My Experience of Eliminating Worldly Mentalities

By a Falun Dafa practitioner from Taiwan

(Clearwisdom.net)

In Hong Yin, "Salvation Far and Wide," Teacher wrote,

"Lay down your human, mundane mind,
The Fa gained, you now stand divine,
Break free, and depart, these Three Realms,
And ascend to Heaven with a Buddha Body."

Cultivation is to remove the worldly mentality. The range of this mentality, however, is very wide. Since I started to cultivate four and half years ago, with the in-depth understanding of Fa principles, I have a deeper understanding of the worldly mentality.

At the beginning of cultivation, the pursuit of fame and gain is the worldly mentality that is easiest to be perceived. Then follows the mentalities of showing off, jealousy, lust, and amusement. With more cultivation time, I gradually have found many other mentalities that I did not regard as worldly mentalities before.

These are reflected in the ways we deal with people and handle issues; they reflect behavior that is habitual and automatic. I did not realize that they were also reflections of a worldly mentality. These repetitive reactions are gradually formed in social activity.

When I looked inside, I found these mentalities were often manifested in how I got along with people. No matter how I treat people or fellow practitioners in the different situations in which we interact, much of it is due to worldly mentalities. For example, I agree with this practitioner, I do not agree with that one; I like this practitioner or dislike that one. In the face of a challenging issue, the first reaction is often the manifestation of this worldly mentality.

Even in many thoughts, what comes up is the idea of competing with another practitioner and treating Dafa work as a field of competition.

In "Further Elimination of Attachments" in Essentials for Further Advancement Teacher said,

"Our students, including our staff, are jealous of each other even in their work for Dafa. Can you become a Buddha this way? I want to have a loose administration simply because you cannot let go of ordinary human things and so will feel uneasy in your work. Dafa belongs to the entire universe, and not to any one, insignificant individual. Whoever does the work is spreading Dafa. It is not important whether it should be done by you or by others. Are you going to bring to a paradise this attachment that you cannot let go of, and contend with Buddhas? Nobody should treat Dafa as his own exclusive thing. Get rid of that thought that you've been treated unfairly! When your mind cannot get over something, isn't it caused by your attachment?"

Sometimes in our consciousness and subconsciousness, although we do not pursue worldly people's fame and gain, we pursue emulation of fellow practitioners. Even if we do not pursue emulation of fellow practitioners, we calculate the mighty virtue of doing something, even comparing ourselves with other practitioners. When I find these hidden thoughts, I find myself laughable and pitiful.

I immediately realize that I am a cultivator, a person walking on the path of godhood, an enlightened being in the new universe, so how can I behave so shamefully? Just as an adult will not treat a child like an adult, a god will not treat a human like a god. So should I not treat worldly people and fellow practitioners with a bigger heart? This bigger heart is a matter of self-restraint in ordinary society. It implies the elevation of a cultivator's level. How can we enlarge our hearts if we cannot remove our attachments?

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2007/4/8/152171.html

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