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How Deeply Do We Believe in Master?

August 16, 2006 |   By a Falun Dafa practitioner from Henan Province

(Clearwisdom.net) Due to our human notions and limited cultivation levels, we usually have doubts about things that do not agree with our concepts and are deemed incredible. Therefore, we often use our human heart to judge Dafa arbitrarily and have biased thoughts, for example, "Is it right?" "Is it possible?" etc. When Master's new articles are published, because we do not follow the Fa-rectification process closely, we also deviate from the main direction of Fa-rectification due to our human notions.

In fact, cultivation is an issue of enlightenment, or, as it is said in the West, it is an issue of "faith." Whether the practitioners deeply believe in Master and the Fa has direct impact on their righteous thoughts. Master said,

"What's critical is whether you can be steadfast and whether you can finish your cultivation." ("Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Switzerland")

However, many practitioners were intimidated by the current situation and thus didn't walk forward, and some even gave up cultivation because they did not understand a word Master said.

Since the rampant persecution started in 1999, many practitioners have given up believing in the Fa for various reasons, which showed that they didn't have righteous and solid belief in Dafa. Master gave us such an example:

"In the past, there was a cultivator of the Dao walking on the street while drinking. He suddenly saw someone. This person was just who he'd been looking for -- someone who was able to cultivate the Dao. So he wanted to save this person and take him as his disciple. He asked this person, 'Do you want to follow me to cultivate the Dao?' This person's enlightenment quality and inborn quality were very good, and he said, 'I do.' 'Do you dare to follow me?' He replied, 'Yes, I do!' 'Do you dare to follow me wherever I go?' 'Yes.' 'Okay. Now follow me!' Saying that, he put his palm-sized wine gourd on the ground, opened the lid, and jumped into the gourd. This person saw that his master had jumped in, so he imitated his master and jumped into the gourd as well. The bystanders all leaned over and looked inside the gourd. 'Wow!' There was a vast world inside the gourd -- really vast." ( U.S. West Fa Conference, 1999, provisional translation subject to further improvement)

Practitioners can make it to today with solid faith in most of the Fa. However, because we do not believe in some of the Fa firmly, the evil takes advantage of our loopholes and leads us on detours in our cultivation journey of the Fa-rectification.

For example, Master told us not to cooperate with any evil arrangement and also to eliminate the evil with righteous thoughts and validate the Fa. Thus the evil does not dare to persecute us. However, when facing the evil, we may be deceived by the evil's strong appearance: we may even fear it. As a result, we sometimes don't want to have a "conflict" with the evil, we dare not even clarify the truth, and we become passive in the face of the persecution. But doing so can result in more severe persecution. In fact, the goal of clarifying the truth is to save sentient beings. So whoever he is, at the very least, he is a sentient being. To rescue those sentient beings who have been deceived, we must clarify the truth but not "fight" with others.

Moreover, do the practitioners that exhibit sickness karma, especially big sickness karma, truly treat themselves as cultivators and pay no attention to any "sickness" whatsoever? Do they completely let go of everything, behave like an upstanding and noble Dafa disciple who has no resentment or attachments, and leave it to Master to arrange whether they stay or leave? Do the practitioners diagnosed with incurable diseases still feel unsure and thus go to the hospital? Do they feel that it's better to take some medicine? Doesn't it show that they don't have righteous and solid belief in Dafa?

We are disciples that Master personally and mercifully has saved. Let alone an ordinary hospital, not even a god of the cosmos would dare to interfere with our cultivation. Then besides Master, whom can we believe in? Not having solid belief in the Fa will result in a bigger tribulation.

In addition, Master told us that doing the five exercises is the best way to get rid of fatigue. However, many of us, including me, usually ignore doing the five exercises. In the case of feeling tired, the ordinary method would be to sleep more instead of doing the exercises. According to experience sharing from fellow practitioners who regularly do the five exercises, they usually sleep three or four hours a day and they still do well in Dafa validating work. Do we truly believe that doing the exercises can greatly change our body?

We have seen many things: the start of the persecution on July 20, 1999; the staged "Tiananmen Square Immolation;" the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party; and the exposure of secret concentration camps in China. In the face of these events, many practitioners gave up cultivation due to human notions. They even accepted false enlightenment and "demonic interference from one's own mind," and thought that they had cultivated higher than others. In fact, Master has already told us about these things. However, how much do we believe in and understand them?

On our future cultivation journey, there still remains an issue of whether we fundamentally believe in the Fa or not. For Dafa disciples, each step we take is crucial. Even until the last day of Fa-rectification, there is still an issue of testing whether we can be fundamentally resolute in the Fa. Therefore, we have to make our thoughts righteous, deeply believe in Master and the Fa at all times, and take every step to validate Dafa well.