(Minghui.org) Recently, when I was memorizing the Fa, I came to a sentence in the section “Your Mind Must Be Righteous” in Zhuan Falun:
“Teacher, I’m practicing Falun Dafa now. I’m also very interested in Zhouyi or things like fortune telling. Can I still use them?” (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun)
My heart suddenly “thumped” and I felt like there was something I had to think about because the Fa mentioned something about predictions of the future.
Before the Chinese New Year (in February 2021), as pandemic cases were rising again in China, I told a few colleagues about the prophecy given by an Indian boy, who predicted a big disaster on February 10, when the planetary alignment of six stars took place. There were also a lot of discussion about this online. I became more anxious to see what would happen on the tenth.
When nothing happened on that day, I felt some loss in my heart. This caused my colleagues to be less trustful of prophecies. When I came to this point in my Fa study today, I suddenly realized that we should not pay attention to prophecies and predictions, and we should not watch those articles and videos. Our eagerness to follow prophecies is actually a manifestation of our attachments.
But I know that since the plague broke out, both non-practitioners and some of our fellow practitioners have become obsessed with prophecies. Among fellow practitioners, there are those who use astrology to predict future disasters, and those who start trigrams to predict future disasters and national fortunes, which are actually no longer in line with the teachings of the Fa.
There are also some practitioners who were very concerned about the prophecy of ancient prophet Liu Bowen, Indian boy and so on. In the face of disasters, ordinary people will certainly be very concerned about what will happen in the future, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we are cultivators walking on the path of divinity, so why should we pay so much attention to ordinary people's prophecies?
Although we talked about prophecies with non-practitioners for the sake of truth-clarification, we can’t stick to the predictions and treat those as facts. Otherwise, it might cause much negative effect when the predictions turn out to be inaccurate. After so many years, there have been many lessons in this regard. Many things are changing according to the needs of the Fa-rectification, and it is time we learn to recognize and accept this important reality.
Master said:
“If you go to a fortune teller, you will believe him. Why else would you do it? What he can tell are some superficial things about your past. Yet their substance has already changed. Then think about it, everyone: If you go to a fortune teller, aren’t you listening to and believing him? Then, doesn’t it create a psychological burden for you? Isn’t it an attachment if you burden yourself with it and keep thinking about it?” (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun)
When we read these prophetic articles and watch videos of ordinary people, don’t we also believe them? If we believe them and think about them afterward, that's a kind of attachment.
The sharing article published a couple of days ago, “Thoughts on the End Time for Fa Rectification and Prophecies,” is about some of the future situations that a fellow practitioner has seen with his celestial vision. While it might be helpful for that practitioner who saw it himself, as Dafa disciples, we should be cautious about such prophecies and predictions.
Master has made it very clear on what we should do in the teachings on Zhouyi and fortune-telling in the section of “Your Mind Must Be Righteous” in Zhuan Falun. We should know that we cannot and should not be attached to these. The abovementioned article is just a sharing article by a practitioner. If one is not clear about the Fa, treat the predictions mentioned in the article as the future of Fa-rectification, or even talk about it with ordinary people, that would not be right.
Master said:
“For a Dafa disciple, Consummation is only a matter of the time of return, whereas Fa-rectification is to be left for the future. The future of the cosmos that beings at different levels have seen actually doesn’t exist and is an illusion. At present, humankind’s every day is arranged according to Dafa’s needs; Dafa disciples’ performance in the human world is to be left for history.” (“What Are Supernormal Abilities,” Essentials for Further Advancement II)
We, as Dafa disciples, should focus on doing the three things well. Don’t distract our attention to anything else, or be attached to the end time or when the disaster will happen. We should work on our own cultivation and put our heart and soul into saving others. And when it’s time for us to know about the future plans, Master will find ways to tell us.
As practitioners of Dafa, if we treat the astrological predictions or other prophecies as something remarkable, or even cling to them, we are actually looking down on ourselves. The predictions and prophecies are about things in this surface world, but our goal of cultivation is to reach higher levels.
The universe is very complex with all kinds of lives interacting with each other all the time and things are changing constantly. Even practitioners with celestial vision can only see a very small range of things due to the limitations of their levels and the fact that they are still cultivating in the world.
Once something is said and other practitioners think this is the future, the impact on the practitioners’ community is actually great and it may also affect all aspects of things in society. So if one really knows the truth at a certain level, it's not suitable to say.
In short, the prophecies and predictions are topics that arouse the attention of fellow practitioners, but we should take the Fa as our teacher and think about Master's teaching in this regard. Getting rid of the attachments in this area and cultivating ourselves well is fundamental.
[Editor's note: Views expressed in this article represent the author's own opinions, for which the author is solely responsible. Readers should evaluate the article's merits on their own.]