My Understanding of Negating the Old Forces

By a Falun Dafa practitioner in China

(Clearwisdom.net) Through continuous Fa study and looking inwards when encountering ordeals, I have enlightened to a new understanding of denying the old forces' arrangements. I would like to share several examples:

1. Once, when a fellow practitioner and I sat down to send forth righteous thoughts together, a loudspeaker came on from outside. Immediately I thought to myself, "Nothing accidentally happens around practitioners" and searched within to see which attachments I still needed to get rid of. I listened to the lyric of the song and heard, "You ask me how much I love you ..." I told myself that I still had attachments to lust and sentimentality and that I must abandon them. All of a sudden the song from the speaker became soft, although I could still hear it faintly. I thought to myself again that, although I got rid of the attachments in the dimensions that I am aware of, they must still exist in the microscopic dimensions that I am not aware of. I said to myself, "Teacher, I do not even want that little bit of it." Immediately the sound from the speaker disappeared. The experience made me have a deeper understanding of what Teacher said in Zhuan Falun,

"Cultivation depends on one's own efforts, while the transformation of gong is done by one's master." What are we really capable of doing? In reality, it is all done by Teacher, and we must have the wish to abandon the attachments.

In the past, before I achieved this level of understanding, I would think the noise from the loudspeaker was trying to interfere with my sending forth righteous thoughts. But isn't this notion incorrect, since Teacher has told us that we should deny even the very emergence of the old forces?

2. Some practitioners regard their physical discomforts as interference. I remember a fellow practitioner told me that she could not lift up her arms when doing the Falun Dafa exercises. I asked her, "Teacher tells us to do the three things well. Which of them have you not done well? You must look inwards." She told me she rarely clarified the truth. I then shared with her the importance of clarifying the truth. When I went to her home again, she told me that she took almost every opportunity to tell people the truth and produced a lot of truth-clarification materials to hand out. Also, her arms do not hurt anymore and she can lift them up when doing the exercises.

When we encounter ordeals, we should always understand them from the point of the Fa, look inwards and cultivate ourselves as we walk the path arranged by Teacher. We should truly negate the old forces' arrangements by thoroughly removing their existence in our minds. I enlightened to the fact that we should not be persecuted because of our attachments. We have attachments only because we have not fully assimilated to Dafa and still need to improve. Our having attachments has no relationship with the persecution. We need to study the Fa more and send forth more righteous thoughts to purify ourselves and do better in clarifying the truth to save sentient beings. We should not study the Fa and send righteous thoughts to reduce the chance of being persecuted by the old forces.

Lastly, I would like to finish by quoting Teacher's words:

"When you encounter ordeals during your cultivation, you have got to cultivate yourself and look at yourself--that doesn't mean acknowledging the ordeals arranged by the old forces and trying to do well amidst the ordeals they've arranged, that's not the case. We negate even the very emergence of the old forces and everything that they've arranged; we don't even acknowledge their existence. We're fundamentally negating all of their things, and all of, and only, the things you do while negating and getting rid of them is mighty-virtue. It's not that you're cultivating amidst the ordeals they created. Rather, you are to walk your own path well while not acknowledging them, not even acknowledging the elimination of their ordeals' manifestations. (Applause) So looking at it from this angle, what we need to do is completely negate the old forces. Dafa disciples and I don't even acknowledge the manifestations of their last-ditch efforts."

("Teaching the Fa at the 2004 Chicago Conference")

These are my limited understandings. Please kindly correct me if there is any mistake.

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