(Clearwisdom.net) Several days ago, the Chinese Communist Party sent someone to my house to harass me. I was not home at the time. They then harassed my family members. I heard this and looked inward. I found many attachments, which made me quite uneasy. How could this happen? I frequently sent forth righteous thoughts. Why didn't it work? That's impossible. There must have been some fundamental attachments that I had not found. I searched, but could not find anything. This upset me for several days.
One day, my wife said something, and I yelled at her. She said, "Why are you so angry? Is it worth it? Plus, what I said wasn't necessarily wrong." I thought about it and wondered myself why I had become so angry. It indeed was not worth getting angry over. Why was I so reluctant to listen to her? This piqued my interest. I told her, "Help me find the reason! Why did I get angry at you?" She said nonchalantly that I had an attachment to vanity, meaning that I refused to agree with her because I wanted to look superior. This shocked me. Indeed, this was my attachment.
Many things that happened in the past flashed back into my mind. My attachment to showing off and vanity was reflected in them. It was such a deep attachment. How come I never noticed it before? How could I have let it develop to such an extent? Why did I find it now? The reason was that I had started copying Zhuan Falun by hand. Since I had been copying the book, my mind was much more concentrated than when I was merely reading the book.
Before, whenever I studied the Fa, I felt tired. Then I needed to combat my tiredness. This made studying the Fa very difficult. Other practitioners also wrote about the experience of overcoming the demon of tiredness. But as Master said, "The paths of cultivation are varied" ("Unimpeded," Hong Yin II), and what other practitioners wrote did not help me. It got worse from there. Even when I wasn't tired, my mind was distracted. I forced myself to study the Fa like this for a few years. Looking back, why was I tired? It was because the Fa did not truly enter my mind. Because of this, it was easy to be distracted by the demon of tiredness and different thought karma. As a result, my mind was even less calm, which in turn created more interference to my Fa study. It was a vicious cycle. Because of this gap, my attachment to showing off was able to permeate into every Dafa project I was working on in the last several years, yet I was not aware of it.
If I had known several years ago that I should benefit like this from copying the Fa by hand, I wouldn't have wasted so much time! Now that I am hand-copying the Fa, the Fa is able to enter my mind, and everything has changed. When I work on projects to validate the Fa, I am no longer tired. Overall, I have a lot of energy. The evil is no longer able to interfere with me, and I am able to pass the tests in cultivation. Studying the Fa with a calm mind is the foundation of everything.
Indeed, if we don't study the Fa with concentration, we are just going through the motions and living like ordinary people. Aren't we ordinary people validating the Fa, then? No wonder I felt that my words to clarify the facts were often pale and powerless, unable to move people. It was all because of the lack of concentration in studying the Fa. When our words are not on the Fa, we don't have the power of the Fa behind us.
The attachment to showing off distracted me from studying the Fa with my whole mind. I remember a few years ago, I felt that it was a sign of my reading ability to be able to read the Fa quickly. This one impure thought took away the sacredness of studying the Fa, impairing my ability to understand the Fa. At the same time, I indulged in the attachment. In front of other practitioners, I tried to show that I was a true practitioner. When I clarified the facts, I was talkative but did not take into consideration what the other person thought. As a result, my truth-clarification efforts were not always successful. On ordinary matters, when others needed assistance, I always helped out in order to show how smart I was. In my ordinary work, I was considerate of those who reported to me, mostly to show how great a boss I was. I forgot to validate the greatness of the Fa. My skin disease, which went away after I started practicing Falun Dafa, returned a few years ago. I now realized that it was also because of my attachment to showing off. Even when I was making banners for Dafa, I was trying to do better than others. Whenever I saw the banners, I felt a sense of pride. What was behind all this? It was my attachment to vanity and a desire to validate myself.
We can see the power of Dafa only when we study the Fa well and truly look inward.
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