My Recent Enlightenment on Compassion and Emotion

(Minghui.org) A cultivator must cultivate kindness and then develop it into compassion. What is kindness? Some people think that not arguing is kindness. This is the understanding of everyday people. If we don’t know what kindness is, and how to cultivate kindness, how can we cultivate? From the Fa we know that we should have compassion with sentient beings. Often times we only say it. In reality, we haven’t had much compassion. In daily life and at work, we ignore or forget that practitioners should have compassion.

The demonstration of this is that we don’t have real love or concern for sentient beings. We still like or dislike the people around us. We want or don’t want to do something. We still have the sentiment of happiness, anger, sadness, or joy when we deal with people. We take care of the people that are good to us. We are stirred up by the things we don’t like. We become emotional in our family environments and don’t treat our spouses, children, parents, and siblings as sentient beings who are waiting to be saved. We are not able to really love them.

Compassion is real love. With compassion, we will be good to anyone. This requires that Dafa practitioners have no hatred and emotion in our hearts. We are not concerned whether sentient beings are attractive or unattractive, happy or sad, upper class or lower class. We don’t have enemies in our hearts. We consider everything from the other party’s perspective.

I realize from the Fa that we will not succeed in cultivation if we are attached to emotion, or cannot let go of our attachments, or even are not aware of our attachments. We cultivate in ordinary society. We have everyday jobs and living environments. If we didn’t have emotion, we could not stay in ordinary society. But we must remind ourselves that we shouldn’t be attached to emotion and must eventually let it go. When we measure people or things, we shouldn’t use everyday people’s standards, we should use the Fa’s criteria. If we are too attached to emotion, we will come across problems and hardships.

A veteran practitioner in my area who started practicing Falun Dafa in 1996 did do the three things. She was persecuted again in 2024. The authorities pressured her husband and children to threaten her. They told her that if she didn’t give up her belief, her children might lose their jobs or be demoted. Her family members also pressured her. She was not able to resist them and gave up her Dafa books and truth-clarification materials.

In doing so, she actually harmed her family members. They cooperated with the evil and did what the evil wanted them to do. If they don’t repent in the end, you can imagine how terrible the consequences will be. It would be a display of our greatest compassion to our family members when we ourselves have completed cultivation and achieved consummation. Only then can we truly save them. Then will they have good futures.

When people do harm to practitioners, they are being utilized by the evil. We shouldn’t hate them. We should feel sorry for them. They have been lied to. I believe that they didn’t want to do this innately. They came for the Fa. We should tell them the truth kindly and hope they will be saved one day!

When we do things or speak to people, we should consider whether our words and actions will be accepted by them, are beneficial to them, or if they can bear it. If we can do this on a long term basis, we will develop compassion and save more sentient beings. As Dafa practitioners, we must discern between compassion and human emotion. We will not succeed in cultivation if we are attached to emotion. We are human when we still have emotion. We must let go of all attachments that derive from emotion.

The above is my recent enlightenment. Please kindly point out anything that is not in line with the Fa.