(Clearwisdom.net) It is hard to keep my heart calm while I am writing this article. I am reluctant to recall the wrong path I went down in the past. However, a question that bothered a fellow practitioner made me make up my mind to face this issue seriously.
I know another practitioner who began practicing Falun Dafa shortly before the persecution began on July 20, 1999. She slowed down in her cultivation once the persecution started and did not keep up with the Fa-rectification process. Today, I shared an experience with her. She hesitated a while and then asked me a question that had bothered her for a long time. She said, "Master kept saying that the persecution would be over very soon, ever since the year 2000. How come it is not over yet? I would like to believe in Dafa, but on this issue, I can't get rid of the feeling that I was deceived." I felt both sad and happy for her. I felt sad for her since she did not even realize that she was controlled by demons and did not respect Master. I was happy for her since she told me her concern openly. First of all, I told her that these were not her thoughts - they came from being controlled and interfered with by the evil. Then I told her my personal experience and how I had similar thoughts at one time, though I'd never told anyone.
It is not wrong to call this time "the final stage of the final stage." The key is whether we can make good use of our time doing the three things well with a calm and selfless heart, rather than feeling impulsive as soon as we heard the words, "last stage," and then doing things irrationally in order to pursue personal "gains." The past ten years have been but a moment when compared to the billions of years we spent to come down level after level to this human world, or the millions of years we spent in the cycle of reincarnation in this world. Even if we have to keep validating the Fa for another hundred years, it is still a very short moment in history. People who had doubts about this issue were looking at it from a human's standpoint. They forgot that the history of the cosmos is not limited to this little bit of this human life.
Master knew what would happen before July 20, 1999, and kept hinting to us that our time is very precious. Back then, I did not realize that I had already enlightened along an evil path. I thought what Master meant was that our cultivation would soon end in Consummation. When Master published the article "Purge Demon-Nature," I still tried to cover my mistake. Master said,
"If you still want to be my disciples, immediately stop being used by demons when you are talking."
("Purge Demon-Nature" from Essentials for Further Advancement)
So I cheated myself by thinking, even if I had these thoughts, I hadn't voiced them. After July 20, 1999, I went to Beijing to appeal for justice for Falun Dafa with the attachment of reaching consummation. Later, I endured the persecution with the thought that everything would be fine as long as I could survive the suffering.
Many fellow practitioners had similar thoughts. This is why there were only a few practitioners who betrayed Dafa at the beginning of the persecution. However, as the time of the persecution was prolonged, many practitioners with the attachment to time lost their patience, faith and righteous thoughts and enlightened along the evil path. The attachment to time makes many practitioners impulsive, they often said, "It will end in the coming fall" or "the spring is coming."
Many practitioners set up a deadline in their minds for the end of their cultivation, and irrationally do unsafe things driven by their human attachments. This provides excuses for the old forces to persecute. When suffering severe persecution, these practitioners did not treat the persecution from the Fa's standpoint. Instead, they endured the suffering with human hearts. When the persecution did not end before their set deadline, these practitioners lost faith in Dafa and did not come out to validate the Fa anymore. Some even went to the other side, turning against Dafa.
In short, there is no way for us to fulfill our sacred responsibility of saving sentient beings when we are motivated by irrational human attachments. We should learn from these deeply painful lessons. When we did Dafa work from the standpoint of human beings, we missed many opportunities to clarify the truth to sentient beings, and those might have been the only chances for some people. Even if we tried to clarify the truth, our attachment to time made what we said or did not as pure as it should have been, and thus lacked the power to move sentient beings. With these attachments, we did not have compassion towards people, but rather, we were doing everything for the purpose of our own consummation.
Later, during the persecution I did what a practitioner should not do and damaged Dafa. After I was released from detention, I did not carefully look inward to find my own problems. First, I accepted the old forces' arrangements; I thought that I had failed the test and thus lost self-confidence. Secondly, many fellow practitioners, who I thought were firm and diligent, enlightened along the evil path after they were put in jail. I compared my own endurance capacity with theirs and thought I could not survive the persecution at all. My selfishness made a self-protecting decision, "I will not forge ahead, yet I will not fall behind." Thus, I did not do any Dafa work for more than a year.
Cultivating is like swimming against the flow of a stream: if we do not forge ahead, we will surely fall behind. However, our benevolent Master never gave up on me, and gave me many hints in my dreams. Once in one of my dreams, I watched my gong pillar that was very high disappear piece by piece until only a little was left. Another time in my dream, I went to a place for a Fa experience sharing conference. Many people were there and I sat in the last row. Master was lecturing in the front, and told us that each one of us deserves the seat we had according to the efforts we made. In another dream, I went to a world higher than the human world, yet there were many higher levels above that level. Two angels were standing by the heavenly doors and encouraged me to keep moving up to higher levels, but I said, "I am afraid" because back then I thought that forging ahead would invite persecution.
I will never forget the help I received from fellow practitioners during that period of time. They brought Master's new articles to me time after time. Since I enlightened along the evil path back then, I laughed in disbelief when I read Master's words, "the final stage of the final stage." I knew that this was disbelief and disrespect to Master, yet I could not stop myself. This was a hard test the old forces had arranged for me.
The type-B hepatitis I had previously recurred and my whole body looked yellow. Every day, the TV reported about type-B hepatitis and it is said that young people who had it couldn't go to university. My child had surgery due to acute appendicitis (she used to be a practitioner but almost quit practicing because of me). After the surgery, she was diagnosed with serious type-B hepatitis as well. I was diagnosed with type-B hepatitis when I went to the university and have lived with prejudice ever since. My husband (a non-practitioner) urged me to go to the hospital immediately. However, I knew I would be done for if I kept sliding down in my cultivation. I had to make a decision.
One day, I suddenly asked myself a few questions. Later, I realized that it was my divine side that asked, and my human side that answered. Question: "Did Master harm you or not?" Answer: "Not one bit." Question: "If what Master says is not true, in other words, if you negate Master, would there be any hope or way out for the cosmos and the human world?" Answer: "No." Because I knew if I negate Master and Truth-Compassion-Forbearance, I would be endorsing Jiang Zemin and his lies, wickedness and violence. And if I choose other religions, I would just be cheating myself.
At this crucial moment, I chose Master and Dafa. A few days later, the yellow color disappeared from my body. My husband was speechless. I once again manifested the power of Dafa to him. Because I had stopped practicing for a while, I wanted to improve myself by reading the Fa, but I couldn't read. Even when I read, I couldn't understand the meaning. After Master's article "Correction" was published, I started to correct the characters in the books. I unconsciously let go of all my attachment to pursuit and read through all the books carefully once. I only meant to correct the characters, but in the end I had a better understanding of the Fa. Master is really pushing us upward! All of a sudden, I understood the meaning in Master's new articles and finally caught up with Fa-rectification within a few months.
Whenever I hear fellow practitioners say, "Master has made it so clear for us, why can't some practitioners just do it accordingly?" I would then tell them that when a practitioner has gone to the opposite side, there is a partition between them and the Fa. They would be totally blind to the Fa Master has taught us. Sometimes they can't even figure out the most surface meaning.
I told them that we are all lives from the old cosmos and we were based on selfishness and should have been eliminated long ago. But Master is so merciful and wants to save the cosmos, and suffered innumerable hardships when he descended to the lowest level in order to save us. The new cosmos is based on selflessness. In order to enter the new cosmos, we have to assimilate to Dafa unconditionally. In our process of assimilating to the new cosmos, Master has done everything for us to enable us to do so.
When we have cultivated to the state of selflessness and always consider others first, think about it. When we then hear Master say that time is tight, what do we think? Shouldn't we be worried about not having saved enough sentient beings and that they are facing elimination? Would we have the zealous attachment of escaping the disaster or the fear attachment of failing to reach consummation? If we put emphasis on ourselves instead of sentient beings, have we truly understood why Master told us time is tight? How could we possibly guess when the time is finished? Would we be disappointed when nothing happens at the deadline one had imagined? Would we still go to the opposite side on the issue of time if we let go of our selfish attachments and assimilate to the characteristics of the universe? Luckily, I made it to this point, but many practitioners have destroyed their own future. Whenever I sense that a fellow practitioner is attached to time, I kindly point it out. I know that the old forces will take advantage of the gap and use it to destroy the practitioner if they can.
I tell them that time really is running out and Master is turning the Falun towards the human world. We should be ever more diligent to live up to all sentient beings' expectations. We should no longer be attached to ourselves, even less should we develop even a bit of zealotry for reaching consummation. Otherwise, we are not worthy of being Master's disciples. Master told us the story of a person falling down upon reaching consummation due to his attachment of zealotry and fear. We have to completely let go of our selfish attachments and completely rid ourselves of the old cosmos' stigma of selfishness. We have to firmly believe in Master and the Fa and assist Master in Fa-rectification. Because we are not the only beings Master wants to save, Master wants to save beings of all levels. We should strive to become righteous beings that are selfless and always put others before ourselves, as Master expects of us.
While writing this article, I had huge thought karma and demonic interference. I even had the idea, "You are not being respectful towards Master" in my mind and it almost stopped me. When I firmly picked up the pen, my mind suddenly became blank and didn't know where to begin. I said silently, "Fa Zheng Qian Kun, Xie E Quan Mie" [a verse to eliminate evil] in my heart and asked for Master's help. I wrote a few lines with difficulty but all of a sudden I became clearheaded.
Thank you venerable and benevolent Master!
(To be continued)
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