Cultivating While Doing Business

(Minghui.org) This sharing incorporates the things that several of us have enlightened to as we developed two ordinary businesses over the past few years. Our understanding is that practitioners are supposed to play a leading role in society and one way to do this is by starting and running a successful business.

Three years ago, several of us started a website to deliver alternative news, bringing important truth-clarification materials to people in the U.S. Progress was slow and a lot of money was spent getting the site established. At first we had a mix of practitioners and ordinary people on staff, with one non-practitioner in a leading role. This person had worked for me for many years at another company and had previously done a good job. However, this company wasn’t growing fast enough and lost quite a bit of money. My wife, who was not a practitioner, was getting impatient and angry.

The Correct Starting Point

After looking inward to see my omissions, I realized I hadn’t followed the Fa correctly. The first thing we noticed after looking inward was that we hadn’t measured everyone’s contributions to the business using gain and loss. We needed to measure every person, every vendor, and the company overall. This omission had taken us away from Master’s arrangement and everything was out of balance – how could a business do well if it didn’t conform to the Fa?

Ordinary people gain through the exchange of their hard work, through pursuit, as well as their virtue, while practitioners safeguard their virtue and don’t pursue things the same way ordinary people do. However, it’s possible for practitioners to become wealthy from businesses and still follow Fa principles while safeguarding their virtue.

In “Teaching the Fa and Answering Questions in Guangzhou,” Master said:

“There are several scenarios. Some people get it by exchanging their virtue (de)—they get their good fortune through pursuing it. In the case of some others, it’s accumulated from the past. There are also cases in which people have brought it with them from high levels. There are different situations, so it’s quite complicated and you can’t look at these things in one, formulaic way. Some people simply have virtue, a great deal of virtue, and they can have whatever they want because that is essential. That’s really how it is. Virtue can be transformed into gong and is one of the things that determine a person’s cultivation level and Attainment Status. If someone only seeks good fortune in human society, then he can exchange this thing with others for money and material possessions. Some people make a lot of money with just a little bit of effort, and that’s because they have a lot of virtue. Some people make no money no matter what they do, and this is probably because they have little virtue. These things are not absolute, and of course, some people’s situations are very complicated. I am just talking about the general rule. People with little virtue may not even be able to get anything when they go begging for food. That is because when others give you food, you still have to exchange virtue for it. So when you don’t have any virtue to give them, you won’t get any food. There has to be an exchange because the 'no loss, no gain' property, which balances the universe, is at work.” (Zhuan Falun Fajie - The Law of Zhuan Falun Explained)

Another practitioner shared an understanding about Shen Yun tickets that shook me. She said, “If you pay more, you get more,” meaning people who buy more expensive tickets get more from the show. This sounded simple, but the principle of gain and loss is a Law. The most shocking thing was that even as a Westerner, I had fallen prey to “Party culture” and believed that everyone who saw the show got the same things, regardless of how much they had paid. I enlightened that Party culture is everywhere in the world today, even in our businesses. Only when we strictly followed the principle of “no loss, no gain” was our business able to succeed.

Businesses serve society; for a business to succeed, it must lose and society must gain. We decided to give ordinary people what they wanted, not only what we wanted or thought was good for them. Practitioners were now managing the company in a leading role, not ordinary people. We paid people based on the results they generated, which naturally eliminated those positions that didn’t generate enough revenue to pay for themselves. We set clear goals for people whose job was contributing content and those who promoted stories on social networks. Because we made these goals clear to each team member, they made the decisions themselves and the company is now self-regulating, profitable, and growing, because it conforms to Fa principles. It really was that simple. When we are on the Fa, we are following Master’s arrangements. Because our website now reaches more people, our truth-clarification is more effective, too.

The Need for Security

With the moral decline of ordinary society, everyone realizes the need for increased security. In ancient times, many people didn’t have locks on their doors, which mainly served to keep out animals. Theft was rare, because society’s moral standards were high. Today, due to the final crumbling of ordinary society, demons flood the Internet, manifesting as email spam, malware, phishing attacks and other destructive things. Spies from every government, including the Chinese regime, are rampant, and electronic communications are intercepted and stored. This instills fear and prevents ordinary people from hearing the truth from practitioners. We believed that it would definitely serve society and do many righteous things if we could offer a secure replacement for Skype and email, two major communications systems in use by ordinary society and practitioners.

We encountered interference from the beginning, even when getting a business account from a bank we were already doing business with, because they were worried about their Chinese banking licenses. The fact that this has infested the technology business to this level was quite shocking. It permeates not only banking, but software and hardware, even down to the computer chips, which have spy features built into them. After we clarified the truth and sent very strong righteous thoughts, we were able to break through and get the account. This was a stern warning about our diligence and a hint that many technology companies are compromised, from the smallest start-up to the largest public companies.

Cooperation

While visiting a manager at Epoch Times, I noticed a framed photograph behind his desk of a massive formation of thousands of practitioners forming an image of Zhuan Falun in Taiwan. Suddenly, the level of cooperation required to construct this magnificent image struck me. Truly, every practitioner is a particle of Dafa. I realized how important cooperation is to practitioners, to society in general, and also to ordinary businesses.

We were having a major technical problem with our software, which kept dropping people offline; this had been ongoing for a month. We decided to call a meeting to review all the possible causes. At the beginning of the meeting, we sent righteous thoughts. Afterwards, we studied the Fa for an hour. Everyone was in a very peaceful and righteous state; it seemed like very still water. It was as if our minds were all connected together and we had formed an unstoppable power. Within a few minutes, two of our technical leads had found the problem. It turned out to be a few lines of code. Only with this state of mind, by using the power of the Fa and having our wisdom unlocked by gods, could we achieve this.

A few days later, after completing the exercises, I remembered this passage in Lecture 3 of Zhuan Falun:

“On one occasion I had my mind connected with four or five great enlightened people and great Taos from extremely high levels. Speaking of high levels, their levels were so high that everyday people would find it simply inconceivable. They wanted to know what was on my mind. I have practiced cultivation for so many years. It is absolutely impossible for other people to read my mind, and other people’s supernormal abilities cannot reach me at all. Nobody is able to understand me or know what is on my mind. They wished to know what I was thinking. With my consent, therefore, they linked my mind with theirs for a period of time. After the connection, it was a little unbearable for me because no matter how high or how low my level is, I am among everyday people and still doing something purposeful—that is, saving people—and my heart is devoted to saving people. But how peaceful were their minds? Their minds were tranquil to the point of being scary. It is possible for one person to reach this tranquility. But with four or five people sitting over there with tranquility like that, it resembles a pond of still water with nothing in it.”

I had never understood this passage before, but suddenly, I enlightened that connecting minds together involves a very high level of cooperation. Just like forming that image of Zhuan Falun, if practitioners can achieve this state, then everything will be completed in a “swoosh!” It doesn’t matter what everyone agrees on, the cooperation is most important. It was truly this way for our project.

Loyalty

Another issue we encountered is that of “yi,” or loyalty. A practitioner pointed out this Chinese character and explained that, even though the overall character of loyalty sounds good on the surface, hidden inside is a person using a weapon to protect himself. This implies selfishness at the core, and I noticed this in myself and others on our project and we had to eliminate it. We had shown a lack of tolerance for others and needed to achieve a state like Master discussed in "Teaching the Fa at the 2002 Conference in Philadelphia, U.S.A.:"

“So what's their state of mind? It's tolerance, an extremely immense tolerance, being able to accept other beings, and being able to truly think from other beings' perspectives. This is something a lot of you haven't achieved yet in your cultivation, but you're gradually catching on and achieving it. When another God proposes an idea, they aren't eager to reject it, and they aren't eager to express their own ideas and they don't believe that their own ideas are good. Instead, they look at what the end result of the other God's proposed approach will be. The paths are different--everyone's path is different--and the truths that beings validate and enlighten to in the Fa are different, too, but the results might very well be the same. That's why they look at the results, and if the result of a God's idea can achieve the goal, if it can truly achieve it, then all of them will go along with it. That's how Gods think. Also, if there's something lacking in it they'll unconditionally and quietly supplement it to make things more complete and perfect. That's how they handle things.”

While this was said for practitioners, it’s important to note that the best ordinary companies all have a high degree of cooperation, as they are unknowingly conforming to the Fa at their levels.

Conforming to Ordinary Society

We visited a shop in Taipei that distributes Dafa books around the world. We expected to see the walls covered in Dafa materials, but were surprised to find mainly office supplies and ordinary books. To the side of the cash register in the front was a small rolling cart with a few of copies of each Dafa book. That was the entire Dafa offering in the store. It seemed that we had nearly that many Dafa books in our homes. Further back in the store by the office supplies, I was deeply touched when I noticed some treasured photographs of Master teaching the Fa in China before the persecution. With my celestial eye I saw the entire shop was filled with Falun, more dense than snowflakes in a blizzard. This shop conformed to ordinary society’s business principles, and yet it was a very solemn and important place for practitioners. Any ordinary person who is able to enter that shop is indeed blessed.

Before starting a secure communications project, we surveyed about 400 ordinary people from our website. The results told us that ordinary people's online security problems are becoming severe. Practitioners have also been warned by their local coordinators about the dangers of using Skype. We were even given a hint when a scene from this year’s Shen Yun performance showed an ordinary person being arrested along with practitioners, then obtaining the Fa in jail. Now, ordinary people are being swept up in this evil, whether it’s in a public setting or online: the whole world is being persecuted. While these things seem bad on the surface, as practitioners we should treat them as a golden opportunity for those sentient beings to learn the truth and for the predestined to obtain the Fa.

By serving society well and following the Fa, we hope to open up an important channel to save many sentient beings and help protect practitioners' online security.

Please correct any errors or omissions in my understanding.