(Clearwisdom.net) I would like to share a little bit of my experience and understandings about the Clearwisdom website. Although I have worked on the website for close to six years, I have recently taken on new and bigger responsibilities. This new responsibility has brought a lot of fruitful cultivation experience that I would like to share about. Because this responsibility is new, a lot of my understandings will be immature, but I still think that they will be valuable to others because they offer this particular perspective.
The first thing that struck me about my new team was how compassionate and kind they all were to each other. The conversation during our weekly meeting was considerate and unhurried. I felt that practitioners were really thinking of others first. How different this team operated from many others that I have been a part of. It did not feel like we were simply "doing things," rather it contained an aura of great and heavy responsibility and attention to details. I was nearly moved to tears for the first few weeks within this environment. Why is this environment so precious for Clearwisdom work? Why is the environment this way? I think that it is necessary because it enables our team to follow the Fa closely, to emanate this pure environment in our work, and to manifest purity in the website for the benefit of everyone.
Working for the website feels totally different than other types of "truth clarification" work. I believe that the website acts as an inalterable mechanism that is solid on the Fa. This quality makes it incredibly precious in the human world. Why do I describe the website as such a righteous entity? For one, our subject matter is practitioners' articles and because they are written by practitioners, they carry energy. We also share in the precious righteous thoughts of practitioners everywhere who look to the website for the pure land and who all contribute with their submissions to the pure land. All practitioners are interacting with this website. And most importantly there is our benevolent Master above everything, guiding us with the Fa, which is immutable throughout the cosmos. There are no doubts whatsoever about the purpose, the sacredness, or the solemnity of Clearwisdom.
I have an understanding about how to approach the submitted articles. Each day we work closely with the truthful words in the articles. We may consider it our job to harmonize with the articles and to make them the best that they can be in their respective languages. It is significant to me that we do not emphasize making changes to the articles; rather our purpose is much more of harmonizing the surface to meet society's requirements for writing without changing the essence. This simple principle shows selflessness and respect for the understandings enlightened to by the article's authors. I feel that it is important not to tamper too much with the practitioners' style, which often contains much of the inner meaning.
At first it is not obvious, but you can even notice the different understandings in the way the persecution articles are crafted. I am picking out this point because of my own experience of the years of writing that I have done to clarify the truth, and the years of my fellow practitioners using and altering my writing at will for different purposes. It was a painful process I went through to learn to relinquish my own things and to be more altruistic. But at Clearwisdom, I feel that this altruistic requirement must be met from the start, because the inner meaning of what we are doing is different from other projects. Once the articles are posted, they can clarify the truth to people from all walks of life and provide facts, inspiration and encouragement to practitioners everywhere.
I am compelled to do more for the website. I enjoy being part of the fluid mechanism in operation, yet I still do not have a very deep understanding when working. I would like to deepen my righteous thoughts when working on articles, so that my righteous thoughts can have a greater effect in dispelling the evil and clarifying the truth. So much of what we do is behind the scenes work to help with different projects, and with the increasing amount of time I now spend on the website, this behind the scenes situation has presented itself as an issue to resolve. Am I doing what I am supposed to do? Is it okay for me to work behind the scenes?
I live in a big city where there are few westerners. There are many things that always need to be done, and I am often called on to help. I am a person with skills in many areas, so it seems I am always a good choice for everything that is needed by the Fa. When my workload for the website increased I really had a difficult time to balance everything, especially when practitioners around me did not know or understand the responsibilities I have, and saw my involvement with the website as a loss to the local group environment. Perhaps the greatest ongoing challenge is to do well everything that I do. I know that I cannot shun other things that are needed, and so I continue with what feels right for me to do. I admit that I have been tested in my ability to sacrifice and keep broadminded when dealing with many things at once, and when my responsibilities to the website cannot be postponed. I notice that I hesitate to do more, and often feel that this attitude is not right although balance is needed. Yet through this process I believe that I have eliminated more human thinking.
Since joining this team I think the most common state I have can be described as unmoved. I find this state is simply necessary to do well. If I stray from it, I know that there are demons just waiting to jump in, and interfere. Since I have tasted this interference I am strongly dedicated to remaining unmoved with strong righteous thoughts, because there is no time anymore to waste. This xinxing elevation has been a great gift and it is still ongoing.
Doing this work has enabled me to encounter cultivation issues that I would not have easily encountered otherwise. This work has me continually thinking about what is best for the Fa. The process of reviewing potential articles for posting is an incredible process of thinking of others first and thinking of the Fa first. A few times I have felt uncomfortable when an article would be rejected for posting for different reasons. I thought that it was a shame that the practitioner's understanding was not high enough to be appropriate for our website, and secretly wished that we could be more broadminded, thinking that it is the heart that matters the most in cultivation. I can see now how this thought reveals my shortcoming. When I thought about how some practitioners could be led astray by that article to do something wrong, or to accept an understanding that lacks maturity, then I understood more about the purpose of Clearwisdom. I can also see in this my deviant thought of being willing to accept something less than the Fa, perhaps because it is more comfortable. But this would be condoning the existence of the old forces. I understand now that the article isn't posted not because the practitioner is wrong; he or she will become better. It is just that we must strive to reject all old force thinking, and be as pure as possible in posting articles so that Clearwisdom can best encourage all practitioners to strive forward diligently as Master asks us to, and to improve as fast as possible without any detours.
From all of these things I can see that working with Clearwisdom is such a good opportunity to ascend in the Fa. All of the mechanisms are solidly in place to prevent practitioners all over the world from straying from the Fa, and with the help of Clearwisdom, with all of its inner meaning, we who volunteer our efforts to work on this website are also constantly finding our shortcomings and improving.