By Mei, a practitioner in Jiangsu Province

(Clearwisdom.net) One day in March of this year, Teacher arranged an opportunity for me to improve.

A woman (a non-practitioner) in my village was raising funds for the construction of a temple. She wanted everyone in the village to contribute some money to it. When she was collecting money at practitioner X's place, X said that she was not sure and that she would have to consult me. The woman raising funds thought that as long as I said yes, X would donate. I was a little uncomfortable hearing this. Why would X say something like this? This could cause misunderstandings among non-practitioners. This really played into the Chinese Communist Party's accusations that we do not act on our own accord. So I said to the woman, "I am a cultivator. I am neutral towards this whole thing. It's really up to X to decide on her own."

I looked inward after the incident. Why did she come to my home to tell me this? There must be something about which I needed to look inward. After a while, I realized that the root cause was with me. Most of the practitioners in our area are illiterate. When we have group Fa study, it is usually the case that I read one sentence and everyone else repeats after me. Sometimes to speed up their understanding, I take the liberty to interpret the Fa for them, mixed with my human mentalities of zealotry, showing off and superiority. I had my eyes on others' shortcomings and I felt that I was so perfect, short of looking for my own weaknesses. Fellow practitioners treated me as their leader. They were following me instead of the Fa. Teacher said in "How to Provide Assistance" in Essentials for Further Advancement,

"Then how can we do the assistant job well? First off, you should treat yourself as one of the students instead of considering yourself above them."

When I realized that, I made a breakthrough. At group study, fellow practitioners realized that we need to discuss together and we need to follow the Fa, not one person. As a result of looking inward, we all improved.

Teacher said in Hong Yin, "The Difference Between Mortal and Divine,"

What is a human?
Full is he of emotion and desire.
What is a God?
Human thoughts are nowhere found.

I have been cultivating for so many years, but have failed to look inward. I thought I was pretty good. It is so dangerous if we do not truly cultivate ourselves. Evil elements in other dimensions are watching our speech and thoughts. Whatever we are attached to, they will magnify it and take advantage of our loopholes. In the past year, I have been having problems in my physical health. I haven't been able to study the Fa with a calm mind. Sometimes I dozed off over reading the Fa. My memory was failing. I could not calm down to send forth righteous thoughts or do the exercises. I had sickness karma, but I could not get over it. I tried to hide it from other people for fear that people would not understand or because I thought that I could not clarify the truth as usual. I had so many fears and yet, I just held onto them in silence. I was taken advantage of and the evil has been interfering with me all this time. No matter how many times Teacher hinted to me, I didn't enlighten. I let the evil demons capitalize on my weaknesses. This is a huge loophole and I was in grave danger.

I wrote this article to look inward to get rid of these bad mentalities and to negate the interference of the old forces. I have to rectify myself in Dafa and do a good job coordinating. I must walk the final path of cultivation well, do the three things and catch up with the Fa-rectification.

I would also like to remind fellow practitioners, as our mission of assisting the Teacher in Fa-rectification is coming closer to the end, we should wake up. No matter what happens, we should look inward unconditionally. The only way to eliminate any loopholes is to study the Fa well and keep righteous thoughts. As long as I believe in Teacher and the Fa, I will be able to catch up with the Fa-rectification and return home with Teacher.

The above is my limited understanding. Kindly point out anything inappropriate.

Posting date: 6/2/2008
Original article date: 6/1/2008
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/5/21/178756.html

 Yearly Archive  Printer Version