(Minghui.org) I have worked in a Dafa media project for many years and have been involved in projects since the second year of my cultivation. This has been Master’s benevolent arrangement to help me catch up with the pace of Fa-rectification, cultivate myself, and compassionately allow me to help save sentient beings and fulfill my vow.
Master helped me to enlighten to my attachment of having indignation in my thinking as well as hidden notions last year. I believe those were hints of bigger issues with my cultivation state.
When Master’s article “A Wake-Up Call” came out, I knew I had not completely removed these attachments. I wanted to save all sentient beings, but hidden in my thoughts and actions were things that held on to prejudices and judgments of others.
I excused those thoughts by thinking “it takes time to remove these deeper attachments.” This was an excuse. Master’s article reminded us that we need to make that change happen now.
Master taught us about compassion in his article. Master said,
“Compassion is expressed in this world through love and kindness, and these are qualities that those who practice Dafa should always radiate from within.” (“A Wake-Up Call”)
To be selfless is to live for others and our thoughts have to be able to reach that level of thinking about everyone and not just a few groups that I may think are better than others. The initial level is showing love and kindness in our thoughts and actions to everyone each day. If my thinking is not up to this standard, then no matter what my actions are (like working in the media), even if I am not writing content, it will still affect the salvation of sentient beings.
My hidden attachment to qing (sentimentality) was reflected in the fact that my family is mostly conservative, so I come into contact with conservative people more often. I felt that I should work on saving them, since I understand them better. I thought practitioners who have liberal-leaning families could reach those people better. It seemed logical, but it cloaked a deeper attachment to not being responsible to all sentient beings, which is something a Dafa practitioner must be able to do. It was my hidden attachment to the sentimentality of liking and disliking someone or something.
I looked within a lot about why I had not developed that level of compassion that Master explains in “A Wake Up Call,” and I realized it was also related to a deeper impression that I developed in my childhood, which is that evil should be punished.
I did not understand how immense the Fa-rectification is and that Master is saving both “good” and “bad” things as the cosmos faces destruction. The role a being plays in this life may be evil to some, but might not be evil in light of what that being’s mission was.
From Master’s Fa, I understand that this is something the old forces have used, and it is causing sentient beings who are playing a “negative role” to go too far in going against Dafa, which is here to save them. I need to see the level of saving beings from a different vantage point. All beings came for Dafa and all are Master’s people and family members! This would be a higher level of compassion.
Any being who interferes with the Fa-rectification and the salvation of sentient beings is the real evil, and if Dafa disciples somehow cause this to happen as well, then it’s a crime. All beings are here for Dafa and are waiting to be saved.
I knew this, but why did I have gaps in my actions and thoughts? Around this time I was stuck in my memorization of the passage in Lecture Six of Zhuan Falun “Demonic Interference in Cultivation.”
I realized I was stuck there because I did not deeply understand this part about demonic interference from our own minds.
My third eye opened a couple months after I started to practice and I saw many things. A couple of months into my practice, during meditation for two days straight, I saw demons trying to stop me from practicing. I had the basic understanding that demons are going to interfere with us in cultivation and we need to persevere no matter what. I also saw Master’s Law Guardians as Western Gods, Chinese Warrior Gods, and a Golden Dragon that helped me during some intense times. Master’s Fashen also appeared when I had two difficult incidents and encouraged me to keep practicing and follow the Fa to go home with him. This greatly encouraged me in my practice, since I knew I needed to catch up.
So I understood that external demons will interfere. After a period of time, I stopped really seeing much with my third eye and would mainly hear random things, but I ignored all of it as external demons interfering again.
As I memorized this paragraph, it struck me that I may have not understood what “messages” are.
Master said,
“Particularly for those cultivators with the celestial eye open at certain levels, this problem can happen easily. Also, some people are always interfered with by foreign messages in their consciousness, and they believe whatever they are told by foreign messages; this problem can also take place. Therefore, some of you with the celestial eye open will be interfered with by different sorts of messages.” (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun)
Understanding that many of my own thoughts or emotions were actually just “messages” trying to take me down these different demonic paths without my awareness was something I did not understand very well. I was not measuring all my thoughts against the Fa to see if they really conformed to the Fa.
As I process information from the cosmos, I am infusing many of these messages with my own ideas driven by my own notions and ego. This creates the challenge of demonic interference from our own minds in cultivation. How many times has an idea popped into my head that sounded good? Did I check for deeper reasons as to why the idea sounded good? Did I measure the idea against the Fa principles? This really made me pause.
A veteran practitioner shared with me that what had helped her was to realize we are all in this demonic state as we start to cultivate and we need to repress this demon nature. But understanding your own demon nature is hard, since you may not realize something is wrong for a while.
I also realized that demonic interference from one’s own mind happens to all of us at all times in our cultivation to see if we take the Fa as our guide and not our faulty human thinking, which can be driven by our demon nature and notions. The path we choose is crucial.
I started to examine my thoughts on a much deeper level and found I could isolate what was thought karma, notions that I’d formed, and then what seemed to be messages that had popped into my consciousness from seemingly nowhere. Each of these subliminal messages could be from feelings I had when I interacted with others, or random thoughts.
In this process, I found many attachments. As I kept doing this, I found that my sending of righteous thoughts improved and my Fa study became stronger. I believe it’s because I became aware of my thinking patterns and that helped to strengthen my main consciousness. Clearer righteous thoughts then came in and were accompanied by higher levels of energy and clarity. I still have some days where I am not as aware of all my thoughts, though I should be, but I can now tell when I am being lazy.
Another enlightenment about breaking my attachment to sentimentally had to do with the attachment of validating myself and having a strong show-off mentality. I know this is not my true self, but I am often interfered by this. It’s quite frustrating at times.
While looking within about why I feel a certain way about some practitioners, I asked myself, what is it that I want from them in my interactions with them? I found that many times when I didn’t get along with someone or had a notion about someone, it was because of how they had treated me.
Sometimes it’s even just an impression they gave me, then a notion forms about them, and yes I know it’s wrong, but it’s like an automatic response and the thoughts and notions form. I will deny and push it away, but many times, the impression lingers and flares up later in my interactions with them.
I consciously tried to remove those, but they still formed. During this process, I found that what I wanted from these people was really just for them to validate my existence, think of me in a favorable light, and on a deeper level, this was my ego and false self wanting to be validated. This false self knows that I am trying to eliminate it, and it clings to needing this validation. This was the root of why the attachment to self validation has always seemed to follow me. The show-off mentality goes hand-in-hand with this, followed by competitiveness and jealousy, but the root for me was the self-validation factor of the ego.
Once I found this root, I took action when I next saw a person whom I had a negative impression of. I told myself I don’t want anything from this person and we are fellow practitioners, so I cannot have any notions about her. Once I really had that righteous thought in my heart, my whole experience was calmer and I was not thinking any negative thoughts.
Even if I perceive that someone does not like me, it helps me to take the blame in the conflict instead of finding their faults. I have just started to work on this attachment, so I feel there is more to work on. This past year has been a constant process of finding attachments and sometimes things have gone quickly, but many times it has been a big process to improve even a little.
In my last sharing, I said I wanted to do longer exercise sets and be more diligent in cultivating my xinxing. I can say that I did cultivate my xinxing, but I did not reach the standard for doing the standing exercises for longer. I did a bit, but not as consistently as I had wanted. I see this as being due to my laziness and attachments to ease and comfort. I will continue to try and reach my goals in cultivation, since that is a process of improving myself and removing attachments.
We stumble and fall but get up again so that we can become enlightened to the Dao.
Thank you for listening to my sharing and please kindly point out anything not on the Fa.
Heshi, Master!
(Presented at the 2024 Southern US Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference)