By a Western Falun Dafa practitioner

(Clearwisdom.net) Working as a volunteer for a Dafa website project, the opportunities for improvement are many. There is a constant challenge with daily deadlines, making sure editors have enough articles to post, and that what is being posted is in good shape. The group working together is spread out all over the world. Different cultures interact. Different cultures collide. Yet the work we do is so important, for so many reasons, and for the sake of saving so many sentient beings.

If I worried about the magnitude of the responsibility of it all, I might become paralyzed, afraid of making mistakes. So I usually try not to think about that, and simply keep moving forward, keep doing my daily duties, keeping the focus on saving sentient beings and just doing what it seems to me I should be doing at any given moment.

Often, of course, those evil old forces stick their noses into things, taking my attachments and twisting my good intentions around them - taking advantage of any gaps in myself and others to create conflicts and interference. Since most of our communication as a group is via email, the environment can be even more challenging, since we work in virtual isolation and don't have the benefit of face to face meetings to help us through the tougher times.

Attachments to fame and gain, to reputation, to control, to gaining mighty virtue, even to "winning" instead of losing... all of these have surfaced again and again in my work for the website, in many different forms and many different manifestations. Sometimes I recognize them quickly... other times I don't and struggle with them for some time before I'm able to identify them and cultivate them away.

As Master has recently hinted, the uncultivated bits of our nature that remain are coarser and more granular than what was there before. The attachments may seem to be many, they are even nastier in character, even uglier than they have ever been before in their surface manifestations, but, thankfully, they are weaker than before. They are also often easier to distinguish and identify than they were before. And as Teacher tells us, righteous thoughts and righteous actions dissolve them quickly.

With so many projects being undertaken by so many practitioners around the world today, and all of them seeming to need more help, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of our website work. Other projects offer the lure of fame and gain - of being on television, on the radio, of having my name in the newspaper - and "push the buttons" on the remnants of those old attachments that are now surfacing and ready to be exposed and eliminated.

Sometimes we think we can just "do more" and sign up for all kinds of projects, only to discover later that we haven't yet managed to cultivate the supernatural ability of accomplishing everything we want to in the very short bits of precious time we have available to us. Projects suffer and sentient beings might be lost as a result. At one time I felt that this meant I just needed to do more, but later my understanding changed. I felt that the losses weren't due to my inability to "do" enough or to others not stepping forward to help enough but were in fact due to my own selfishness, due to my own thinking that I was so important that I had to do all the work, maybe even subconsciously wanting all that mighty virtue for myself, when in fact I was standing in the way of others who might be able to do a great job with the task at hand, if only I'd get out of their way and give them a chance.

I'm very thankful for the opportunity to be involved in this project. I don't feel that the work we do is more important than that done by someone, for instance, who hands out flyers on the street. Yet very few practitioners have the language skills that I have, so, for me, it is clear that this is the work that I SHOULD do. It's no more important than the truth clarification work done by others, but since I have the particular skills to do this particular work, it is important that I continue to do it.

I guess it is important that all of us do what we do for the websites. I look forward to discovering ways we can do even better, and I look forward to ways we can work together more effectively and with fewer conflicts and greater productivity. The evil will try any and all means to hinder us in this work, but I feel we must overcome these obstacles together, because the futures of so many sentient beings are at stake. We have become their only hope for salvation.

I hope we will meet the challenges and do even better, both individually and as a team, in the most important final step that lies before us.

Thank you.

Posting date: 11/12/2004
Original article date: 11/11/2004
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/10/26/87651.html

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