PureInsight | November 19, 2001
I remember that I had a dream in which my daughter and I were traveling by air. Suddenly, the plane moved up rapidly. I felt that my head was so heavy that I could hardly lift it. Several seconds later, the plane suddenly started a rapid descent. I was so alarmed that I felt as if my heart had been quickly lifted up to my throat. While I heard some fellow passengers crying out, I cried out as well. I realized that the plane was about to crash to the ground when I saw the skyscrapers through the window of the plane passing by in a flash. At this moment, I remembered that I was a practitioner, a disciple of Falun Dafa, all at once. How could I fear death like the others? And then I patted my daughter sitting in front of me and said to her, 'We are different from the rest of them, aren’t we?' Both my daughter and I nodded to each other knowingly. I waited for the moment when the plane hit the ground, even with a little excitement. Then I felt the wheels of the plane smoothly touching the ground. Everything was over.
When I opened my eyes, I realized that it had all been just a dream. And I felt, with a sense of excitement, that since I was able to let go of life and death, even in a dream, I could certainly let go of life and death in real life and really let go of humanness.
As I progressed in Fa-rectification cultivation, I realized that my thoughts in the dream were still very human. How could you leave humanness behind if you still held on to the human way of thinking? Not being afraid of death and letting go of life and death were two different realms. We should not think that being able to let go of life and death is the same as not being afraid of death. If that were the case, we would not need to go through cultivation practice. If an ordinary person becomes wary of the world and does not want to live anymore, can he become a Buddha after death?
In fact, life and death are just the manifestations of arriving at, and leaving, this dimension of everyday people. They are delusions, and they are also notions of this space of ordinary people. If you have this type of notion in your mind, you will be limited by it.
What is life, actually? What is death, actually? Death is life, isn’t it? No lives may die. There is no life and no death to gods. The concept of life and death does not exist for them. It's just like someone putting on a coat when he goes out and taking it off when he comes home. Can you say that he is now a different person?
If a cultivator has the concept of life and death in his mind, he will have to let go of them. If there were some changes in his mind, and the concepts of life and death were gone, there would be no need of letting go of life and death, and then the thought of letting go of life and death could be abandoned. In fact, how many concepts in this space of ordinary people follow along the same lines? To truly let go of humanness is to remove this layer, this coat that is made up of human notions. Obviously, I haven’t taken the coat off completely yet, but I feel that I am truly leaving humanness behind, step by step.
Translated from:
http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2001/11/7/12339.html
