Selfish Motivations Are Behind My Exaggerations

(Minghui.org) I used to think that, as a Falun Dafa practitioner, I was an honest person. But recently I realized that I had a tendency to exaggerate and that behind those exaggerations were selfish motivations.

My uncle once said at a family gathering that my words could not be trusted. I was shocked. Why did he say that? I tried to look within, but I didn’t find the main problem.

My daughter was born not long ago, and my wife’s parents helped us to care for the baby when I went to work during the day. They loved the baby so much that they held her often. When I took the night shift, the baby was hard to handle: She wanted to be held and didn’t want to stay in bed. I told my wife, “Please ask your mother to hold her less. I held her for an hour and half tonight, and whenever I put her down she would cry.”

My mother-in-law came to our room the next morning. I told her what had happened the night before and said, “Mother, please hold her less often and let her play with her toys in her bed. I had to hold her for two hours last night.”

I was shocked at my words. Why did I exaggerate the time? Wasn’t this lying? Why did I say it so naturally?” I started to reflect on myself.

I realized that I had a habit of exaggerating. When the workload increased at my job, I would say, “Wow, we finished six months of work in the past few days.” Sometimes, in order to sound convincing, I would exaggerate 10 to 100 or an hour to a whole afternoon. When others asked me to do something extra, I would say I was fully booked: “I have to do this in the morning and do that in the afternoon.” When I was late for work, I would come up with all kinds of excuses, such as the elevator was broken, the traffic was bad, I ran into something, or I had a traffic accident.

A company needed my services on a project, and I was supposed to receive a decent commission. After I heard that the company wanted to cut my payout, I couldn’t calm down. I thought of many reasons on my way to work: “We signed the contract for that amount—how could you just pay me less? I need to support my wife and child and pay my mortgage and car loan. If you cut my commission, where will I get the money to pay my bills?” These thoughts kept jumping into my head, and I was ready to argue with them. Actually, I did not have a mortgage or a car loan, but I could not keep from complaining. That project was eventually canceled.

I was shocked to realize that I told small lies almost every day.

I kept looking within and found that my exaggerations came from several selfish motivations. One was the desire for fame—to blow up something small into a much bigger deal to convince others and prove myself. The second one was laziness—to make minor things sound major and complex to show I was fully occupied. A third one was money—to avoid wasting my time or money. And the last one was comfort—to enjoy the easy life of an everyday person. From all these attachments, I also realized that I had doubts about the Fa and some disbelief in the Fa-rectification in the human world.

However, these exaggerations were hypocritical. They were all rooted in my selfish nature. I always said, “Falun Dafa is good, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good.” But I was not true to what I said—I couldn’t even follow basic “truthfulness.”

Here I expose my attachments on the Minghui website. I must root out the bad intentions and actions that violate the Dafa principles.