Falun Dafa Minghui.org www.minghui.org PRINT

Lessons Learned from Mistakenly Believing I was Cultivating Diligently

July 6, 2016 |   By a Dafa practitioner from Shandong Province, China

(Minghui.org) I am 77 years old, and I started practicing Falun Dafa in October 1995.

I was once the local coordinator of our region. When I first started practicing, Master opened my celestial eye. I was able to see things at different levels in another dimension. As a result, all along, I thought of myself as having good inborn quality and that I cultivated well.

Recently, I experienced some serious problems.

One was having been abducted to the police station where I was coerced to make a confession, had my picture taken and my blood drawn, was fingerprinted, and I did what a Dafa practitioner should never do.

The other was my body showed symptoms of serious illness. I lost control of my bladder and bowel. My prostate developed problems so that I constantly felt the urge to urinate. I urinated frequently but had difficulty eliminating. I was in terrible pain. When my incontinence was at its worst, I dreamed that my children were all dressed in white hemp, mourning my death.

The third problem was my energy field was filled with and bothered by low level spirits, rotten ghosts, and other degenerated things, so much so that I felt drowsy when studying the Fa and couldn’t hold up my right palm in an erect position while sending forth righteous thoughts. I also started having conflicts with fellow practitioners.

I pleaded with Master for help. I looked inward, but, however much I tried, I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong.

My house is a Fa study site. Practitioner Amy, who comes for Fa study, enlightened by Master, saw the danger I was in, and attempted to communicate with me within the Fa.

At the beginning, I couldn’t take in her comments because I couldn’t agree with some of the things she said. I was even feeling resentment toward her. But when my situation persisted and I recognized her heart of selflessness, I was finally able to calm down and contemplate my inner self.

That was when I uncovered a great many and very serious attachments, especially to lust.

As an elderly person, that attachment should have been long gotten rid of. But about eight years ago when I was already almost 70, I succumbed to lust with my wife.

Afterwards, I was in a state of utter devastation. I saw the collapse of heaven and earth, the mad rush of waters in the seas and oceans, and my world covered with flood that had the appearance of blood… The whole place was void of people, in complete desolation. Everything was in ruins and lifeless, with not a blade of green grass.

I felt myself crouching on the ground, bursting into heart-wrenching wild sobs. I practically didn’t want to live, feeling living would be pointless.

The feeling was so immensely intense, but my attachment to lust was not rooted out.

Although I did not repeat the lustful act, yet whenever I saw young female practitioners, impure thoughts would still surface, manifested without my full awareness in my eyes, my speech, and my actions.

Even the young female practitioners could feel my tainted intent, so that for a long while they didn’t even want to come to my house for Fa study.

Having been brought up steeped in the Communist Party’s poisonous culture, every cell in my body was polluted, and every pattern of my every thought and action had the Party’s imprint, but I wasn’t aware of the severity.

I was capable of throwing some mean punches since my younger days so that I could easily fight off three or five people at once. At home and out in society, people considered me some kind of a big boss and generally gave me a wide berth. I became accustomed to imposing my will on others.

With my celestial eye opened soon after I started Falun Gong practice, my feeling of superiority intensified. I turned into a show-off, constantly relating with relish the things I saw in my cosmos and my world.

I would produce my own truth clarification materials and went out only with my wife to distribute them, without involving anybody else. In order to protect myself, I wouldn’t become a part of the whole body.

Although I made some slight changes in recent years, yet, on the whole, I tended to look down on other practitioners and unwilling to be with those whom I deemed at lower levels. I would pick and choose individual practitioners whom I considered diligent and worthwhile to come to my house.

My wife is a little deaf and her eyesight is poor. I couldn’t tolerate her deficiencies. Instead of being understanding and accepting, I would often roar at her:

“Are you blind? Are you deaf?”

My wife would get so frustrated, she would answer me with a snappy “Get lost!”

I had also held a grudge against my mother for many years.

For one thing, my mother wouldn’t let me go to school when I was young. For another, she didn’t stand up for me when I was beaten up by my older brother.

I was 13 years old when I had a fight with my second brother. He used a shovel to hit my head and opened up a three-inch gash in my skull. I lost a lot of blood.

At the time, my mother was not home. When she returned, she didn’t punish or scold my brother. Maybe my mother always felt I was the naughty one and didn’t want to fend for me. But, I believed my mother shouldn’t have looked at that incident as something insignificant. She should have made a clear distinction of what was right and what was wrong and acted accordingly.

In later years, the gash healed to the extent one can’t see it or feel it, but a gulley remained. After I started practicing Falun Gong, the gulley was gone and hair grew at the spot.

Those two incidents happened so many years ago, yet every time I thought about them, I am still full of resentment toward my mother.

The female practitioners who come to my house for Fa study are generally 10 and 20 years my junior.

Generally when we talk about Party culture, or attachments to jealousy, resentment, combativeness, and such like, it is relatively easy; but when the topic is about lust or sex, even male practitioners find it hard to open up. So we barely touch these topics.

However, because the female practitioners wanted to help me rid myself of this attachment to lust, no matter if it roused up my resentment or that I made it known they were no longer welcome at my house, they would not leave it alone.

Again and again, they would bring up the topic and openly talked about the source and manifestation of my heart of fifth, forcing me to confront it, until I made up my mind to get rid of it.

After thorough examination and analysis, I realized how serious not only was my attachment to lust, but also to combativeness, jealousy, resentment, impatience, superiority, etc.

I realized how I haven’t treated my cultivation with sincere earnestness, and how my attitude had not only directly impacted my wife’s cultivation but also created rifts among fellow practitioners, so that many things that could have been done well cooperatively were not done well, leaving a multitude of regrets.

I realized, through the years, I have appeared to be cultivating and doing the work of saving sentient beings, but most of the times I have been studying the Fa with human notions and have not paid attention to the content of Fa at higher and different levels.

If we work on projects in attempts to fulfill our vows but with an impure heart and with all kinds of attachments, we cannot reach what the Fa requires of us at different levels. As a result it is inevitable we will invite persecution physically and mentally.

But, if we study the Fa more and more diligently, measure our thoughts and deeds against Dafa frequently, look inward constantly, and do the work of saving people well while cultivating solidly, the old forces will never have loopholes to take advantage of.

Under Master’s magnanimous mercy and support, practitioner Amy saw that my other dimension, once used to be filled with filth, was swiftly being cleaned up, with evil’s low level spirits and rotten ghosts being eliminated, and that my condition kept improving.

Several days ago, in my dream, I saw a high wall that was in danger of collapsing at a moment’s notice. Below it was the vast ocean. I walked over safely along the top of the wall.

I knew it was Master who has saved me from death and destruction.

My heart feels so grateful toward Master, I just cannot control my tears.

Thank you, Master! Thank you fellow practitioners!