PureInsight | October 4, 2015
[PureInsight.org] Recently, I happened to frequently meet fellow practitioners. I noticed one thing from my encounters with these practitioners. Many of them didn’t seem to pay attention to their personal cultivation. I’d like to share some of those issues here.
1) Chit Chat
When cultivators meet, they should discuss their cultivation and share Fa validation experiences amongst themselves. They should exchange ideas on how to improve cultivation as well as how to do an even better job of Fa validation. However, some practitioners who are very close to one and other tend to enjoy chit chat. They joke around and contradict each other. To an outsider, these fellow practitioners appear to be jostling. This is not appropriate behavior for a cultivator. I think this is a direct result of the CCP’s Party cultural influence. Falun Dafa cultivators should not fall victim to such behavior. When a cultivator behaves this way, no one can see the cultivator’s sincerity, kindness and compassion. How can a cultivator behave in such a way? What’s more, it will make it easy for the evil to interfere with the cultivators. As far as I know, these practitioners tend to have trouble calming their minds when studying the Fa and they also tend to complain against others.
After going through so many years of hardship, we understand that a cultivator has really matured, and behaved properly toward people who are very close to him or her. When dealing with people we hardly know, we tend to behave properly because we don’t want to lose face. Now, when dealing with close relatives or friends, we slack off and our hidden attachments are exposed. Actually, we are presenting our true image when we are off guard.
I’ve heard many stories from family members of fellow practitioners who told me, “Hey, look at my daughter, she behaves so nicely in society, but she is a completely different person at home. She doesn’t behave like a cultivator at all, she is just faking it.” Of course, such stories tend to be one-sided. We shouldn’t concern ourselves too much over such allegations. However, we need to ask, “Are we behaving like cultivators all the time?” This also reminds me of one other issue. When we clarify the truth to people we don’t know too much, it always seems to be relatively easy. When we try to clarify the truth to our family members, it often seems to be very tough and they just don’t want to listen to us. Many times, our family members would tell us that if we did exactly what the book says, they would listen.
2) Security Issue
When fellow practitioners talk to each other, they sometimes would say things that should not be discussed in public. They would discuss who the local coordinator is, who is responsible for the site of document preparation, who is helping publish Dafa books and who is helping people prepare documents to sue Jiang, etc. Right now, the evil forces are not yet completely eliminated. We need to be mindful of security and safety. Talking about those things won’t help us in our cultivation; actually, such talks have nothing to do with cultivation. It is one’s show-off mentality that drives a cultivator towards this problem.
3) Attachment to Politics
As the Fa rectification process goes on, many significant changes are taking place in society. Sometimes, every week, or even every day, we would see some dramatic changes. When faced with such rapid change in society, many fellow practitioners don’t do more to save people; instead, they spend many hours talking about those changes. They read the newspapers every day and begin to develop great hopes for the current Chinese government leader to dissolve the CCP. These practitioners tend to slack off in their personal cultivation as well as in their Fa validation projects. They behave like ordinary people. If many practitioners fall victim to such behavior, it will definitely create trouble. The evil forces will most likely take advantage of our attachments and interfere with us to block the Fa verification process.
4) Attachment to Prior Lives
Many fellow practitioners have tough living conditions right now. This, of course, is a direct result of the evil CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong. Now, some of those fellow practitioners don’t seem to have gotten rid of their hidden attachments to fame and material gain, yet, now that they are unable to get fame or gain, they begin to talk about their prior lives to comfort themselves. They would discuss who they were and what they did in their prior lives, etc.
I can list still more, but what I’d like to point out is that the behavior we present to the outside world is actually the true image of ourselves. It is a rare opportunity to cultivate Falun Dafa. We really should cherish such a chance as we don’t want to be left behind due to our attachments. We must be responsible to us! Cultivation is not trivial. It is the most serious thing in the human world!
I am not complaining about fellow practitioners’ shortcomings, rather, I just want to remind everyone to treat cultivation seriously. Let’s all follow the Fa as our teacher.
Translated from: http://www.zhengjian.org/node/147404
