(Clearwisdom.net)
Do not act too hastily when you see a fellow practitioner's attachments or deficiencies. You should only give your advice after you have purified yourself. You need to remind him with good intentions in your heart and help him with sincerity. Try as much as you can to use your true nature that you have cultivated in the Fa and use your heart to communicate with him. Do not point fingers and do not carry pre-conceived notions. Quite often words spoken without deliberation tend to contain attachments or prejudices that are yet to be cultivated away. This bad content will affect communications and cause your message to be unacceptable to others, or even generate resentment in others. Things will not go the way you intended them to go, and it can cause many unnecessary misunderstandings and conflicts.
When helping people, do not take a superior stance. Do not feel that you are doing something extra or handing out something. Do not have any thought of seeking things, because you should not forget that the process of helping others is a process of cultivating and purifying oneself. As a matter of fact it is this process that practitioners use to help each other and elevate ourselves together.
When a fellow practitioner points out your attachments or deficiencies, do not deny them right away, or try to evade or cover them up, or to find excuses for them. Sometimes one can sense that one is trying to cover them up, but even he himself is deceived by his own excuses, while the attachments that need to be eliminated are left alone. One needs to deliberate quietly to see if one's thoughts and conduct indeed have some problems. Do they contain any hard-to-detect but impure motives? If the answer is yes, do not run from them and let them slip away. You need to face them squarely. Look deeper into your heart to find their roots. You have to catch them and hold them tight. Try to find out what it is that is causing the problems. When you find it, you need to root it out and get rid of it without hesitation. If the answer is no, then do not do too much explanation to show your innocence.
When a fellow practitioner points out our attachments or deficiencies, sometimes he may carry certain emotions or prejudices of his own, since he may have some things that are yet to be cultivated away. We cannot use his bad attitude or tone of voice as an excuse to reject his criticism, paying attention to "cultivating" him but not ourselves. Remember that Master has said that we need to "look inward unconditionally," no matter how bad his manner is or how deep his misunderstandings toward us are.
One should absolutely not tolerate any attachment or deficiency of one's own. Toward other people's attachments or deficiencies, one should be as tolerant as possible and point them out with good intentions.
Do not be too attached to other people's attachments. Do think often of how to get rid of your own attachments. Do not constantly try to change others. Do think often how to change yourself.
Reviewing Master's article "Pacify the External by Cultivating the Internal" from Essentials for Further Advancement from time to time may help.
