Eliminating Notions That Interfere with Our Mission to Validate the Fa and Save Sentient Beings

By a practitioner in China

(Clearwidom.net) While validating the Fa and saving sentient beings, we are likely to form some personal notions or even an attachment to self-conceit. During our interactions with fellow practitioners we tend to display our notions, and thus cause conflicts among practitioners and cause damage to our unity.

Since September 2005, I have repeatedly submitted articles to the Minghui (Clearwisdom) website. I felt it was an approach to validate the Fa. Over time, I formed a notion that writing articles is the best way to validate the Fa. Consequently, I failed to consider this issue from within the Fa.

Fellow practitioner A is responsible for making truth-clarification materials. He feels there is nothing more important than making truth-clarification materials. He has repeatedly tried to persuade me to give up writing. In addition, he organized the purchases of computers and supplied fellow practitioners with computers so that we would have a lot of in-home truth-clarification materials sites. He advised me to devote myself to maintaining a truth-clarification site.

Fellow practitioner B is responsible for buying supplies, distributing truth-clarification materials, and contacting fellow practitioners. Hence, he was very interested in talking about issues related to his responsibilities. He would also emphasize the importance of his responsibilities.

Gradually the three of us started to coordinate truth-clarification work in our county and neighboring areas, and supply truth-clarification materials. However, we had never coordinated with each other well owing to our own, personal notions. Although the truth-clarification sites have never stopped running, they failed to be 100% effective. Because we failed to identify our notions, we always failed to achieve our expected results, although we thought we were all doing our best to cooperate with each other. Whenever a problem came up, we always thought of validating ourselves.

Once fellow practitioner A wanted to have an experience-sharing conference and asked me to notify the fellow practitioners whom I knew. I felt we hadn't prepared well and we had different understandings regarding truth-clarification work, so I didn't notify fellow practitioners in the farming villages to attend the Fa conference. At that solemn and sacred conference, we sang completely different tunes. I talked about the importance of writing articles, while A talked about the importance of providing truth-clarification materials. Other practitioners shared their respective understandings. Some fellow practitioners acted rather pleased with themselves.

Because we failed to cooperate with each other well in terms of revealing the local persecution and clarifying the truth, the police arrested five fellow practitioners in the neighboring city three days after the Fa conference. Despite the painful loss, we failed to identify our individual problems.

One day a notebook computer at the truth-clarification site broke. Practitioner A came to me and we worked together in the hopes of fixing it, but we couldn't get it to work. At the time we thought it was because we didn't have strong righteous thoughts. On the third day, we went to see practitioner A again to try to fix the notebook computer. When we shared our thoughts with each other, practitioner A said, "We failed to utilize our respective talents and skills and we failed to cooperate with each other. That's why we have encountered so many problems. We should have more than just one truth-clarification materials site. After all, teaching one to fish is better than giving one a fish."

Teacher said,

"All human attachments and notions that interfere with validating the Fa and saving sentient beings must be removed. For cultivators traveling a divine path, is it really that hard to get rid of those attachments that arise from human thinking and to change those notions? If a cultivator doesn't want to get rid of even those things, well, how is he to show that he's a cultivator?" ("The Closer to the End, the More Diligent You Should Be")

It was not until then that I realized my own attachments and the fundamental reason why we failed to cooperate with each other. It was all because of our human attachments and notions that we had formed during the process of validating the Fa and saving sentient beings. The evils took advantage of our omissions and strengthened our attachments and notions. Although we had been studying the Fa, we had never really let go of our human thoughts when we studied the Fa. We had been studying the Fa with human attachments.

I am confident that we will be able to eliminate these human thoughts and notions, be able to cooperate with each other, and complete the final part of our journey well. Hopefully this article will serve as a reminder for fellow practitioners.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2006/1/10/118362.html

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