(Minghui.org) Over the past few months, the chaotic situation of the U.S. election has caused me great distress and it has also revealed many of my human attachments.
When I saw those “Big guys” who reversed black and white and accused the good people of doing the bad things that they did themselves, I developed hatred towards them and I couldn’t wait to see them brought to justice.
But when I calmed down and thought about it, it didn’t take much for me to realize that such sentiment isn’t something I should have as a Dafa disciple. I shouldn’t have been influenced by human emotions or confused by the surface illusion. The chaos in the human world is controlled by the evil forces behind the scenes.
When I focused my attention on the people themselves and developed negative thoughts about them, then I fell for the tricks set up by the old forces. When the old forces manipulated those people to do bad things, they didn’t think about saving them, but just to eliminate them after they were used.
When we, Dafa disciples, developed negative thoughts against those people, we were also giving the old forces more excuses to eliminate people. The old forces might also make those people even worse, arguing that they could no longer be saved.
As for those people, they didn’t know the consequences of their wrongdoing, but were unknowingly controlled to walk towards destruction. They were just pitiful.
While we send forth righteous thoughts to eliminate the old forces’ evil factors in other dimensions, we should maintain our compassion towards those people on the human level. Even if they are no longer savable, we shouldn’t hold grudges against them, as it’s something negative and not befitting a Dafa practitioner who is cultivating according to the new universe’s Fa – Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance. When we stop looking at things from the human level, we can easily rectify our own cultivation state and become peaceful again with the help of the Fa.
But at times, just as I calmed down, my emotions arose again when I read about those people and the bad things they did. Sometimes it took a long time before I realized the emotion. Then I would remind myself to look at things based on the Fa, and I would calm down again.
On the other hand, when the situation didn’t develop in the way I had hoped for, I became dejected and sad. Such human thinking is also something for me to cultivate away. The old forces are trying to use such illusion to weaken our righteous thoughts and righteous faith. When we believe that everything we see is true and think that there is no way for things to be turned around, we are acknowledging the old forces’ arrangements and giving them excuses to continue causing trouble.
It’s exactly the same as how we look at physical karma. If we believe we are sick, then we acknowledge it and will truly become sick. Without the righteous thoughts that go beyond the human level, we are just ordinary human beings and we don’t have the extraordinary strength to eliminate the evil.
If we always think about things along the lines of ordinary people, then we are ordinary people and our abilities will be restricted at the surface level.
After I understood this, I realized that no matter how sad or discouraged I felt, I have to correct and control such thoughts and emotions in myself – this process in itself is cultivation. And just suppressing the negative thoughts isn’t enough. Only by fundamentally changing my understanding underneath, can I make true progress in my cultivation.
Some practitioners have shared that the current situation is somewhat similar to that in 1999 in China before the persecution started, when the human heart surfaced among many practitioners. As we are still cultivating, it’s normal for us to still have human thinking. And it’s under such a chaotic situation that our human hearts are revealed. When we look at things from the Fa’s perspective, the chaotic situation is in fact the best opportunity for us to elevate our understandings, rid ourselves of humanness and walk towards divinity. Let’s all cherish the final, fleeting cultivation opportunities and improve together.
In the end, I’d like to suggest that we all study again Master’s article “In Fa-Rectification Your Thoughts Have to be Righteous, Not Human” in The Essentials of Diligent Progress Vol. III.
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Category: Perspective