Do Not Become Attached to "42 Months" By Qing Shan
(Clearwisdom.net) Some Dafa disciples in China have recently revealed a situation on the
Internet that certain disciples in their area had become attached to a time frame after reading
Master's lecture, which mentioned the "42 months" as stated by a disciple in the article
from the Bible's Book of Revelation. Some disciples who did not study the Fa deeply enough
even started to wait and were reluctant to further commit themselves to Fa-rectification work. I
think this is a misunderstanding of the Fa principles as well as an example of manifestations of
human attachments! We need to address this issue seriously right now. "42 Months" is the Old Forces' Arrangement Master did mention what was stated in the Book of Revelation in his lecture "Teaching
the Fa at the Washington, D.C. Fa Conference," "...says that the evil beast would attack
God with his mouth for forty-two months, which is three and a half years. I won't comment on whether
that's the case, but I can say that this evil drama has really come to the final stage, where it has
the will but not the strength to carry on." From His words alone we can clearly see that Master
did not affirm the "42 months," yet he explicitly told us of the important progress, that
"this evil drama has really come to the final stage, where it has the will but not the strength
to carry on." For all the old prophecies in history, no matter how accurate they were at that time, they were
produced in the old cosmos, before Fa-rectification. They only predicted the old forces'
arrangements, many of which have already changed during Fa-rectification. Master basically does not
acknowledge those arrangements at all, so how can we, Master's disciples, become attached to the old
forces' arrangements? How Can We Reach Consummation Without Making the Best Use of Time to Offer Salvation to People? The meaning of our existence lies in Fa-rectification. The progress we have made during our
personal cultivation was only paving the way for us to carry out our current Fa-rectification
mission. Only by making diligent and constant progress and offer salvation to as many people as
possible can we establish the mighty virtue we are supposed to have as Dafa disciples; only then can
we constantly rejuvenate and enrich our own cosmos, according to the requirements of the new cosmos,
so that countless heavenly beings who count on us for their salvation will be truly saved. If,
because of our human attachments, we just sit there and wait for Master to do everything, isn't that
the same as rejecting the most wonderful things Master has prepared for us in order to save us? How
can we reach Consummation that way? Look Inside Ourselves to Break Through the Old Forces' Arrangements We think of non-practitioners as being selfish for planning their actions and commitments around
their personal interests. However, we cannot assume that we can get rid of this, our own selfishness
as a matter of fact. Many of our remaining attachments result from this selfishness, and whether we
can give the selfishness up determines whether we can completely break away from the old forces'
arrangements. We have all come from the old cosmos. All of our notions and arrangements prior to our
cultivation came from the old forces. As I understand from Master's teaching that, selfishness
exists all the way up to a very high level in the cosmos. Every cultivator has selfishness. In order
to do away with it, Fa-rectification disciples must be diligent during Fa-rectification and
"attain the righteous enlightenment of selflessness and altruism" ("Non-omission in
Buddha-Nature," Essentials For Further Advancement) in order to reach the pure standard
of the Fa required from the guardians of the new cosmos. It is therefore of critical importance that we study the Fa well and look inside ourselves in all
circumstances. This is the key point to consider in the decision whether a Dafa disciple can
eventually break away from the old forces. In other words, we can't do away with the old forces'
arrangements simply by eliminating external interferences! We must also pay attention to
assimilating ourselves to the Fa and cultivating ourselves, so that we can distinguish and eliminate
many bad things from the old forces that we still harbor within ourselves, including selfishness,
and many other attachments. Posting date: 10/14/2002 |