Validating Ourselves Is the Enemy of Group Cooperation

By Ren Zhong

(Clearwisdom.net) During the last several years of working on Dafa projects, be it working at the local assistance center during the personal cultivation period, or doing coordination work for the Falun Dafa Association during the Fa rectification, I have found that there is one thing that is difficult to detect. It is neglected by many practitioners, and destructive to the group's Dafa work as a whole. That one thing is validating oneself.

What is validating oneself? In my personal understanding, it is talking about and validating the Fa on the surface, but ultimately for personal gains and for the validation of oneself.

Why is the attachment to validating oneself so difficult to detect? First, this attachment is deeply hidden, and is hard for others or oneself to find. Second, looking from the surface, doing things for the validation of oneself is almost identical as doing things to validate the Fa. It is easy for others to think that one is only validating the Fa.

"Validating oneself" is an attachment that every practitioner needs to eliminate. Master told us that no human attachment can be brought to the Heavens. I would like to point out that because we have neglected this attachment, it has already interfered with and damaged group cooperation. The loss has been huge. For example, it almost led me to a huge mistake.

About two years ago, because of shortcomings in my personal cultivation, whenever a conflict occurred, I always used the Fa to examine others or discuss the issue on the surface, without looking inward for my own attachments and problems.

Once, when working together with the coordinator for our region, I disagreed with his ideas and approaches. At the same time, I felt that I was unable to use my greatest potential. I went to former local assistants and told them about the shortcomings I saw in the new coordinator. I also mentioned that we should restore our old local assistance center.

On the surface, my thoughts were not wrong. However, that same evening, a fellow practitioner who was close to me had a dream about a tremendous social chaos in our region. She told me about it. I immediately questioned whether my idea to restore the old local assistance center was based on the Fa. I stopped what I was doing and shared with fellow practitioners. They pointed out that my idea to restore the local assistance center was based on my desire to validate myself.

I looked inward more thoroughly. Deep in my heart, I felt that I was a very capable and experienced local assistant, so that I should be in charge of the coordination work in our region. As a result, when I saw that the current coordinator missed something, instead of supplementing and kindly pointing out his mistake, I was telling others about his mistake in order to establish my own reputation. Can this be based on the Fa? Of course not. I would surely have fallen into the old forces' arrangement. Having realized this, I completely let go of this idea. Looking back, I can clearly see the attachment to validating myself.

I hope my "detour"can remind other practitioners to not make the same mistake.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/6/2/179549.html

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