How I Learned the Importance of Looking Inward

(Minghui.org) As a Falun Dafa practitioner living in China, I was forced to leave home to avoid facing even more persecution. A friend then referred me to get a job working as a janitor in his company.

While I was explaining the facts about the persecution to my co-workers, someone reported me to the company director. The director told me he used to be in charge of persecuting Falun Dafa practitioners at his previous workplace, and that he had cooperated with the police in raiding practitioners’ homes. I sent righteous thoughts and told him some truths about the practice. He didn’t say anything else. He later called my friend to find out where I was from and asked if I was a Dafa practitioner. My friend replied, “How should I know, why do you ask that?” The director didn’t respond.

I went straight to another practitioner’s home after work and asked her to send righteous thoughts with me to eliminate any evil factors that were interfering with the director. The practitioner, who had recently just started cultivating again after stopping for a time, told me to do it on my own. I thought Master had used the practitioner to remind me that I shouldn’t rely on others. Previously, due to my fear of being persecuted, whenever I had a problem, the first thing I did was to look to others for help. This time, it wasn’t appropriate because seeking help externally is not cultivating. One must change oneself from their essence.

Master said,

“If you do not change the human logic that you, as an ordinary human, have formed deep in your bones over thousands of years, you will be unable to break away from this superficial human shell and reach Consummation.” (“Cautionary Advice,” Essentials for Further Advancement)

When real difficulty occurs, I can only rely on Master and Dafa. I hand-copied some of the Fa after work and then sent righteous thoughts to eliminate the evil factors that interfere with the salvation of sentient beings and continuously looked inward. I also reviewed my thinking from the time I started the job and looked for things that were not in line with Dafa’s principles in my behavior.

I realized that each morning I got to work, the first person I met was the director. I’d greet him with a smile and feel grateful to him. I was shocked. Isn’t this from my attachments to complacency and emotion? I should be grateful to Master. Other people are not concerned with Dafa.

The director was very strict, and everyone was afraid of him. When I was on the third floor, he often yelled up to me from the second floor. I would respond loudly, or sometimes walk behind him and whisper, “Director, you called me, what’s the matter?” to deliberately mess with him. 

I found I had the mentality of fighting just like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advocated. I knew I had to correct my behavior immediately. The next time the director yelled my name, I went downstairs and responded calmly. His attitude changed immediately, as if he was a different person. He said, “There was a puddle of water on the floor, but now it’s gone, so no need to do anything about it.” After I rectified myself, he changed too!

I was sending righteous thoughts in my fourth-floor room when a staff member knocked on the door. I asked him what he wanted, and he said he was just passing by. I knew he worked on the third floor, so it was unlikely that he would be on the fourth floor for no reason. I felt afraid and stressed, and suspected that he had been sent to spy on me. Although nothing happened, I became so scared that I wanted to leave the company. I then thought to myself, “If I leave, what about the many people who work here who have not been saved? I should calm down and just look inward.” So I spent the rest of the day looking inside for my own shortcomings. 

Perhaps Master saw that I was slow to realize he planted the story of “suspecting my neighbor of stealing an axe” into my mind to point out I had the attachment of suspicion. Once I realized this, Master removed the bad substance at once. Thank you Master for helping me resolve my tribulation. I instantly felt relief, as if nothing had happened.

I ended up working at that company for several years. Whether I clarified the truth inside the workplace or elsewhere, the director was always happy to see me doing it. Many of the staff have learned the truth and been saved by Master’s compassionate mercy.