(Minghui.org) The sharing article, “Fundamentally Changing Oneself Is the Key to Eliminating Interference” prompted me to think about what is true cultivation and unconditionally looking within.

Many practitioners I know have been struggling with sickness karma for a long time and some have lost their lives. My family member Shu is an example of a veteran practitioner with sickness karma. Shu has been practicing for nearly 30 years. She is well-educated, has a decent job, and is articulate. Even though Shu has been repeatedly detained in labor camps or brainwashing centers, she never gave up her firm belief in Master and Dafa.

However, in recent years, Shu began to experience sickness karma. Fellow practitioners came to study the Fa with her, send forth righteous thoughts together, and discuss how to look inward, but she did not improve and suffered with one condition after another. She spent more time studying the Fa and doing the exercises and made efforts to look inward, however, the sickness karma persisted. This situation left the fellow practitioners who tried to help her feel perplexed, and she herself felt helpless.

This led me to think about what genuine cultivation is and how to truly achieve the standard of the Fa. Even though we are now in the Fa-rectification cultivation period and no longer in the personal cultivation period before the persecution started in 1999, the Fa’s requirement of us has not changed. As a cultivator, the fundamental requirement of us is still to “unconditionally look inward and cultivate oneself.” Especially when everything now is coming to an end, I realized that the Fa’s requirement for us is even more strict.

While Shu is very diligent in the superficial form of cultivation and she also looks within when faced with conflicts, I felt her looking within was limited at the human level, with human thoughts.

In the sharing article I mentioned earlier, the practitioner measured how well she had cultivated based on how many things she did. When she came across a conflict, she thought that as long as she avoided fighting with the other party, she was improving her xinxing. She didn’t examine whether any of her attachments were exposed in the conflicts or if any of her thoughts were impure.

My understanding of looking inward unconditionally is this: No matter what happens to me, I should determine whether it is for me to eliminate certain human sentiments, attachments, or rectify certain deviated thoughts or human notions. Only when I unconditionally rectify myself and assimilate to Dafa, can the sentient beings in my world be saved and enter the new cosmos.

On the other hand, true xinxing cultivation is about working on one’s heart and it won’t automatically happen, one must have the desire to truly look within. When a test arises, we wish we could do well the first time around and easily pass it. But in reality, it might take several rounds to remove one particular human attachment. True xinxing improvement can be heart-wrenching and painful. But the wonderful feeling after our xinxing is indeed improved is also rewarding and we have to persist.

When Shu first encountered sickness karma, she endured it with human thoughts. When it got worse, she went to the hospital and her faith and righteous thoughts weakened. When practitioners reminded her to look within, she did not listen. Then when her condition improved after the treatments, she seemed to think it was because she increased the time studying the Fa, doing the exercises and sending righteous thoughts. What I observed was that some of her fundamental attachments were still untouched.

I see similar situations with other veteran practitioners, who had reservations when they looked within and refused to realize certain thoughts in their minds, as if they were protecting them. But that’s exactly the area we need to cultivate and truly look within unconditionally.

In my own cultivation practice, I didn’t know how to cultivate or how to identify my problems in the past, which led to sickness karma or other tribulations. It was only in recent years that I learned to look inward unconditionally and cultivate inwardly.

I hope more practitioners can look within unconditionally, measure each and every thought we have against the Fa, and truly rectify ourselves based on the Fa.