By a practitioner in Heilongjiang Province

(Clearwisdom.net ) During cultivation, being attached to one's self is very bad. It seriously affects a cultivator's improvement, has an impact on saving sentient beings, and even becomes a loophole for persecution by the old forces.

The attachment to self mainly indicates the attachment to personal abilities. In my experience, when I submitted an article to the Minghui (Chinese version of Clearwisdom) website, the editors had to reflect on the possibility of my article being published based on my "ability" to write. In my article, I bragged about how I persuaded many people to quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); how I created an environment in my workplace for validating Dafa; what I did for Dafa projects, etc. Those attachments emerged from my mind unknowingly in daily life and I simply did not recognize them.

This attachment to self was also reflected in my attitude towards and judgment of other practitioners' performances. For example, I would think: Practitioner A persuaded 10,000 people to quit the CCP and he is really good; Practitioner B's righteous thoughts are strong; Practitioner C's technical skill is high; Practitioner D is doing the three things really well, etc.

In fact, no matter how well fellow practitioners or I do, all of these abilities are provided by Master and everything should be credited to Master and Dafa. Without Master and Dafa, could our lives exist? Without Dafa's opening up our wisdom, could we do anything? Master is rectifying the Fa and saving the great Universe; all this is done by Master. What we do is only the reflected formation of universal changes. In other words, it is Master who selected us and we are walking the paths that Master arranged.

Fellow practitioners might already be enlightened to what I mentioned, but I just truly realized it today when analyzing my attachment to self. With the Fa-rectification approaching the end, we have gone through repeated difficulties over so many years that I feel I should have earned some merits. Even without merits, I should at least make efforts. However, all we have done we are doing for ourselves, aren't we? What merits should we talk about then? In fact, I realized this is an issue of respecting Master and Dafa. Without Master's protection we would not have been able to come this far.

March 17, 2008