PureInsight | October 22, 2013
[PureInsight.org] One of the most dangerous things in cultivation is that one may not be able to detect one’s human notions for a very long period of time, especially in regards to some trivial attachments. As a result of such a problem, a cultivator may linger at the same level for too long and never get to go beyond the human realm.
My next-door neighbor is a good gardener. She planted many flowers in her yard and they looked beautiful. On several occasions, she approached me and asked, “Hey, you’ve got a very large yard of your own, why don’t you plant some flowers as well?” I said to myself, “I am a cultivator, and I don’t want to be regarded as a strange person by other people. Ok, let me also plant some flowers then.” So I decided to plant the same kind of flowers that she did. After I finished I became very confident and said to myself again, “All of these flowers that I have planted have predestined relationships with me. These flowers will definitely grow better and be more beautiful, because I am a Dafa practitioner.” Every day when I was watering my flowers I would say to them, “The better and more beautiful you grow, the more evident it will be that Dafa cultivators are not ordinary people.” I would also keep telling the flowers, “Please always remember that Falun Dafa is good, Zhen Shan Ren is good.”
However, later on, I began to notice that my flowers were not much better than my neighbor’s. The leaves were not so green and there were not too many flower buds either. Why? I started to calm down and think about it. I immediately realized that I was too attached to certain human notions and my self-ego was very strong. From the very first moment, there was this “ego” in it. “Those flowers are mine. My flowers must be better than others’ because I am not an ordinary person, I am a Dafa practitioner.” Obviously, I had a clear distinction between myself and others and wanted to fight to win against others. Whenever I was watering the flowers, I only talked to them and ignored all the flowers close by in my neighbor’s yard. I even developed jealousy toward my neighbor’s flowers, “Please don’t grow too quickly; don’t grow more beautifully. How can your owner compare with me? I am a cultivator. What can you do about it?”
After I got rid of those attachments I would talk to my neighbor’s flowers whenever I walked by them. I would tell them to remember that “Falun Dafa is good, Zhen Shan Ren is good. Every one of you will have a wonderful future. The better and more beautiful you grow, the happier I will be!”
I purchased a car several years ago. A fellow practitioner helped me select and buy the car. The practitioner told me that the car I bought had remained the best selling car in the country for six consecutive years, and the price for the car had not dropped at all. I developed a sense of pride in my purchase of the car. Every time when I was driving on a busy highway, I would always make comments in my mind on how inferior the other cars on the road were. When I saw a car that was the same model as mine, I would develop some kind of affinity-like sentiment and say to myself, “Hey, that person is shrewd, he’s got a good car just like mine.” When someone passed me whose car I deemed to be inferior to mine, I would say to myself, “Hey, what’s the hurry with such a terrible car? Why don’t you keep a lower profile with such a car?” Every now and then I would ask the fellow practitioner who helped me purchase my car how this particular type of vehicle was doing sales wise and whether or not it was still popular. The fellow practitioner would reply, “It’s doing well, it’s still very popular.” I would then ask, “Has the price dropped?” “Not at all.” After hearing such comments, I would feel very proud of myself. I would feel that I had a superior long-term vision on things. “Hey, look at me, just look at this car I bought!” A sense of superiority would appear in my mind.
So, why did I always think that my car was the best? Why would I come up with so many thoughts and notions when I saw others’ cars? When I gave such thoughts a detailed analysis, I was almost surprised to realize that those thoughts were all generated due to the presence of my “self-ego.” This “self-ego” is alive and it is continuously making comments on this and that. It always thinks that its own stuff is the best in the world and that its own choices are the best. No matter how perfect other people’s things are, it’s very tough for this “self-ego” to accommodate others. Even if this “self-ego” has to accept others, it will still keep finding faults. This has revealed that I have not yet gotten rid of the “selfish shell” that is the characteristic of the old universe. I began to realize just how poorly I behaved when I was having discussions with fellow practitioners. I would always think that my understandings were the best, that my “way” was the most proper one. Even if I accepted other people’s ideas, I would still try hard to find shortcomings in those ideas. For example, I would say to myself “Hey, even though this practitioner is right, he doesn’t cultivate as good as me on a certain aspect.” I had forgotten to accommodate fellow practitioners with an extremely merciful heart. As far as cars are concerned, they are just tools used by human beings for transportation purposes. Different sentient beings from different universes came up with the idea of this car in the human world, and a car was thus made in the world. Such a car is simply waiting for its future to be decided in the process of Fa rectification; it’s waiting to be saved by Dafa practitioners with strong righteous thoughts. How could I have developed such a differential notion towards different cars? After I realized my attachment to “self-ego,” I started to change my attitude towards cars. Now, whenever I see a car, I will say to it, “Please remember that Falun Dafa is good, Zhen Shan Ren is good. Don’t miss this chance of being saved.”
There is another story that I’d like to share. For a very long period of time, I always had this thought: “If I buy things from a shop run by a fellow practitioner, I can always count on getting a good deal.” Sometimes I wouldn’t say too much when paying for things, but other times I would say, “Hey, charge me as much as it’s worth.” Yet deep in my heart I was always hoping that the practitioner would give me a big discount; otherwise I might have just as well bought the same items sometwhere else. It seemed that the fellow practitioner might have sensed my thoughts because every time I was hoping for a deal the practitioner would say to me, “Hey, we are in the same family so I just charged you the wholesale price.”
Once I purchased a remote control from another practitioner’s shop. When I asked how much it was, the practitioner uttered “10 bucks.” I said to myself, “It must be the wholesale price.” However, later on, when I asked a friend of mine about it who also had a shop he told me that he had the same remote control for the same price. I immediately realized that the practitioner didn’t give me a discount on the remote control and at the very same time I also came to see how many human notions I had developed. I had developed this selfish attachment, just like an ordinary person. I decided to send forth righteous thoughts to eliminate these human notions right away.
Sometimes when I was talking to practitioners I would suddenly start to have this thought in my mind, “I am better than others. I have similar understandings on the Fa as others, and I can even talk about things that others won’t be able to talk about at all.” Later on, I also realized that this particular thought was again a revelation of my self-ego. The notion that “I am better than others” was actually an indication that meant I was already lagging behind others. When I was telling myself that I was good, that I was not left behind, it only meant I was completely consumed by my self-ego. Anything that a Dafa practitioner enlightens to is only a tiny bit of knowledge in the vast ocean of Dafa; what does my own understanding amount to? What is it that I can boast about?
I have just revealed some shallow understandings of mine. I decided to write this article to help put myself on the right path. If there are any inappropriate comments, please kindly point them out so that I can correct them.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/119177
