(Clearwisdom.net) A few days ago I read a fellow practitioner's cultivation sharing experience article regarding the “desire for comfort,” which generated a lot of thoughts and feelings. I feel that many of the situations mentioned in the article are found in me and the article seems to be targeted at me.
Since the latter half of last year, my cultivation state has been less than satisfactory: not being diligent in doing the three things, feeling sleepy while reading the Fa, not being able to get up in time to do the exercises, and lacking a sense of urgency to save people. I have not felt the same happiness and pride that I felt when I initially started practicing Falun Gong. To make things worse, I tried to persuade a few acquaintances to quit the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with no success, which left me depressed and I could not keep up my spirits. After I retired, I moved to a new location, where I did not know the local practitioners. I have been alone in my cultivation and I did not know how to continue to talk to people about quitting the CCP. Most importantly, I did not look inside and I did not study the Fa well. Therefore, I could not recover from this failing and became more and more depressed and low in spirits.
In fact, all of this was a result of my own bad cultivation state, and it cost me a lot of precious time that could have been spent saving people. Reading fellow practitioner's sharing articles was a wake-up call that made me realize that my cultivation state was a typical manifestation of the desire for comfort. Teacher warned us,
“The closer it gets to the end, the more you cannot let up; the closer it gets to the end, the better you must study the Fa; the closer it gets to the end, the stronger your righteous thoughts must be.” (“To the Canada Fa Conference,” 2007)
On the contrary, I did not advance diligently. Instead, I was led on by the desire for comfort and descended in my cultivation without even realizing it.
The desire for comfort is an invisible killer, and it wears down a practitioners' willpower. During this priceless moment for saving people, I slipped away from the Fa. In the last couple of days I have realized that the desire for comfort is very harmful to practitioners, and it is certainly arranged by the old forces, not by Teacher. I have been walking the path arranged by the old forces, and they almost ruined my cultivation without my realizing it. From now on I must be diligent, always look inside, and devote all my efforts to doing the three things.