Differences between the Attachments of Compassion and Sentimentality

(Minghui.org) I have been feeling tremendous pressure lately, and was being attacked by all kinds of conflicts and friction. I was clueless for a while about where my problems were coming from.

One day while reading Master’s teachings, the word “Compassion” jumped out at me. It suddenly dawned on me that my problem was lack of compassion. I asked myself, “Compassion is the nature of enlightened beings. Do you have compassion?” “No, I do not have it.” “Since you do not have compassion when things happen to you, are you cultivating?” “Not really.” I continued with a third question, “Gods and Buddhas are covering the world with their compassion. But look at you, you are under siege by troubles and conflicts. Could you find something wrong with yourself?”

After some serious soul searching, I was shocked to find my problem. I always felt confident about my cultivation. But in my everyday encounters with friction and various trivial matters, my attitude was far away from the universal characteristics of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. This helped me realize that the unpleasant things that I experienced were arranged by Master to help me, by using people to interact with me. Instead of looking within, and improving myself without conditions, I resorted to human tactics – fighting back. Little by little, the small tests accumulated into barriers that were difficult to overcome. Fortunately, Master never stopped reminding me, using different approaches.

From reading Dafa books and looking within, I learned that the fundamental dividing line between gods and humans comes from the differences between compassion and sentimentality. While divine compassion is unselfish, human sentimentality, a matter within the three-realms, is selfish.

Sentimentality is a substance made of molecules, and it is vulnerable to negative interference from other dimensions. The stronger one holds on to sentimentality, the further away one moves from compassion.

I felt a bit empty in my heart after this realization. How could I miss such a fundamental concept, and waste many years of my time? After I eliminated the bad substances in my dimensional field, I began to see beautiful scenes.

Yet, I am not very excited, because the change is a natural consequence of my new understanding, inspired by Master’s compassion.