(Minghui.org) Greetings, revered Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
In 1998, my aunt introduced Falun Dafa to my ailing mother when I was in elementary school. In the beginning, my mother didn’t want to bring me to group Fa study because she was afraid that I’d be a nuisance. But I felt like I was missing out on something wonderful, so I insisted and just like that, my mother brought me with her the next time she attended. Looking back now, those were very happy times for me.
After July 20, 1999 my mother was persecuted many times. Our family, which had been joyful and harmonious with Dafa’s blessing, was shattered. I was forced to leave school when I was in the seventh grade and find a job to help support the family. This marked my entrance into the big dye vat of society and gradually, I studied the Fa less and less. I knew in my heart that Dafa was good, but I just couldn’t motivate myself to remain diligent. I often pleaded to Master, hoping that He would give me a chance to make up for lost time. I wanted to start my cultivation over again.
Thanks to Master’s arrangement, I moved to Melbourne at the beginning of 2018. In 2019, I finally managed to get in contact with other practitioners and I re-entered the cultivation environment. Fortunately, I’ve been roommates with some very diligent practitioners. They encourage me to study the Fa and do the exercises, and I often go to truth-clarification sites with them. Under their influence, I became diligent in my cultivation.
Breaking Through Human Notions to Clarify the Truth
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda and incitement of hatred has led many people who didn’t understand the truth to become prejudiced against practitioners. On top of this, I hadn’t studied the Fa for a long time while I was in China, and I had a naturally introverted personality. All of this meant that while I understood that Dafa was good, I had difficulty explaining why it was good. Every time I worked up the courage to clarify the truth I felt very uncomfortable. The end result was that I either couldn’t say anything, or the person I talked to ridiculed me. I began to think I didn’t know how to clarify the truth. At last year’s conference I listened to other young practitioners who under different situations created opportunities to validate the Fa and clarify the truth. I realized that it was high time that I eliminated my notion.
Master said,
“Because our practice is one in which the Fa refines practitioners, this means that some situations will arise from gong and the Fa. In the course of practice, different levels produce different situations.” (Lecture Seven, Zhuan Falun)
As I studied and memorized the Fa, Master granted me stronger righteous thoughts. I began to feel that I wished to clarify the truth, so I asked fellow practitioners to teach me how to do this. We had several phone numbers from Sichuan. When I dialed my first number, I was nervous, and my heart beat very fast. I silently asked Master to strengthen me. As soon as I said the first “Hello?”, I felt an electric energy surge through my body. In the beginning, I wrote down what I planned to say to clarify the truth. Even though I continuously edited it the information still didn’t have good flow or a sense of continuity. During that time I must have made about five to six hundred calls, and although my success rate with helping people withdraw from the CCP and its youth organizations wasn’t that high, I was able to practice my conversational tone and speed.
When Melbourne was on lockdown during the pandemic, I attended training on the RTC platform and I learned how to clarify the truth. I was on the platform making calls almost every day. With Master’s help and fellow practitioners’ assistance, I finally broke through the notion that I did not know how to clarify the truth to people. I was able to use these telephone calls to tell people how to recite the phrases “Falun Dafa is good” and “Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good” and quit the CCP to keep themselves safe.
On weekends I often went to Melbourne’s Chinatown to distribute truth-clarification materials. If I ran into Chinese people, I’d ask a practitioner who was experienced in clarifying the truth to persuade them to quit the CCP. I built up the attachment of dependence but lately, this practitioner became busy and couldn’t come. I realized this was an opportunity for me to remove the attachment to “being afraid of not clarifying the truth well.” Now, I also clarify the truth to people face-to-face in Chinatown.
One day I chatted with a man who lived in Australia for over 30 years and I helped him quit the CCP. His face was pale and ashen, and he looked very tired. He thanked me multiple times, and told me that he appreciated our hard work passing out flyers. About a month later, I ran into this man again. He saw me first and called out, “Hey! You’re that Falun Dafa practitioner!” I was surprised and looked at him thinking, “Who is he?” He smiled and said, “You don’t recognize me?” I suddenly remembered him. With a laugh, I said, “It’s because you look so energetic, sir. You look like you’re in such good spirits now. I didn’t recognize you.”
He looked happy when he heard that. After seeing the change in this gentleman, I am even more certain that what Dafa disciples do in truth-clarification truly saves sentient beings.
Cultivating Xinxing Within Dafa Projects
In October 2019, another practitioner told me that she was having problems editing sound files for a radio program. She hoped that I could help her out. I was a little hesitant, since I didn’t like doing this type of “clean up” work. I thought that if I did a good job with the editing, the audience would think that it was all thanks to the show’s host; if I didn’t do a good job, the blame would fall on me. Moreover, because I wasn’t diligent in practicing the exercises back in China, I still had a back problem. The thought of having to work late into the night seated in front of a computer seemed daunting. But when I thought about how this practitioner had such a hard time, I decided to put aside my selfish thoughts and help edit Sound of Hope Australia’s Lifestyle News segment.
My motivation for doing this was to help a fellow practitioner and lighten her workload. As I continued in this work, I realized that this was actually the cultivation path that Master arranged for me. Through this job, many of my attachments were exposed such as not wanting to be wronged by people, wanting to hear praise, complaining and feeling frustrated when practitioners messed up their recordings, etc.
Many of these attachments came to a head last October. I thought that I was fairly experienced as I had been working in that position for a year, so I began to focus more of my time and energy on truth-clarification phone calls. While in the RTC 101 room on the platform, the host would often unmute me first in order to broadcast my calls to the other practitioners in the room. I hadn’t studied the Fa deeply, so I became full of myself after hearing other practitioners’ praise. I also developed the attachment to zealotry after overcoming the obstacle of not being able to clarify the truth—an obstacle that had plagued me for years. Even though I appeared to be modest, my show-off mentality had already revealed itself.
I became cocky and unable to concentrate on my editing work. When I was given an assignment, I immediately began thinking of how to finish the job as quickly as possible. While listening to the audio files for quality checks, I was often on my phone at the same time, and I let my mind wander. Naturally, my work suffered. But because I let all my attachments go to my head, I wasn’t able to tell the difference. I still thought my work was perfect.
One day, the host of the show I edited sent me a message. As soon as I saw her long text, I was dismayed. She basically said that in my current state, I didn’t have the heart that I did when I began cultivation. Everyone used to be assured of the quality of the segments I edited, but over the past four or five episodes, my cuts were not clean. She also mentioned that in an ordinary people’s company, editors have their pay docked for every mistake they made.
By the time I finished reading her message I was furious, and even defended myself in my heart: “Do these tiny mistakes really warrant such overreaction? Do you know how much I do in a day? I’m so busy that I barely have time to eat. I do all this work for you, and all you do is criticize me!” My attachment to fame felt attacked, and the grievances I had kept popping up.
I came across this passage while studying the Fa:
“Of course, we have said that one brings trouble to oneself because one’s personal values are not correct and one’s mind is not righteous.” (Lecture Three, Zhuan Falun)
I focused on Master’s words: “mind is not righteous.” But I had been diligent in doing things to save people! I thought—I kept up with all of my Dafa projects. During the lockdown, I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to memorize the Fa, and I hardly had time to FaceTime my family, so how was my mind not righteous?
When I began looking inward, I found a lot of shortcomings. First, I treated my editing job for Sound of Hope just like an ordinary person’s job. I thought that because I had experience, I didn’t have to pay as much attention to my work. Because I thought I was good at my job, I didn’t want to spend time to double- or triple-check my work. I was doing the three things, but I wasn’t doing them conscientiously. I felt that truth-clarification on the RTC platform was much more efficient in that you’d call people, they’d quit the CCP and that was it. But for editing radio shows, I’d have to work long nights and sometimes the content wasn’t even related to Dafa at all.
It felt like I was putting a lot of time and effort into a show with no listeners. Truthfully, this was all because I had a lot of arrogant notions and thought that I was a big deal. When I re-edited those few episodes that I had messed up, I was appalled at how bad they were and I wondered how I managed to do such a terrible job. I sent righteous thoughts to eliminate my resentment, competitiveness, and show-off mentality. When I re-read the message that the show’s host sent me, her tone was actually very calm and kind, and it was evident how she had first looked within for her problems when this issue cropped up. All she did was to sincerely point out my flaws. I felt thankful to her from the bottom of my heart, and readjusted my cultivation state.
Having Faith in Master and the Fa Helps Me Overcome Tribulations
My cultivation state in the past was very inconsistent, so whenever I made up my mind to be diligent for a bit and Master would strengthen His straggling disciple, I immediately felt the stark difference. Whenever I wrote sharing articles I always talked about what I felt or what I saw in a dream. It seemed like I was cultivating based on feelings and sensations. So when I realized that I had so many attachments and that I wasn’t doing the three things with righteous thoughts, tribulations began showing up one after the other.
In November when Melbourne opened back up after the pandemic lockdown, I returned to my busy work schedule and lost my routine for doing the exercises. At the same time, something went wrong with the app that I used for RTC calls. My phone number was blocked and my RTC account was frozen. When I called China, people on the other side couldn’t hear anything, and my attempts to learn how to edit videos were pointless as I was unable to produce anything satisfactory even after many long nights of toil. I lost all the “feelings” I would get in cultivation.
When I lit incense for Master I couldn’t tell what Master’s expression was, and I couldn’t see anything out of my celestial eye. It began to feel as though I had stopped cultivating. Then came the U.S. presidential election, which stirred up a lot of my other attachments. I couldn’t even sit still when sending forth righteous thoughts. My cultivation state grew worse and worse, until I hardly had any motivation to be diligent.
During this time I saw many of my flaws such as not taking cultivation seriously, not cultivating according to the Fa, not holding myself to the strict standards of xinxing improvement that a cultivator should have and that I always wanted to show off. I also had an overenthusiastic desire for fairness which stemmed from jealousy, as well as deeply hidden resentment. But there was still one hidden attachment that I wouldn’t find until later.
During group Fa-study, I happened to read this passage of the Fa,
“You may be thinking that your Master has limitless powers, that he should be able to handle things however he’d like in the Fa-rectification. But have you thought about the fact that if we are to rescue all of this, then those who are to be saved need to be willing [to receive salvation], or it doesn’t count. If it is done against their will, their fundamental nature will not change; forcing such change would equate to re-creating a being. Re-creating a being is easy to do. It is saving a being that’s hardest. Re-creating is very easy.” (“20th Anniversary Fa Teaching,” Collected Fa Teachings, Vol, XI)
I realized that I’d had similar thoughts before. In 2020, practitioners in Melbourne held a righteous thoughts relay around the clock so that Shen Yun’s performance wouldn’t be canceled. I thought that because we had formed one body in our righteous thoughts and actions, Shen Yun would perform without a hitch. But in the end, Shen Yun had to cancel the performance due to the pandemic. This time, we did a similar 24-hour relay to continuously send forth righteous thoughts, but the results were contrary to what we expected. I realized that all of my trials and tribulations were because I was not steadfast in my faith in Master and the Fa.
Master said,
“Isn’t any form of pressure a test to see whether your faith in the Buddha Fa is fundamentally strong? If you still are not fundamentally resolute in the Fa, everything else is out of question.” (“For Whom Do You Practice Cultivation,” Essentials for Further Advancement)
Although I didn’t keep up with the election news I still expected a certain outcome. When the results came out, many fellow practitioners were crestfallen. They soon found their attachments and were able to bounce back and do the three things well again. I, on the other hand, hid my strong attachment, only letting it come out when things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to. I felt like the sky had fallen and I couldn’t find the willpower to do anything. This was a huge gap in my cultivation—but I finally found my hidden attachment. Afterwards, my cultivation state and environment both changed for the better.
My biggest improvement this year was that whenever things became difficult, I would know to treat the situation with righteous thoughts. Before, at the slightest sign of difficulty I thought that I wasn’t a good fit for the job, or that I wouldn’t succeed, or that I wasn’t capable.
I’d like to close with Master’s “Steadfast” from Hong Yin II:
“SteadfastThe awakened esteem what is beyond this worldThe devout cultivator sets his heart on ConsummationWhen great is the ordeal, keep steadfastThe will to be diligent never bowed” (“Steadfast,” Hong Yin II)
These are my recent cultivation experiences. Please point out any shortcomings you see.
Thank you, Master! Thank you fellow practitioners!
(Presented at the 2021 Online International Young Practitioners Experience Sharing Conference)
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