(Clearwisdom.net) If a person does not cultivate himself, he will never reach consummation no matter how many things he has done for Dafa. A God only looks at a person's heart, not how many things he has done. As practitioners we do a lot of things to validate Dafa, but should not use how many things that we have done to substitute for cultivation. Saving sentient beings is very important. The three things that Teacher requires of us--studying Fa, sending righteous thoughts, and clarifying the truth--should not be separated individually. Doing these three things well is the best way for Fa-rectification period practitioners to improve our cultivation and save sentient beings. Each one of these three contains the other two. This is another expression of the harmony of the Dafa.
I noticed that in the past six months, Teacher has been emphasizing the importance of self-improvement in a couple of his teachings, which made me realize that the reason we had some problems with cultivators as a whole body was that individual practitioners failed to improve themselves. Right here, I'd like to point out one thing. When some practitioners talked about "as an integrated body, we have some problems," they seemed to have unknowingly excluded themselves, as if the problem was just for the whole body, and had nothing to do with individual practitioners. Therefore they appeared indifferent to the problems. In my opinion, this kind of attitude is exactly the reason why we have failed to resolve various problems appearing in our cultivation. If the whole body of practitioners encounters trouble, it must be that the majority of practitioners have xinxing problems. How can individual practitioners not be part of the problem? Oftentimes when we point out other practitioners' weaknesses and/or give advice to them, we are always very talkative and think we are right. But when the situation is reversed, we usually do not truly pay attention to other practitioners' advice, nor do we carefully consider their opinion. Now that we have a serious problem, namely, several practitioners have been arrested, I think each and everyone of us should seriously look inside, which is the fundamental solution to the problem.
Teacher said in Lecturing on and Explaining the Fa at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference:
"I hope that every Dafa disciple won't overemphasize the surface form of things. Your own cultivation, your own improvement, your validating the Fa amidst the evil, saving sentient beings, and steadfastly walking the path that you should take, doing all these well, that's what counts most."
Postscript: After finishing this article, there were still some points that needed to be revised, so I had not planned to publish this article right away. However, some bad news came again: another practitioner who worked on making truth-clarifying materials was arrested. Therefore, I felt I must send this article out right away. Please point out anything that you find inappropriate or incorrect.
(Please refer to http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/7/14/38106.html for the first part of the article.)
