(Clearwisdom.net) When I read an article by a fellow practitioner which mentioned the subject of how to be a practitioner, it reminded me that practitioners outside China have often said to each other: “This is how Master wants us to do it.” It seems that they have taken this reasoning as an excuse to convince others. The result is that for some practitioners, the conflict in question is eased on the surface. If some practitioners do not agree with the reasoning, they try to find any chance to ask Master. Therefore, there arose another issue whereby people said, “Master meant such and such, so you all just have to do as I said.” Usually when practitioners from mainland China bump into problems and don't know why, they also keep asking whether it is a problem that Master has mentioned before. Actually, they were expecting the answer to be “That wasn't what Master said.” Thus this is an important issue of how we learn to be practitioners.
Master has taught us the universal law, and whatever we should know is written in “ZhuanFalun.” However, there are some parts of the book that we should understand and yet still do not, or there are some common problems which appear regarding these points. Master has also issued articles to point out things to us and to correct our mistakes and He taught us to “take the Fa as the teacher” (“Teaching the Fa at the 2004 International Fa Conference in New York”), keeping a calm heart in everything we encounter and always having the attitude of looking inward, standing firmly in the “Fa” to cultivate. Thus the Fa principles will appear to us. This is what Master has pointed out to us as the way to rise up in cultivation.
Every practitioner will run into hundreds or thousands of problems and conflicts. Those problems form an environment providing us the chance to understand the Fa better and to relinquish our attachments. If we push the problems off to Master, that means we refuse to cultivate ourselves, and we are also looking externally. So in this case, we cannot rise up in those conflicts.
Many times when we came across some problems, part of the practitioners' reactions were: “Master has never mentioned it before. Go ask Master, see what He says.” However, a little later, because of not being able to find a channel to ask Master directly and being without any other alternative, we just calmed down and studied the Fa. Eventually we found Master had already said everything in the book, but He didn't use the same example as our situation. The principles of the Fa are general principles. Thus no matter what happens, we should follow the general principles, the standards of the Fa. Since Master taught us the principles, then we should do our best to understand them and learn how to put them to use. When people in olden times studied, they usually emphasized drawing inferences about other cases from one incident. Nowadays we study Dafa, and if we cannot be like that, it actually means that we do not understand the principles yet. What should we do? We should calm down and strengthen ourselves in studying the Fa well instead of staying at the former level of understanding, or following the former thoughts and digging into a dead end. The more you dig, the more confused you will be, and eventually you will form an attachment to it.
With regards to some other problems that Master has never published an article about but that practitioners are talking about and Minghui/Clearwisdom website editors are discussing, we need to consider these problems from within the Fa. What if these problems are too low and are not things Master wishes to talk about while he is rectifying the universe and teaching Dafa? Nevertheless, they are very basic issues that a Dafa practitioner should treat righteously while being a noble, good person among everyday people.
If we only consider problems from our angle, then we may think for instance, “Master should talk about this problem,” and “Why didn't He talk about that problem? Since He didn't talk about it, I don't know how to do deal with it, so I should just insist on my own opinion.” Or we think that Master's words must have this meaning or that meaning. Or we may think that Master had talked about this problem before, but now the situation has changed; therefore, what He said cannot apply in this case, so I should insist on my original opinion and way of doing things. If you have a problem like this, that means that you were affected by modern science and the Chinese Communist Party's atheism and do not know how to be a practitioner. You actually don't know what the duty of being a practitioner is. Many of the problems and obstacles will thus be difficult for us to move beyond, and of course, the elevation of our levels will be blocked. This is definitely a serious problem that we need to take to heart. We cannot presume that we have not been polluted by atheism and the CCP culture.
These are just little bits of my thoughts, and I wrote them out to share with everyone. Each of us has a different part in cultivation; and also each of us is walking our own path, but no matter what path we are on, learning to truly cultivate the Fa, standing firmly in the Fa, and understanding it are the basic and most important things. Hopefully all of us will be more righteous and more steady on the last part of the journey.
