My Understanding of “A Life of Cultivation”

By Yuanyuan, a Falun Dafa practitioner in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province

(Clearwisdom.net)

One day, I was memorizing Zhuan Falun. In Lecture Two, in the section “The Supernormal Ability of Precognition and Retrocognition,” two sentences especially touched me. In fact, I felt a shock in my heart. The first sentence was “There is another way to change one’s life, and this is the only way: It is that this person takes the path of cultivation practice from now on.” The other was “As a practitioner, your course of life can be altered. Only through cultivation practice can your life be altered.”

From these two sentences, I suddenly enlightened: when a person takes a path of cultivation, his or her life becomes a life of cultivation. Therefore, anything that happens in life, even small occurrences that one wouldn't even notice if not paying attention, are relevant to a person's cultivation, including “xinxing” improvement and letting go of attachments and bad notions. When you are facing an issue, your first reaction and thoughts and whether or not they are based on Fa will tell you if you are walking a path of cultivation. If your thinking is not based on the “Fa”, then you are using ordinary methods and means to deal with the issue. At that moment, you are not walking the path Teacher arranged for you. You are like one of the people Teacher described,

“In the past, whether people practiced qigong in parks or at home, they did it with much effort and dedication, and they practiced quite well. Once they stepped out the door, they would act differently and go their own way, competing and fighting with others for fame and profit among everyday people.” (Zhuan Falun, Lecture One, “Why Doesn't Your Gong Increase with Your Practice?”)

When your thinking is based on the Fa, you are walking the path Teacher set for you. Even if we do not initially pay attention and have ordinary thinking, we can realize our mistakes and correct ourselves. We then are walking the path of cultivation. Once we are back on the path, we become aware of the detour we had taken and learn from our mistakes.

Once I enlightened to the Fa, I started to pay attention to my own thoughts. When I started to feel my heart being elated or disturbed, I detached myself from the event or the words that triggered the attachments, which previously might have caused irrational and emotional thoughts and behavior. I focused my mind on the Fa and remembered that the events or the words must have been arranged for my cultivation. If my heart was uneasy, there must have been some attachments or notions that I need to search for. Just that simply, I was able to put myself into the state of cultivation and suppress the uneasy heart. I could find some bad notions and attachments and rid myself of them. Afterward, I immediately felt that my heart was light.

When I wrote this, I finally seemed to understand why Teacher repeatedly tells us to study the Fa more. I understood so much Fa from just those two sentences. I think if we study “Zhuan Falun” calmly, we will enlighten to many things with each reading. We should remember that Zhuan Falun can guide us to walk the cultivation path well.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2007/3/8/150341.html

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