(Clearwisdom.net) There is a practitioner in our local area who suffered from "sickness karma" for two years. On the surface, this practitioner became scared and suffered a lot physically. Twice she even had thoughts of committing suicide, due to the unbearable physical pain. Fellow practitioners cared about her. We studied the Fa with her, sent righteous thoughts for her and tried to analyze the cause of the suffering with her. But there were no obvious results.
When that practitioner shared with me, she said that things were usually fine if she could eliminate bad thoughts as soon as they appeared, but if she let her notions take the lead, right away, she would encounter interference. It was too late to send forth righteous thoughts after the interference began. That practitioner also said that sending forth righteous thoughts was helpful at the beginning. After righteous thoughts, things usually would be under control for some time. But later, sending righteous thoughts seemed not to work anymore.
My personal understanding is, when there are attachments, we need to look inward and eliminate them. It's too late to wait until things get beyond control. It is our goal to keep every single thought of ours righteous, but it is difficult to maintain righteous thoughts every minute. Our remedy is to look inward and eliminate and suffocate evil thoughts bred in our own minds. The looking inward we talk about is not limited to just one or two attachments, we must find the fundamental attachment causing the interference. Moreover, we cannot replace looking inward with sending righteous thoughts. When we send righteous thoughts, we eliminate external evil elements. Getting rid of attachments is most essential. Evil elements will take advantage of us if we are too dependent on sending righteous thoughts, without looking inward. In this case, we would be walking on the path arranged by the old forces without realizing it. During the Fa lecture, "Fa Teaching Given to the Australian Practitioners" Master Li mentioned that if a practitioner didn't do well, it's most likely he forgot the most fundamental thing - looking inwards. Master repeatedly stressed the importance of looking inward. I feel we must form a good habit of constantly looking inward according to the Fa, and establish such a mechanism. Let's not start to look inward only when there is interference.
Another practitioner who also suffered interference did not want other practitioners to find out about her status. Isn't this a strong attachment? Let's cast aside the considerations of saving face, or being laughed at by others. Protecting our human attachments is giving evil elements space to survive. That is the most frightening thing. In the past, I was introverted by nature. After I started cultivation, I found it hard to tell others about some of my attachments. But then I realized, since I started my journey as a cultivator, I had to let go off these dirty things. They became nothing after I exposed them.
During the process of helping fellow practitioners, I found many attachments of mine such as the attachments of jealousy, competitiveness, self-validation , anxiousness, complaining, having a lack of compassion, and sentimentality, etc. When I exposed these attachments with my fellow practitioner and expressed my sincere wish for her to be free from interference, Master gave me many new understandings on the Fa, helping me to see through the evil's tricks. As a result, we both improved together. I understood that as long as we help fellow practitioners with a pure and clean heart, even if we are not that capable, Master will give us the wisdom, as long as we have the heart to help. I learned from my own experiences the meaning of "Cultivation depends on one's own efforts, while the transformation of gong is done by one's master." (Zhuan Falun Translated by US Practitioners)
