(Clearwisdom.net) During a group Fa study, a fellow practitioner read, "When your friends or family suffer, are you moved? How do you weigh them? This is how difficult it is to be a practitioner!" (Lecture Eight, Zhuan Falun)
While listening, unknowingly I took a glance at my wife. Thinking of her, I could not hold back my tears and they ran down my face. This alerted me. I realized that my affection toward my family members was very strong.
Since the start of cultivation in the Fa rectification period, I have found that my affection toward my family was one of the attachments that was very difficult to discard. My wife has been trying to overcome a tribulation of illness karma for more than three years. The process has been slow and painful. Fellow practitioners have given us a lot of help. They pointed out that I had strong affections and these affections were blocking my wife from overcoming the tribulation, and that I should discard this affection. I agreed with them, but I did not seriously look inside for reasons. I did not try to understand the root of my attachment from the Fa and did not dig deeper into myself looking for the root cause.
Later, while I was reading,
"Because of practicing cultivation among everyday people, a lot of our practitioners cannot release many of their attachments. Many attachments have already become second nature, and these people themselves cannot detect them." (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun)
I suddenly understood a lot. I again looked deeper into myself. I did a thorough search for the fundamental attachment that I had been unable to detect: Why was I unable to let go of my affections and what had kept me from diligently following the principles of Dafa?
I kept digging deeper and deeper with a peaceful mind. Finally I found that behind my strong affections was my strong and selfish attachment of fear, which had become second nature. I took my wife's inability to overcome the tribulation too seriously and was afraid that it would cause a negative effect to the image of Dafa when clarifying the truth. In my mind I wanted to let people know that Dafa is good; however, since my wife's physical condition had not shown any obvious improvement since she started cultivation, I worried about how I could help others believe Dafa is good. I kept thinking about how my wife should overcome her tribulation quickly so that I could go out and validate Dafa. But the more I thought about it, the slower her progress was.
When I tried to help my wife with it, I kept adding something selfish to her spatial field. Everyday I said to my wife, "Please cooperate, I am sending forth righteous thoughts to help you to clean up your spatial field and help you to eliminate the tribulation quickly, so that we can validate Dafa well and save more people." My words implied that I had cultivated better than her and that I was at a higher level. Later, as my wife listened to my words over and over again, she started having an aversion to what I was saying and stopped cooperating with me. My attitude toward her also became less compassionate. I started having a negative attitude and I often complained. This situation was taken advantage of by the evil in other dimensions and the gap between my wife and me was enlarged, which made it more difficult for her to overcome the tribulation.
My attachment to my wife's tribulation of illness karma exposed my ordinary people's selfish mentality. During this process, I came to understand the broad and profound meaning of "the entire cultivation process for a practitioner is one of constantly giving up human attachments." (Zhuan Falun) Any ordinary mentality is an attachment that can cause a cultivator to think and act like an ordinary person. When the attachments are eliminated, then a person can go beyond being ordinary.
The above is my personal understanding. Please point out any mistakes.
Category: Improving Oneself
