(Clearwisdom.net) I read a story the other day about a prime minister who came from Ye County in ancient times. People called him Mao Gong, and it was said that Mao Gong grew up in a very poor family. His father was a cattleman who died when Mao Gong was still a teenager. His future father-in-law funded his study and livelihood. A year after getting married, Mao Gong went to the capital to take the exam to be a public official. He stayed in a hotel where the owner's name was Wang. The owner was very happy to learn that his guest's name was Mao. He treated Mao with warm hospitality and good food and didn't charge him anything. Mao thought this was strange and asked the hotel owner, “We are strangers. Why are you so generous?”

The owner said, “I had a dream two nights ago. In my dream a deity told me that I would host a guest named Mao and that he would place first in the exam. If I ever had trouble in the future, this Mao would save me. The deity asked me to treat you well. So after hearing your name was Mao, I believed the dream.”

Mao Gong was very happy to hear this. He then thought, “I will be an honored person after the exam, and I will be socializing with high ranking officials. My wife has alopecia (hair loss) and is not good looking. I need to replace her, otherwise I would loose face.”

Who would have thought that, after taking the exam three times, he did not even make the list. He was really upset and complained that the dream wasn't true. Embarrassed, he took a detour and did not go back to the hotel on his way home.

After studying hard at home for three years, Mao Gong went to take the exam again. Arriving at the hotel, the owner again welcomed him from far away. Embarrassed Mao Gong said, “Your dream wasn't true: I didn't place first in the exam. But you treated me so well, and now I feel ill at ease.”

The hotel owner laughed out loud, saying, “Don't say my dream wasn't true. It was because your heart was not righteous. Heaven was punishing you and you destroyed your own future.”

Surprised, Mao Gong asked, “What do you mean?”

The owner said, “After you left that day I had another dream in which the deity told me that you would not pass the exam because your heart was not righteous. You wanted to discard your wife and get a new one after you did well on the exam.”

Mao Gong was shocked to hear this and thought, “I'm ashamed. Really, how can I deceive the gods who can see through everything. I only had a thought and didn't even pay attention to it, but the gods knew it. Otherwise, how would this hotel owner know it?”

The owner then said to him, “Don't give up. If you cultivate your heart and get rid of your bad thoughts, you can still pass the exam.”

Mao Gong nodded and dared not have any bad thoughts again. Sure enough, he placed first in the exam.

After reading this story I thought: If it hadn't been for the hotel owner's dream, Mao Gong would have never realized that the reason he did not pass the exam was because his heart was not righteous. He thought that he did not study hard enough and he lacked knowledge. Was that so? From the surface, that thought had nothing to do with the exam.

But, as cultivators, we know that it does.

I remember one time while sharing experiences a practitioner said, “It turns out that from the surface our xinxing problems do not have direct or logical connections with the three things we do. It is really like that.” Many practitioners' experiences published on the Minghui/Clearwisdom website have also talked about this, although it is not clearly pointed out. For example, some practitioners found many attachments after being arrested and persecuted, such as the attachments to comfort, lust, jealousy, fame, etc. On the surface these attachments have no logical connections with the arrest on the human level, but looking from another dimension, this is the direct cause of the persecution. Master warned us that these are our own problems and they are attracted by our human notions. Therefore, when we have problems, we should look inward first. This is the magic tool Master has given us, and we need to know how to find our attachments. We can't look outside, nor can we just look at the problem itself to find our attachments.