By a Falun Gong practitioner in Taiwan

(Clearwisdom.net) Cultivation practice is a serious matter. If we cannot keep every single thought within the Fa, the evil will take advantage of our omissions. If we cannot enlighten ourselves within the Fa and search inward, we may misinterpret sudden or continuous incorrect situations resulting from laws of nature. "Natural" does not exist and every incident has reasons behind it. I will mention a few things from my daily life as examples.

Recently, my children were constantly against me. At the beginning, I treated the situations with human notions, "My children are teenagers now and have become more rebellious than before, or they have a lot of pressure from school so they spend less time studying the Fa or practicing the exercises." I found a lot of reasons for my children to explain why they were not steadfast. However, I ignored to search inward and constantly thought the situation was because of their states of cultivation.

The normal approach for me to teach my children is to give my advice with compassionate words first. If this does not work, I will blame her or threaten to punish her. After searching inward I found that I did not match up with the characteristic of the universe, "Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance." With this incident, I had searched outward and tried to find the problems of my children without realizing that it was me that had problems. My patience was not good enough. Whenever I ran into conflict, I could not patiently deal with it, and therefore, the evil took advantage by interfering with my truth-clarifying work using my children.

I asked my husband to buy something, but he bought the wrong item. Instead of communicating with him, I blamed him immediately. My husband became extremely angry when I criticized him. At that moment I thought that my husband was overreacting. It was really unnecessary to get so angry. The next day, I realized that instead of treating myself as a cultivator, I treated myself as an ordinary person. Even if my husband did not get so angry, the evil would like to take advantage of my omission; "See, she could not treat herself as cultivator. Blame her, and wake her up." I felt ashamed when I thought of this.

There was a period of time when all of my colleagues worked together peacefully and harmoniously. I was happy in this environment. However, a couple of colleagues started to say unfriendly things to me. Moreover, one of them started to constantly criticize other people. I felt unhappy about these behaviors, and could not get rid of this attachment for several days. Therefore, the original harmonious atmosphere had changed completely. I found the root cause was because my mind was not clean enough to rectify the incorrect condition around me. After I realized the fact and adjusted myself, my working environment became peaceful and harmonious again.

From the above examples, I found that if my mind were not clean and pure, the environment around me would follow. The environment changes with my mind. If my mind is righteous, the environment is righteous. There is no accidental thing during our cultivation process. We must cultivate our every thought with the Fa, and not let the evil to take advantage of us.

Posting date: 4/4/2006
Original article date: 4/4/2006
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2006/3/21/123340.html

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