June 12, 2003
(Clearwisdom.net)
Recently the Xinhua News Agency again published an absurd venom-filled commentary that used SARS to demonize and attack Falun Gong. Furthermore, it produced propaganda distorting and quoting out of context Teacher' new lectures. Here I'd like to talk about some problems that probably exist in our cultivation.
I remember when the persecution of Falun Gong just began in 1999, many of the lies fabricated by the evil were directly aimed at some of the attachments and confusion common to Dafa practitioners at the time. As pointed out by Teacher in "Towards Consummation" (Essentials for Further Advancement II):
"Do you know that one of the biggest excuses the old evil forces use at present to persecute Dafa is that your fundamental attachments remain concealed? So in order to identify those people, the tribulations have been made more severe...Whatever you're attached to, they have evil ones concoct lies about that."
Therefore, are the recent fabrications the consequence of the continued presence of related attachments still dwelling in the minds of a significant number of Dafa practitioners? For instance, is it because a significant number of Dafa practitioners actually very much rely on and worship the experts and the scientific theories of everyday people, which they think are much easier to explain and more readily accepted by the everyday people than the truth of Dafa? Are they then attached to explaining such scientific theories as western medicine's immunology and the genetic expression of polymorphic neutrophils etc.?
When I saw that much of the propaganda was aimed at people's most susceptible emotions, I thought to myself: Was this because a significant number of us Dafa practitioners hadn't yet thoroughly understood these human emotions from the Fa and let go of them that the evil had this chance to exploit? If so, the Dafa practitioners who have encountered, heard and witnessed these phenomena, should all be mindful and pay serious attention. Teacher has recently explicitly pointed out:
"When the persecution first began, the students in Mainland China and outside the Mainland alike indeed didn't do well with a lot of things. When they didn't do well at that time, you could say that they lacked experience, or hadn't ever run into something like that, or didn't know what to do. But in a flash a few years have passed, and you can't say that anymore. And you know clearly and rationally how to handle those things. So you should do even better, and what happened in the past shouldn't keep occurring." (draft version of "Lecturing on and explaining the Fa at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference")
It has been nearly 3 years since "Towards Consummation" was published. We should calmly examine what our fundamental attachments were, and determine whether we have rooted them out in the course of our cultivation or if we are still attached to pursuing what we yearned for driven by these notions.
Of course, Teacher has also said,
"When interference comes up it's usually caused by those old forces. Then when we do everything righteously, should we expect there to be no interference? It can only reduce a lot of the losses. And that's because your gaps would be taken advantage of due to the fact that you yourselves still do have undetectable elements, and the old forces insist on forcing in what they want to do." (draft version of, "Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference")
In conclusion, I think now that the evil has fabricated these kinds of lies, which must have poisoned sentient beings to a certain extent, we must promptly clarify the facts in a timely manner. At the same time, we should make use of this reminder, even though it came in the form of vicious lies, to reflect and root out as much as possible our deeply imbedded and not easily detectable fundamental attachments, and do better and better in the final and critical stage of Fa-rectification.