The Essence of Cultivation

In my path of cultivation, I have often asked myself a question, and I have benefited a lot by doing so. The question is: what is the essence of cultivation? When pondering this question, I am always reminded of Master words: cultivation practice is about cultivating your heart (paraphrased). Cultivating my heart is the essence of cultivation.

1. Seizing every opportunity to purify our hearts

Only amid arguments and conflicts can we reach the aim of cultivating our hearts. Therefore, whenever something happens, and touches your heart, it's the opportunity for you to cultivate your heart. You can easily see whether the heart is righteous, and then correct the incorrect attitude. However, we tend to fall in the trap of superficial phenomena of problems, focus on possible results, and try to judge who is right or wrong from the results. If we always deal with things with such an attitude, we may lose a lot of opportunities to elevate our xinxing [heart nature]. We can always learn lessons from the past. Therefore, seizing every opportunity to purify our hearts is really very important. Because there are only a few opportunities left, don't let superficial phenomena cover our eyes of wisdom, and neglect the essential problems we should aim at. I think that is how we meet the requirements of Fa. Once we lose the opportunity to purify our hearts, it may never come back again!

We should not become muddled in concrete problems or forget the essence of cultivation. Looking back at the past, I find that many concrete problems were not as important as we had imagined. In the Fa-rectification period, cultivating our hearts may be far more important than technically solving problems or changing things according to our own desires. Whether or not things work as we want them to may not influence the final results.

In "Lecturing on and Explaining the Fa at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference,” Master explained a question about sickness karma and sending forth righteous thoughts. I thought that this is telling us how to understand the Fa of looking inwardly and rationally denying the arrangements of the old forces. If we only emphasize denying the old forces, but neglect looking inwardly, we cannot solve problems fundamentally. We especially need to look inward with our hearts.

2. How to All-Encompass One Body

In Fa-rectification, the issue of being as one body is always raised. If we view every practitioner as a part of a human body, it will be easy to understand this principle. The function of every part is different, but the aim is the same: keeping our body functioning smoothly.

Therefore, for practitioners in UK to do things as one body, every practitioner has the responsibility to think about one question before acting: whether our act is beneficial for UK as one body to help Fa-rectification? This should be the starting point for all of our missions. We should always put being one body in the first place.

Translated from Chinese at http://www.yuanming.net/articles/200306/21887.html