someone has a very strong Energy Parami, Determination Parami, and they may start to judge someone who doesn't have that Energy and Determination. Yet I'll see that this other person has a very high Generosity Parami, and much higher than the first person's Generosity Parami. So we may be judging others just from our strengths and not seeing their strengths or knowing our own weaknesses. It's good not to compete with each other in that way, and instead be able to appreciate other people's strengths. This is where the unselfish emotions come in, especially Sympathetic Joy, seeing the good qualities of others and taking Joy with them. This is often what good parents and hopefully good teachers will do, they'll see the good qualities of a person and try to encourage their strengths.
I do tend to notice that in Westerners there is a lack of ability to have sympathetic joy with themselves and others, and this often comes from the competitive aspect in Western cultures, the wishing to gain and achieve status and fame and all these things in order to feel worthy about themselves. So it's important for Westerners especially to learn how to reflect on their good qualities, to reflect on sympathetic joy so that they're able to see their good qualities. This actually helps them to appreciate other people's good qualities and lessen this aspect of unhealthy competition. When we feel jealous of other people's goodness, it ignites a sense of unworthiness in ourselves, and it's quite important to let go of this unhealthy aspect of competition. So competition is like most things, it's not bad in itself, it's how we use it, how we approach it, and how we balance some of the negative aspects that arise from these types of competition.