(Minghui.org) Greetings, esteemed Master and fellow practitioners.
I’d like to share some of the cultivation experiences I encountered during the past year. Looking back, not much has happened in the past year outside of my daily routine, but at the same time, it feels like I haven’t really had many quiet days, either. Almost every day, there are many opportunities for my attachments to show themselves, which means that I am almost always at odds with myself in one way or another.
I hope my experiences below can be helpful to other practitioners in overcoming the same issues.
At the beginning of April, I had to get vaccinated for an event I was attending at my ordinary job, and also because I may need it to help out with Shen Yun in May. Although I knew that getting vaccinated was something that was okay for us to do, I was uneasy at the prospect of getting my shot.
In my spare time, I do volunteer work for another media project writing marketing publications. Because of this, I often try to keep myself up-to-date with the latest news that the readers care about so I can better communicate with them. One of these hot topics was the issue of vaccine safety. I ended up getting pulled into this topic and began to research this topic.
As a result, when it was time for me to get the vaccine, all of the matter that has accumulated in my head—about how the pharmaceutical companies didn’t follow protocol, about side effects, and about young people dying after the shot—overwhelmed me. When I went into the pharmacy, I was fighting with these thoughts, between doing what I was supposed to do and giving in to irrational fear.
Over and over again, I recited the Fa silently in my head, but more out of desperation than anything else. I recited the Fa because I knew that if I didn’t, fear would overpower me in my mind.
This state continued until after I got the shot and returned home. However, a few hours later, I began to feel that this state wasn’t right. I felt that I shouldn’t be this tense. After all, this fear was not a part of my true self and had no business being in my space. From that point on, I started to treat this fear differently: not as an equal, but as something external and lesser than myself. Every time a doubt or thought would come up, I would imagine it as a child throwing a tantrum and ignoring it—and slowly, the thoughts became less intrusive and more manageable.
Yet, when I was studying the Fa later that day, my understanding of the situation changed again. I realized that instead of fighting this fear as an external threat only, I should also be looking within for any issues of my own. If I didn’t have shortcomings in this respect, no interference would be allowed to find me.
I found two attachments that day that caused this tribulation. One was an attachment to wanting to know the future and having the future follow my plans. This directly led to an inability to firmly believe in Master and the Fa, because I had subconsciously dictated how the future should play out in situations where I required Master’s assistance, and if things didn’t meet my expectations, I believed that Master wasn’t taking care of me. In hindsight, this is a highly disrespectful thought towards Master and the Fa, an arrogance that presumes that I know better than Master what the plan for myself should be.
Master said:
“How could someone who’s to be saved choose how he’s saved? It’s like he falls into water and someone tries to save him, but he says: “You can’t save me directly with your hands. You have to save me with a boat that I like.” How could that be?” (“Fa Teaching Given at the 2002 Conference in Philadelphia, U.S.A.,” Collected Teachings Given Around the World, Volume II)
The above paragraph had been referring to the old forces, but it was a similar kind of thought that caused my fear.
The thought went like this: “If Master is taking care of me, then I will not suffer any symptoms or side effects. If I see any adverse reactions at all, then that must mean the old forces have caught a loophole in my cultivation, and Master cannot help me.”
I was so obsessed with the manifestations on the surface level, and whether I would be helped or harmed in certain ways that I had placed a false condition on Master’s support.
All Master wants from us is the heart to truly cultivate. As long as we truly cultivate, even if we slip up and go down the wrong path, Master will find a way to get us back on track. Believing this and letting it guide our every action is my understanding of the faith that is required of us. We may not always like or understand the things that happen to us, and what happens may not unfold according to our own plans, but we must always have faith that we are never outside of Master’s purview, and that it is Master who guides everything towards the best result.
The second major attachment is interconnected with the first; it is a fear of suffering. The reason I had been so preoccupied about what would happen in the future—whether I might develop symptoms of COVID-19 or have lasting sequelae—is because, at my core, I was still afraid of having bad things happen to me in life.
It also revealed another disturbing thought of mine, that I wasn’t truly cultivating for the sake of cultivating itself, but that I wanted to be diligent so that I wouldn’t have to deal with unpleasant things. I had read stories about illness karma, financial persecution, about damaged personal relations in other practitioners’ sharing, and I became afraid that I would also go through these things if I did not cultivate well. In other words, I was cultivating to protect the pleasant things I had in ordinary people’s society.
This kind of thinking ran counter to the basic cultivation tenet that we were told in the poem: “Let joy be found in hardship,” (“Tempering the Will,” Hong Yin) What’s more, it made me unable to truly let go of myself in many situations, since the protection of my personal interests were so deeply embedded within my motivation to cultivate.
After discovering these two attachments, the pressure on my mind started to lessen. As I was getting ready to go to bed that night, a thought appeared in my mind that this vaccine was no longer an issue and that I should just leave the rest to Master and not think about it anymore. Just like that, this test was finally over. The day after, I had a headache but nothing more.
Reflecting upon this series of events now, I’ve also realized two other attachments that I hadn’t noticed—being attached to ordinary people’s news and being attached to results. It’s truly been an experience that taught me about the subtlety of cultivation, and that sometimes, attachments can be so complex and multilayered that we really have to measure our every thought and every action against the Fa to ensure we eliminate as many of our attachments as we can. Moreover, it’s helped deepen my understanding of the relationship between myself, Master, and the Fa, and just how much of our cultivation is embodied in “doing what Master wants.”
One of my strongest fears since childhood is presenting or performing in front of a group of people. It wasn’t because I hated attention; it was because I was afraid of making a mistake, and losing face in front of people.
At my ordinary job, I listed public speaking as one of the career skills that I wanted to develop. Soon, my manager recommended that I work with a public speaking coach who partners with our company.
Once, my speaking coach asked me why I thought I would be nervous before speaking. I said that it was because I was afraid of messing up. She then asked me why I was afraid of messing up. I responded that I didn’t want people to think badly of me. And then she kept on asking me why repeatedly until I said this:
“It’s like I can’t have anything bad happen to me, ever.”
To that, my coach laughed, and it was at that moment when I realized how ridiculous the thought sounded even to an ordinary person. But, this was precisely the root of my nervousness.
By default, my assessment of situations in life always came down to my own benefit: which options can maximize my own benefit, and which options would do the least harm to my personal interests. I would become nervous and anxious before taking any action that I thought might do harm to my personal interests, in terms of fame, profit, or emotion.
However, this nervousness disguised itself with a noble purpose. I would be anxious at my ordinary job when I’d be in meetings with top executives, for instance, because the nervousness told me that if I would make an embarrassing mistake, it would lower the executives’ opinion of me, and make it harder to clarify the truth to them in the future.
But, this was an incorrect thought based on my unclear understanding of the Fa, and an incorrect thought that allowed my selfishness to take refuge.
I recently read a fellow practitioner’s sharing where she quotes this section of the Fa:
Master said,
“When you see someone not having righteous actions, in fact it’s that he doesn’t have enough righteous thoughts, since a person’s mind guides his actions. When your righteous thoughts are strong enough your actions will definitely be righteous, and when the righteous thoughts aren’t strong enough the actions won’t be righteous.” (“Fa Teaching Given at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference,” Collected Teachings Given Around the World, Volume III)
Her understanding of this passage was roughly that our actions are only a manifestation of our thoughts on the inside. Often, we think that it’s something we said or did wrong that caused our trouble, but in reality, those words or actions are the symptoms of misguided thoughts.
Similarly, when I am nervous, all my thoughts in my mind are selfish. They all focus on me, the things that I would do, the things that would or would not happen to me, and what other people would think of me. There’s hardly enough room in there for other people. How could thoughts like these produce benevolent actions?
As of right now, I am not yet free from the nervousness that comes before I have to present or speak up to strangers. However, I now know that it’s not anything productive, and will not help me perform any better. It is an attachment and should be rejected as such. The only way to truly do my best is to become altruistic and have my thoughts be aligned with the Fa—only then can I produce the most effective actions.
And if I do mess up, it is only a chance to look inward, and discover where I still fall short in my cultivation.
After all, Master has already told us that,
“Whatever you experience during your cultivation—whether good or bad—is good, for it comes about only because you are cultivating.” (“To the Chicago Fa Conference,” The Essentials of Diligent Progress III).
Now, it’s up to me to truly believe that and let go of myself and my fear.
Over the past year or so, it really felt as if I am being pushed forward in my personal cultivation. Every day, I seem to find more and more attachments within my daily thoughts—even the thoughts that I used to think were harmless.
Although it’s sometimes appalling to discover just how deeply some of my attachments run, I am grateful to Master at the same time for not giving up on a practitioner like me, and allowing me to play a part in the Fa-rectification. Looking back, I have stumbled and fallen in many places, and would not have recovered without Master’s compassionate guidance.
I can only repay Master by doing better and even better in cultivation and in saving sentient beings.
Please let me know if anything I’ve shared is not in accordance with the Fa.
Thank you, Master, for everything. Thank you, fellow practitioners.
(Presented at the 2022 Minghui Teams Fa Conference)