(Clearwisdom.net) I remember that when I studied Master Li's poem "Don't Be Sad" for the first time,

"Imprisoned as you are, don't be sorrowful or sad.
Carry on with righteous thoughts and actions, and the Fa is with you;
Calmly reflect on the attachments you have;
Remove your human thoughts and evil will naturally die out." (Hong Yin II)

I thought this poem was written for those practitioners who were arrested and detained. Today I clearly and truly enlightened to the understanding that this poem is written for all Dafa practitioners. When "prison" is mentioned, we tend to think of those heavy gates and gloomy cells, which is the result of judgments made using our human flesh eyes. In fact, there is another kind of prison that is even more fearful, and that is the prison in our minds.

I obtained Dafa during the intense persecution in 1999. During the process of following Master in Fa-rectification, I have had a fairly lenient environment, even though the police did come to my home to search, fellow practitioners around me were arrested, and I was yelled at or driven away by supervisors who did not understand the truth. I still continued practicing despite the persecution.

Every time there appeared to be a potentially harmful incident, I did not seem to be in danger. After every one of those incidents, Master gave me hints that assured me that, if we can take a righteous, great path, we will not be in any danger. Actually, nothing truly dangerous ever happened. The one incident that affected me most was when a fellow practitioner with whom I had a close relationship was arrested, while that very same day, a supervisor at my workplace gave me a printer for free. I knew Master was giving me a hint to continue doing the three things well.

I never stopped doing the three things. However, when more and more practitioners around me got arrested, due to the attachment of fear, I became reluctant to provide too many materials to other practitioners around me, nor did I want to keep in contact with those practitioners who had been persecuted before. I always worried about being implicated, and I always used being busy with work as an excuse to cover up my attachments of fear and of pursuing comfort. The consequence was that the "excuse" became a reality. My workload really became heavy, and major inspections came one after another. The materials at my job, about which we reported to the higher departments, were also found to have problems.

Then I really became unable to guarantee time for Fa-study, and my own printer broke down, so I was unable to even ensure Dafa materials for my own use, not to mention providing materials for other practitioners. Since I did not have enough materials to give to practitioners, then naturally fewer and fewer practitioners came to my home, and consequently I had fewer and fewer opportunities to share with other practitioners, and my mind-state dropped down.

Such a state lasted for several months, yet I did not feel it myself. Every day I started and finished with a busy and heavy workload. I always hoped that the following day's situation would be better, but after several months, that anticipated "tomorrow" was still a repetition of "today." I wondered why I could not step out of such a state.

Today when I opened the Minghui/Clearwisdom website and read practitioners' experience sharing articles, I suddenly had a thought in my mind: "Why can't I step out of this state? ... Cannot step out... cannot step out..." isn't the state of not being able to step out also a form of prison?

I was not detained in an obvious prison that the evil had arranged and was visible to human eyes, but instead I had walked into a prison that my own attachments had created. Which prison is more fearful? The prison of the mind. If we don't remove the attachments, these prisons will not disappear. I found all kinds of bad thoughts in me, the first of which was lack of 100 percent pure, firm belief in Master's hints, followed by attachments of fear, comfort, vanity, jealousy, the show-off mentality, attachment to pursuing fame and self-interest, and the attachment to hearing nice words. Each of these attachments existed to a different extent and each was hidden. The other day I cut open a big, red apple, to put in front of Master's picture and found that the core of the apple was rotten. This was no accident. This incident was a hint from Master ¡V it all reflects on your mind whether you cultivate well or not. Master hopes for us to cultivate to become pure and clean Dafa disciples.

Not only do I manifest this "prison in the mind," I notice that many practitioners have similar problems. When we make this or that excuse, in fact the excuse itself forms the wall, the iron gate, and the gloomy environment of a prison, which prevent us from stepping forward. It stops us from offering salvation to sentient beings, stops us from establishing our own mighty virtue, and stops us from fulfilling the sacred responsibility that Master gave to us. How can we become a Fa-rectification period Dafa disciple? My own understanding is that, if we do not recognize the old forces' arrangement, neither our bodies nor our minds will be imprisoned, and we can clarify the truth well and save sentient beings. When we are slow and slack, when we are numb, when we pace back and forth, we really should think carefully, "Are we really languishing in a prison?"

October 26, 2006