PureInsight | May 31, 2023
[PureInsight.org] Recently, through studying the Fa, reciting the Fa, and practicing, I realized that I still have two major misunderstandings in my cultivation. I wrote it down to share with fellow practitioners, with the intention of improving together.
1. Mistakes in Treating Doing things as Cultivation
To this day, when I am doing things or thinking about problems, sometimes I still break away from the state of a cultivator. I am not studying the Fa with a compassionate attitude. Instead, I still maintain the everyday people principle and a desire for something, doing Dafa-related things with an unclean human mind, for the sake of my own consummation and to achieve my own goals. I have been busy doing Dafa activities for more than 20 years. But because of the wrong base, I did not put myself in the position of a cultivator. Of course, I have not been able to enlighten high-level Fa principles by studying the Fa so far. I did a lot of things, but my xinxing failed to improve. There were a lot of disturbances along the way, I stumbled left and right. It really made the merciful Master worry about it!
Master mentioned in Fa Teaching at the 2019 New York Fa Conference, "The things you do are not cultivation in themselves." I have been practicing for more than 20 years, and I always think that I am practicing well. I treat the implementation of Dafa-related things as cultivation which is exactly the opposite of what Master said.
In the past, no matter whether it was writing about sharing experiences or communicating with fellow practitioners, it was all about myself: how many truth-clarification materials were distributed, how many truth-clarification stickers were posted, how many truth-clarification materials were printed, truth-clarifying coins, etc., and persuaded how many people in the world have quit the CCP. Every time I talk about the things I have done to validate the Fa, I am always complacent, thinking about how well I have done Dafa-related things. Sometimes I look down on fellow practitioners who are too afraid to do Dafa-related things.
In fact, it was because I did not really study Master's Fa well, and I did not really understand what real cultivation is. I mistakenly treated doing things as cultivation, and focused my mind on doing things, instead of letting go of human attachments in the process of doing things as the main thing. So for a long time, I have done a lot of things, but I was slow in getting rid of my attachments, and of course, my improvement is also very slow. In a nutshell, I do not fully understand how to cultivate, and I do not fully understand the special nature of Dafa cultivation. In the current environment where morality is low nowadays, I will be powerless on cultivating.
From Master's lectures, I realized that work is work, not Dafa cultivation. None of us can let go of our role as ordinary people. We should play that role well among ordinary people. We should honor our parents, discipline our children, and maintain good relationship between relatives, friends, and neighbors. Among ordinary people, we should start by being a good person and doing our job well among ordinary people. If we cannot even do our own work well, we might not even be considered a good person among ordinary people. How can we be considered as a cultivator? Therefore, we must cultivate ourselves well. Only by cultivating our xinxing can we raise our level. We must start by getting rid of each human attachment. Only by cultivating ourselves well can we do the three things that Master asked us to do well. But when we are doing these specific projects, we can cultivate ourselves, improve ourselves, and get rid of our human attachments in the process.
2. Look Inwards with Additional Conditions
Master said in Zhuan Falun, “In genuine cultivation practice one must cultivate one’s own heart and inner self. One should search inside oneself rather than outside.” Master told us to look within but did not add any additional conditions on us. Look inward. If we cannot look inward unconditionally, we are not truly looking inward as Master told us. Its manifestations are: looking outward in a disguised form, it seems to be looking inward, but in fact it is looking outward, looking for the problems of the other party and the faults of fellow practitioners; When encountering conflicts, requiring the others to look inward; Originally, one was wrong, but one still insisted the other to look inward; the majority of fellow practitioners only look inward when they encounter problems, and the purpose of looking inward is to solve the problem; there are some fellow practitioners, whenever there is an incident of persecution as a whole, they will look inward in a pointless and meaningless way, and will say indignantly, "We have omissions as a whole, etc."
I personally think that those kinds of looking inward are not the way Master told us to look inward, and they all have conditions attached. We must do this: unconditionally look inward, and when encountering conflicts, no matter who is right or wrong, first look for your own problems. This is the way of looking inward as a practitioner. Only by cultivating our xinxing, we can achieve a higher level.
Chinese version: https://www.zhengjian.org/node/282044
