Maintaining High Standards in Cultivation is Extremely Important

I am a 22 year-old Dafa practitioner. Recently, I heard that a lot of practitioners have experienced tests with lust and sentimentality. Some of them are very serious. I think the old forces are using the last surface part of the practitioners to make us fall. The Three Realms is full of sentimentality and it is everywhere - even in the molecules that constitute the Three Realms. Therefore, that is also the last part of practitioners to change. It is normal to have some human feelings since we still have a human body and mind, but as Dafa practitioners we need to take our human emotions lightly and not let them have any control over us. Some practitioners have even made very big mistakes in this area. They let human feelings cause them to fall down and no longer cultivate. When the situation is the most difficult, that is truly the time to make a choice: whether to be a human being or an enlightened being.

Master has told practitioners that to pursue something is wrong and can bring on bad things. This includes the pursuit of having a romantic partner for sentimental or lust reasons. [Practitioners get married and have families just the same as everyone else, it is just that they try to take the sentimentality and lust involved in a relationship more and more lightly]. One can get oneself into terrible situations and leave an enormous gap for the old forces to take advantage of. There are many examples of this at the moment that we should all learn from. As Dafa practitioners, we cannot use any pretence as an excuse for seeking romantic partners to cover up our real attachments, such as “I need to have a girlfriend to fit into everyday society” or “if I date a Chinese girl, it is a great chance to clarify the truth to her and all her friends.” Dafa practitioners are leaving a cultivation path for the people of the future and everything we do needs to be the purest and most righteous. We cannot use any excuse to allow attachments to control our actions.

Recently my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message on my mobile. She lives very far away from me so I do not see her any more, but she still contacts me occasionally to see how I’m doing. When I replied to her, my reply seemed to upset her a bit and she sent me a message back that was hurt and angry. She has read Zhuan Falun before and knows that I am a practitioner. I am the only practitioner she has encountered and to her I represent Falun Dafa - I did not want to leave her with a bad impression. So I sent her a message apologising. However, in my attempts to make her feel better, my message was also slightly flirtatious.

From the above experience, I realised two places where I needed to upgrade my character:

1) Dafa is dignified. We can’t manufacture anyone’s good feelings towards Dafa; we can only wake their good nature through our righteous words and actions. Otherwise, we compromise the principles of the Fa and that is a big loophole.

2) Flirting is not correct behaviour for a practitioner; practitioners should hold themselves to higher standards than others. However, what is even worse is that this girl has got a boyfriend. Flirting with someone who already has a partner is not correct behaviour.

That evening I had a tremendous amount of problems and interference. I realised that through my very unrighteous actions, I had stained my cultivation path and left myself open to the old forces’ persecution. However, it was not until later that I realised the deeper reasons why what I had done was so bad. When I went to sleep that night I had a dream. In this dream I knew for certain that I was in one of the dimensions that I am responsible for. A girl who I knew from my school days walked towards me. I know that this girl is now married with two children. She handed me a note that said she wanted to have an affair with me, even though she has a husband. I then saw that this was happening in the whole dimension, everyone was doing it and it had become an accepted and normal way of behaviour in that world.

I woke up and thought about what had just happened. This came as a big shock to me. Because I had dropped my standards here in this human world, the standards for the countless beings and dimensions that I have come here to represent had dropped along with them. But the effect in these worlds was much larger than the change in my standards here in the human world. Master has told practitioners that a single thought from one being at high levels can have enormous effects on all the levels below. I feel that this is exactly what had happened – my drop in standards, which on the surface seemed quite small, had enormous and devastating effects on the levels below. The standards in that universe became even lower than the correct standard for human beings and if I had not corrected myself, the future for all beings in that universe could have been very bad.

This experience is not limited to just that one form of lustful/sentimental attachment. I think that this is the case for any attachment. If our standards do not meet the requirements of the Fa, then the standards in our universe will be even further away from their requirements and the lifespan of our universe will indeed be short. I hope that practitioners can learn from my lesson and be even more diligent in cultivating themselves and upholding the high standards of Fa-rectification cultivation.

Please point out anything that is improper.