My Understanding of "Taking the Fa as Teacher"

I would like to share my enlightenment with fellow practitioners. I have been through wind and rain in the past years, and truly felt the seriousness and solemnity of what cultivation really is. My past experiences have allowed me to clearly understand the meaning of "Taking the Fa as Teacher," and I am especially moved by Teacher's grand compassion and infinite grace.

Teacher has earnestly told us to "Take the Fa as Teacher," and I have already inscribed the words into my heart. But when our human emotion is impacted by the complexity of modern day reality, we may unconsciously move away from Teacher's teaching and use the reality principle to deal with our thoughts and actions. I nearly destroyed myself by walking the path that the old forces had arranged. The environment I grew up in, from my childhood to adulthood, made me develop a "critical self-esteem" and I paid great attention to what others thought of me. I especially loathed those people with an imprudent behavior in their sexual relationships, and I always paid great attention and restricted my own conduct in that aspect. After I started practicing Falun Gong in 1997, and after learning from the Fa's guidance, I reduced some of my critical self-esteem. However, the fundamental problems that have resided inside of me have covered up my selfishness, which is still not eradicated. Subconsciously, an incident had happened, which almost lead me to an evil path from a tribulation test.

I get along well with the majority of practitioners in our area, and we often study the Fa and do the exercises together. We also coordinated well in Fa validation after the persecution started in 1999. We encouraged and helped each other when practitioners suffered through this persecution. Together, we walked through many dangerous situations in our Fa validation. Using everyday people's words, it was like, "The friends who shared life and death." But an unexpected matter occurred. A practitioner accused me of enticing her husband. That behavior is exactly what I most loath in others, and now I had tasted my own bitter medicine, especially from a practitioner whom with I had shared life and death. At that moment, my human sentimentality got the better of me, and my deep-rooted "critical self-esteem" resurfaced. I felt my anger rising and it surpassed my self-control. The feelings of shame, grievance and resentment, one after the other, all came out. I was very sad and pledged not to have any more communication with that practitioner again.

My enlightenment was that when using my human thinking to deal with matters, it is often controlled by human principles. Thinking back, some of the not so righteous things practitioners had said in the past, they are just like movie scenes being played back in my mind. In the end, these unexpected human principles formed the following crooked theories: "Dafa cultivation can't change a person. No matter how long you practice, you still can't eliminate your selfishness and human mindset. Why do contradictions still exist between practitioners? Looking back, after cultivating for all these years, why do I still have so many shortcomings? Sometimes, I feel that some of my notions are even worse than the good behavior of everyday people." My thoughts had seriously deviated from the Fa principles and had fallen into the crack of evil theories, making me sadder and sadder day by day. Worse yet, I started having some doubts about Teacher and Dafa.

Some practitioners felt extremely worried about my situation. They came to visit and tried to persuade me not to give up the practice. They also cleared up the evil in my surrounding environment and all the unrighteous thoughts that I had. Finally, one day I started studying the Dafa books again and realized what had just happened to me. I had walked into an evil trap, the exact opposite of a righteous path. The basic reason was that on my cultivation path, I didn't take the Fa as the Teacher. Instead, I took human thinking and matters as my Teacher. I was using a everyday people's conduct to measure the Fa and not using the Fa to measure human behavior. What kind of logic was this? It was simply absurd. Recalling this time, I thought my actions were "righteous thinking" but it was actually a laughable and pitiful mindset.

Teacher said:
"This is what the Dafa disciples are facing today, and it is a form of cultivation brought about by interference from the old forces and company. So during your cultivation process, as long as the side of you that has been fully cultivated goes over and is partitioned off, everything that you haven't fully cultivated will still manifest. Human attachments will still show themselves, just as will bad elements." ("Teaching the Fa at the Fa Conference at the U.S Capital")

So it will create a contradiction between practitioners. Once the tension or conflict emerges, it will be displayed to others and they will discover it and make matters even more noticeable. After that, the practitioner who had the conflict will eventually discover their own problem and be able to look inward to find the self-insufficiency and eliminate the attachments.

I felt ashamed for not comprehending Teacher's lecture sooner, for his lecture couldn't have been more clearly stated. It took me so long and I walked many detours to rectify the situation. In group discussions, I still discovered individual practitioners, who instead of looking inward and practicing diligently, examined other practitioners to find some bad conduct, and used that as an excuse for their slacking off in the practice. This perception is very dangerous. Fellow practitioners, please use my prior mistakes as a mirror image and rectify your unrighteous thoughts. And remember to use the "Taking Fa as Teacher" approach in every respect. No matter what the circumstances, please use the Fa to measure all things and use the Fa to reform ourselves and fellow practitioners. Thus, walking our own righteous cultivation paths, raising our Xinxing (heart and mind nature, character) and upgrading our levels together.