Breaking the Attachment to Lust and Selfishness - Assimilating to the Fa

By a Western Practitioner from the U.S.

(Clearwisdom.net) It truly is an honor to speak in front of all of you. What I want to share with everyone is something that I have found few practitioners are willing to speak about. It regards the attachment of lust. This is something that has seriously interfered with me since the beginning of my cultivation and something that I have not felt very comfortable talking about with other practitioners. To help you understand my tribulation more fully, I will mention a bit about how I was before I started cultivating Falun Dafa.

Before I obtained the Fa, I went along with the rest of society and took pre-marital sexual relations with the opposite sex as something casual. I really lacked a good understanding of how serious it is and how it is not something that I should take lightly. It was truly something ugly but I was unable to see anything wrong with it at the time. It is really as Master says,

"Only those people whose xinxing has been upgraded through cultivation will realize, by looking back, that human moral values have decayed to this terrible extent."(Zhuan Falun, Lecture 9, Mind-Intent)

It wasn't until I read Master Li's lecture in New York that I began to understand just how serious the attachment of lust is, and how sacred sexual relations between a man and a woman truly are. After enlightening to this principle, I decided to no longer be the way I once was, and that I would strive to overcome my attachment. To be honest, the first nine months of my cultivation almost completely revolved around this attachment. I remember that once I finally decided that I would overcome it, the suffering began immediately.

In the beginning the internal battle to control my thoughts was extremely difficult. It was as if a war was going on inside my own body. Every time an impure thought would arise about a woman I would try to suppress it or eliminate it, but this was not something very easy to do. It fought me intensely. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was temptation and other things calling out to me. It was as if I could not escape it no matter which direction I turned.

Every day I would come home from work and inside me it felt like I was dying. My head was aching, my body felt like it was suffocating and my thought karma was extremely huge. Horrible thoughts would come into my mind one after another. I couldn't stop them from coming because every time I eliminated one, a new one would take its place. Each day I would sit down in the middle of my living room and tell myself, I know I can beat you. I know I can overcome you and you will not stop me from elevating myself. I would sit down and tell myself that if I must suffer, then go ahead and make me suffer because in the end, I will beat you.

Every time an impure thought would surface it was as if I could feel something inside me moving around. When I tried to eliminate the impure thought, this thing inside me would make me feel as if I was suffocating, as if trying to tell me that if I want to eliminate it, it would try and take me with it. But I did not stop and I would just sit there for long periods of time and fight through the pain. My suffering at the time was tremendous.

The battle seemed to go on for months and months. I often felt that the only time I felt relief was when I went to a fellow practitioners' apartment to practice the exercises and study the Fa. Actually this fellow practitioners' apartment was the first practice site that I had ever been to. When I would step into their apartment it was if the attachment was lifted off me and I would feel no pain while I was there. Several times when my suffering was at its worst I would think to myself that if I could only go over to their apartment for a moment I could get some relief and overcome the attachment.

Finally after several months had passed, one night I woke up in my bed in the middle of the night. When I awoke, I opened my eyes, and I shall never forget what I saw. In the bed with me was the most disgusting creature that I have ever seen. The only way I can describe it is that it looked like a ferociously large rat that was four feet long. When I saw it, I jumped up out of my bed and ran to the door. When I got to the door I thought to myself, "I must be dreaming," so I turned back, went over to look at my bed and found that the creature was still there moving around in my bed. I thought to myself again that I must be dreaming, so I tried pinching myself, but there it was still sitting in my bed. I must have stood there watching it for several minutes before it finally vanished into thin air. After that I slept with Zhuan Falun next to me for what must have been the entire next week.

Two weeks later, again I awoke in the middle of the night and again the creature was there. However, this time it was different because the creature was about fifteen feet away from me and although it tried and tried to come near me, it wasn't able to. It was as if there was a shield around me that was stopping the creature from coming near me. After that I understood that Master had removed this thing from me and Master was not allowing it to harm me anymore. After that night it never came back to bother me again.

After that, my battle with the attachment of lust changed. Although it was still there it was never again as intense. It was as if a ton of bricks had been lifted off my shoulders and I could breathe again. I felt so grateful for what Master had done for me. Later on, as my attachment to lust would surface, I could feel the attachment arising inside me, but most of the time I would be able to eliminate it very quickly with righteous thoughts.

My experience with this tribulation has taught me many valuable lessons. I have learned that attachments are not something to be pushed aside when they come up. I often watch other practitioners when they become aware of one of their attachments that they know they need to overcome. Instead of facing it head on, they often push it aside and tell themselves that they will overcome it in the future or have the wishful thinking that if they don't face it, that somehow it will go away on its own.

I have learned that it is true that there will be suffering when overcoming attachments, but when we overcome them, we come to know deep inside that all of our efforts are worth it. I now understand that if we put all our heart and effort into overcoming attachments with Master's help, they can be overcome no matter how difficult it may appear.

I would like to end my sharing with a recent experience I had while I was sitting in meditation. I suddenly became aware that inside me, Master was rectifying all the universes that were connected to me. However, I also became aware that there were still many universes that were not rectified yet. In my mind I couldn't understand why, but when I went to take a closer look I caught a glimpse of something terribly shocking. I saw Master had come to one of the universes connected to me that had still not been rectified and that he was about to rectify it. However, something stopped Master before he was able to rectify it. To my surprise, what was stopping Master from rectifying the universe was ME MYSELF. It was me who was resisting Master because of my attachment to selfishness, self-protection and all the things I had been unwilling to let go of. After becoming aware of this it really hit me very hard. I know that I must work harder to more completely let go of my attachments and assimilate to the Fa. Only then will all the lives and universes connected to me be completely rectified.

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