Upgrading Xinxing
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        Many people of the past ran into a lot of problems after they cultivated to a certain stage and could not go up any more because they could not observe their Xinxing. Some people naturally have relatively high Xinxing. Their Celestial Eyes are at once opened during practice, and they have reached a certain realm of awareness. Because such a person has relatively good inborn qualities and Xinxing, his cultivation energy grows rapidly. By the time his cultivation energy has reached the level of his Xinxing, he needs to continue to upgrade his Xinxing in order to increase his cultivation energy. Then, the problems will also become outstanding. Particularly for a person of good inborn qualities, he feels that his cultivation energy has grown well and he is getting on well with his practice as well. How come there are suddenly a lot of troubles? Everything now is abnormal. People are mistreating him, and the boss starts to dislike him. Even the situation at home is very tense. Why are there suddenly so many problems? He does not understand it. Such a state has occurred because of his good inborn qualities, and because he has reached a certain level. However, how could that be the standard of the final consummation for a practitioner? It is far from the end of the cultivation! He must continue to upgrade himself. He has reached that state because of his little inborn qualities. In order to upgrade himself, the standard has also to be raised.

        One may say: I shall earn some more money to take care of my family. I shall have no more worry about it, and then, I will cultivate the Tao. I would say that you are dreaming. You are not able to interfere in the lives of others, nor can you control the fate of others, including your wife, sons, daughters, parents, and brothers. Are those things to be determined by you? In addition, what will you cultivate if you do not have worries nor troubles? How can you practise the Gong in a comfortable and relaxed manner? Where is there such a thing? That is what you think from the perspective of an ordinary person.

        Cultivation should take place in the midst of tribulations to see whether you can give up and care little about the seven emotions and six desires. If you are attached to these things, your cultivation will not be successful. Everything has its causational relationship. Why can human beings be human? It is because of the existence of emotions in human beings. They just live for such emotions, such as an affection for kinsfolk, love between a man and a woman, an affection for parents, feelings, friendship, doing things in consideration of mutual emotions, which embody in all respects. Whether a person wants to do one thing or not, is happy or unhappy, loves or hates something, everything in the whole human society derives from these emotions. You cannot cultivate until you give up these emotions. If you have jumped out of them, nobody can affect you any more. The mind of an ordinary person will not be able to sway you. What takes over in their place will be benevolence which is something of a high order. Of course, it is not easy to abandon such things all at once. Cultivation is a long term process, in which one's attachments are slowly given up. However, you should maintain a strict standard for yourselves.

        As practitioners, contradictions may arise all of a sudden. What shall we do? You should always maintain a mind of compassion and serenity. When running into a problem, you can do well because it gives you room to relax the tension. You should always carry compassion and kindness towards others, and think of others before doing anything. If you first consider, whenever a problem comes up, whether others can put up with it and whether it will hurt others, you will not do wrong. So you must make a high or even higher demand on yourself in your cultivation.

        It happens frequently that some people cannot realize that. Somebody's Celestial Eye has opened and he sees Buddha. He comes back home and worships Buddha while at the same time talking repeatedly to Buddha in his mind, asking: Why don't you help me? Please help me solve the problem. Of course the Buddha will not help him. The tribulation was set up by the Buddha to improve the person's Xinxing so that he may go up in his contradictions. Can he help you solve the problem? He will not, at all. He will never help you solve it. How can you increase your cultivation energy, improve your Xinxing and get promoted when all problems have been solved? The key is to let you increase your cultivation energy. From the viewpoint of the great enlightened beings, to be a human being is not the purpose. The purpose of having a human life is not to be a human, but to return to the origin. Buddha considers it better that one bears more hardships because he may speed up paying his debts. That is Buddha's opinion. Some people do not realize that. When someone got nothing by asking Buddha for help, he begins to complain to Buddha: Why don't you help me? I burned incense and kowtowed to you every day. Hence, he breaks the image of Buddha and from then on starts to abuse Buddha. Because of such abuse, his Xinxing comes down and his cultivation energy disappears. He knows he has lost everything and then he hates Buddha more and more. He thinks Buddha was harming him. How can he judge Buddha's Xinxing by using ordinary people's standards? How can it work when he treats things of a high order with an ordinary person's criteria? So it happens frequently that people consider such hardships to be mistreatments, and therefore many people have dropped down.

        In the past few years, many well-known big qigong masters have also dropped down. Of course real qigong masters have returned after accomplishing their own missions. Only those, who have lost among ordinary people and whose Xinxing has come down, are still active. They no longer have cultivation energy. Some qigong masters, who used to have a great reputation, are still active in society. Noticing that he has dropped into the level of ordinary people and is unable to extricate himself from the pursuit of fame and gain, his teacher takes his Assistant Spirit () away where his cultivation energy grew. There are quite a lot of such typical examples.

        Such examples are rather few in our school and those in our school are not striking examples. However in the aspect of Xinxing improvement there are quite a few striking examples. There was a student from a textile factory in Shandong Province. Having learnt Falun Dafa, he taught others to practise it. As a result, the factory has taken on a new look. The employees of the factory used to take leftover towel cloth home. After he had learnt Falun Dafa, instead of taking it home, he would bring back to the factory what he had taken home before. When they saw what he did, other staff would also not take any. Some of them even returned to the factory what they had taken home. Such a situation occurred throughout the whole factory.

        A Falun Dafa assistant center director in a certain city went to a factory to see how the practitioners there were doing with their practice. The factory director came out to meet him in person and said: since studying your Dafa these workers come to work early and go home late. They work very diligently and accomplish whatever assignments they are given by the boss. Also, they do not compete for personal interests. Since they have started to act this way, the whole factory has taken on a new look, and the economic benefits of the factory have also been improved. Your Gong is so powerful that I would like to attend the lectures when your teacher comes. The principal purpose of our cultivating Falun Dafa is to bring people up towards the high dimensions, without trying to do so. Yet, it could also play the role of promoting the spiritual awareness of society. If everyone goes searching inside himself, and thinks about how to conduct himself well, I would say that society will be stabilized, and the moral standard of mankind will go up again.

        During my lecturing session in Taiyuan, there was a student who was over 50 years old. She and her husband were crossing the road on their way to the auditorium to attend my lecture when a car running fast passed by them. The old woman was caught by the wing mirror of the car. She was pushed along more than 10 meters before being thrown onto the ground. The car did not stop until it had gone more than 20 meters. The driver got out of the car and was cross with the lady: "Why weren't you walking carefully?" Nowadays many people tend to shirk responsibility when they meet with problems no matter whose fault it is.

        The people in the car asked the woman how she felt and if she needed to go to the hospital. At this, the driver changed his manner. He asked the woman if she was all right, and offered to take her to the hospital. The woman, who was a practitioner, rose from the ground and said, "There's nothing wrong with me, you may go". Then she whisked away the dust on her and left with her husband.

        When they came to attend my lecture and told me what had happened, I felt happy because our students' Xinxing had indeed improved. The woman told me that she would have dealt with the occurrence differently if she had not learnt Falun Dafa. Let us think about the event. The woman was in her 50's. The car pushed her along so far and threw her heavily into the street. Besides, she had retired enjoying no benefits. If such a thing had happened to an ordinary person, she might have said that she was seriously injured, and she might not have got up. If she had been sent to the hospital, she might have caught this opportunity and stayed there as long as she liked. But as a cultivator, the old lady didn't behave that way. We believe that one mindfulness of a person determines the consequence of an affair. Is it possible that an ordinary person at the age of 50 would not get hurt at all in such a situation? But the old lady did not even scratch her skin! This is because she was right minded at that moment. If she had said, "Oh, I feel terrible. Something is wrong with this part or that part of my body...", then she might have really broken her bones or got paralysed. She might have had to spend the rest of her life in the hospital. In that case, would she feel better by being paid a lot of money? The people watching the accident wondered why the old woman did not take advantage of the mishap to squeeze some money from the driver. We know that moral standards have been distorted today. The driver was wrong for speeding. But did he knock the woman down intentionally? Certainly not. However, even the bystanders think it unfair that she did not ask the driver for money as compensation. Many people do not know what is right and what is wrong. If you tell someone that he is doing bad, he will not believe you. Because changes have taken place in the moral standard of mankind. Some people put profit-making first. There is nothing that they dare not do for the sake of money. And it has even been taken as the motto by some people that "Heaven destroys those who do not look out for themselves."

        One practitioner in Beijing once took his child for a stroll at Qianmen after supper. They saw many people buying lottery tickets at a broadcasting van. The child wanted to join in the fun, so the father bought a one-yuan ticket for him. Luckily they won the second prize: a high-quality bicycle especially made for children. The child felt overjoyed. But it suddenly occurred to the father that a practitioner should not pursue this kind of thing. How much De would it cost him to accept a prize which he was not entitled to? With this idea, he said to the child, "Don't take the bike, I will buy you one if you want". The child became unhappy, "You didn't agree to buy one for me before; now that I've got one free and you won't even let me take it!" The child began to cry; the father had to take the bicycle home. At home, the more he thought about it, the more uncomfortable he felt about himself. He thought about sending money to the lottery people. Then he thought that the lottery tickets were gone, and figured they would divide the money among themselves if he sent it to them. Finally, he decided to donate the money to his work unit.

        The father is lucky that many of his colleagues are practitioners of our Falun Dafa, too. They can understand him, so can his boss. If such a thing occurred in an ordinary environment, an ordinary work unit, where you say you do not want the lottery bike and donate the money to your work unit because you are a practitioner, your boss would think that there is something wrong with your mind. Others would talk behind your back: "Has this person gone wrong with his practice of qigong, and gone mad because he is too obsessed with it?" I have told you that the moral standard of the people has been distorted. In 1950's and 1960's, what was such a behaviour? It was quite common and nobody would have felt strange.

        We believe that no matter what changes have occurred in human moral standard, the cosmic qualities - Zhen Shan Ren will never change. If someone says that you are good, you are not necessarily really good. If someone says that you are bad, you are not necessarily really bad because the measuring criterion for good and bad has been distorted. Only by conforming to the cosmic qualities can one be a good person. That is the sole measuring criterion for good and bad, which is recognized by the universe. Although a great change has taken place in human society, human moral standard has declined, the moral degeneration of the world is getting worse day by day, and profits making has become the only motivation, the universe does not change with the changes in mankind. As a practitioner you cannot act according to the ordinary people's standards. It is not all right if you do something because an ordinary person says it is right to do so. What an ordinary person says is good may not be necessarily good. What an ordinary person says is bad may also not be necessarily bad. In an era when moral standard is distorted, if you tell someone that he is doing something wrong, he will not even believe it! As a practitioner, you can determine what is genuinely good and what is genuinely bad by using the measurement of the cosmic qualities.