(Minghui.org) Everyday people pursue comfort. Practitioners cultivate to reach Consummation, severing our ties to the inevitable physical and mental suffering of the human world. One must wade through a lifetime of hardships and cultivate diligently. One also must be kind to others, put others first and reach the realm of selflessness.
Humans develop selfishness, an ever growing rift between us and our original, true selves. We don't have a lucid concept of our original home and our path back is fuzzy. As a result, we accept this human world as our home. If we develop an attachment to comfort in this world, does that signify us surrendering our desire to return to our true home?
From this aspect, the attachment to comfort is demonic deceit, diverging us from transcending this human realm. The “comfort” humans pursue is material affluence and psychological ease to avoid hardship.
Generally people consider comfort to be a well-deserved blessing. Dafa practitioners should transcend this kind of thinking and have a different view. If we want to return to our true home following Master Li, we must treat comfort as an attachment chaining us to this realm.
Master Li taught us in his poem Tempering the Will:
“To consummate yourself, reaping Buddhahood,Let joy be found in hardship.Physical pains count little as suffering,Indeed, cultivating mind is hardest.Each and every barrier must be broken through,And everywhere does evil lurk.Abundant troubles rain down together,All to see: Can you pull through?The world’s miseries endured,One departs the earth a Buddha.”
If a practitioner pursues comfort, it means that he does not follow “let joy be found in hardship.” How can he transcend the world to reach Consummation?
We cultivate to break the cycle of karmic reincarnation and return to our true home. If not enduring bitterness, how can one dissolve karma?
Master Li taught us in Zhuan Falun,
“But a junior monk who cooks meals might not be of poor inborn quality. The more the junior monk suffers, the easier it is for him to achieve the Unlocking of Gong. The more comfortable the senior monks’ lives are, the harder it is for them to reach the state of Unlocking Gong since there is the issue of karma’s transformation. The junior monk always works hard and tirelessly. It is quicker for him to repay his karma and become enlightened. Perhaps one day he achieves the Unlocking of Gong all of a sudden.”
We as practitioners should not imitate the senior monk pursuing comfort, but strive to become the hard-working junior monk. After the attachment to comfort inflates, other attachments, such as lethargy, fame, complacency, showing off, jealousy, flattery and admiration would consequently surface.
Each attachment is a rope to tying us down tighter to this human realm. This attachment to comfort is serious. One must not be controlled by it in either action or words. With such an attachment, one cannot return to their true home.
I hope fellow practitioners with the attachment to comfort will get rid of it as soon as possible and do the three things with pure heart.
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Category: Improving Oneself
