I recently met a practitioner who declared that she did not strive forward vigorously to overcome her tribulations. She repeated this phrase twice in our conversation. I reminded her that her tribulations were interference from the old forces in validating the Fa, and not to regard them as hardships experienced in personal cultivation. Teacher said very clearly,
"Except for newer students, from July 20 of 1999 on, Master hasn't created any personal cultivation tests for you, and that's because overall your personal cultivation has changed in every respect so that it's in the direction of saving sentient beings and validating Dafa."
(Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference).
After she heard this, she came to appreciate the arrangement made by Teacher to help her enlighten to this matter.
However, Teacher's arrangement was also to help me improve myself. Then, where was my problem? After a while, I came to realize that there were some problems in my own thoughts in denying the arrangement of the old forces.
In my conversation with the practitioner, I became aware that sometimes I also forgot what Teacher had said about rejecting the persecution rather than "overcoming tribulations", or "going through an obstacle". I also noticed in the conversations of some practitioners, including articles on the Clearwisdom website and presentations at Fa conferences, that there were similar phrases used about having righteous thoughts and behavior to deny and reject the persecution as "overcoming tribulations".
Some of the phrases I noticed were, "You overcame this tribulation very well", "I did not overcome this tribulation", "She got through the obstacle well", and "This tribulation was not overcome well". More importantly, it is a problem if we think of it as overcoming tribulations in personal cultivation instead of denying the persecution, and thereby directly or indirectly accepting the interference of the old forces as hardships. Therefore, I wrote this article as a reference for practitioners.