Here are my highlights:
Then how should we handle that incident? When you run into that type of conflict, we should first keep calm, and we shouldn’t handle it the same way he did. Of course, we can explain it kindly, we can clarify things—that’s not a problem. But you shouldn’t get too attached. When we encounter these problems we shouldn’t fight and compete like other people do. If he acts that way, and you act that way, too, aren’t you an ordinary person? Not only shouldn’t you fight and compete like him, you shouldn’t hate him, either. Really, you shouldn’t hate him. Once you start hating him, aren’t you getting angry? Then you’ve failed to live up to Endurance. We strive to be True, Good, and Endure. And what’s more, your Goodness is nowhere to be found. So you shouldn’t act like him, and you really shouldn’t be angry at him, even if he smeared your reputation at the office and really disgraced you. Not only shouldn’t you be angry at him, you should thank him from the bottom of your heart—really thank him.
Maybe an ordinary person would think this way: “Isn’t that being like that pathetic guy Ah-Q?” I can tell you, that’s not the case. Let’s think about it. You’re a practitioner. Shouldn’t you follow a higher standard? You shouldn’t go by the criteria that ordinary people go by. You’re a cultivator, so aren’t those things that you get of higher levels? Then you should follow the criteria of high levels.
If you act like he does, aren’t you the same as him? Then, why should you thank him? Think about it, what will you get? In this universe there’s a law called “no loss, no gain”—if you want to gain, you have to lose. He smeared you around ordinary people, he’s considered the party who gains since he’s profited at your expense. The worse he smeared you, the more serious the impact, the more you shoulder, and the more virtue he loses, and that virtue is all given to you. At the same time, when you’re shouldering it you might take it lightly and not take it to heart.
Why can human beings be human? It’s exactly because humans have emotion. People just live for emotion. The affection among family members, the love between a man and woman, love for parents, feelings, friendships, doing things for friendship’s sake—no matter where you go you can’t get out of emotion. You want to do something, you don’t want to do something, you’re happy, you’re unhappy, you love something, you hate something—everything in society comes completely from emotion.
If you don’t sever emotion, you won’t be able to cultivate. But if you do break out of emotion, nobody can affect you, and ordinary attachments won’t be able to sway you. What replaces it is compassion, which is more noble. Of course, it’s not easy to sever it all at once. Cultivation is a long process, it’s a gradual process to get rid of attachments. But you really have to be disciplined.
Some people ask, “Is it true that if you have a lot of black matter, you can’t cultivate to high levels?” Yes, you could say that. People who have a lot of black matter have their comprehension affected by it. It forms a field around your body and envelops you, it cuts you off from the nature of the universe, to be True, Good, and Endure.
Karma comes off one chunk at a time, so after a chunk is eliminated your legs feel a little better. But after a little while, here comes another chunk, and your legs start to hurt again. After the black matter is eliminated, it doesn’t dissipate, this matter isn’t destroyed—after it’s eliminated it turns directly into the white matter. And this white matter is virtue. So why can it transform like that? Because he endured hardship, he paid the price, and he tolerated the pain. We believe that virtue is gained when you tolerate pain, endure suffering, and do good things. That’s why this happens during meditation.
When you say you want to cultivate, they won’t put up with it, “You want to cultivate, you want to leave. If you develop gong I won’t even be able to reach you, I won’t be able to touch you.” They won’t let it happen, and they’ll do just about anything to block you. They’ll try to stop you from cultivating. So they use all kinds of tactics to interfere with you, and they might even come to kill you. Of course, it won’t happen like you’re meditating here and your head just gets cut off—that’s impossible, since it has to conform to the way of things in the ordinary world. Maybe you’ll be hit by a car when you leave your home, or you’ll fall from a building, or run into other kinds of danger.
There’s a chance these things will happen. It’s quite dangerous. True cultivation isn’t as easy as you imagined. Just because you want to cultivate, you think you’ll be able to cultivate upward? When you really start to cultivate you’ll immediately run into life threatening danger, this problem will come right up. There are many, many qigong masters who don’t dare to guide people up to high levels. Why is that? Exactly because they aren’t able to get around this problem—they can’t protect you
Let’s see what our Falun Dafa has to say about this. When you cultivate in our discipline, as long as you can always keep up your character, “one good can overcome a hundred evils”—you won’t run into any trouble. On the other hand, if you can’t keep up your character well, if you seek after all sorts of things, you’re sure to invite trouble.
Cultivate your mind, steadfastly raise your gong, always keep improving yourself, and assimilate to the nature of the universe—then, and only then, will you be going up. Some people ask me for my autograph, and I don’t want to give it to them. And then maybe some people tell other folks about how the teacher gave them his autograph, and maybe they want to show it off and want to get protection from the teacher’s messages. Isn’t that another attachment? In cultivation you have to rely on yourself— what are you talking about messages for? Would you care about that stuff when you’ve cultivated to a high level?
The people in other dimensions don’t have bodies like this one, and they can levitate and expand or shrink. But in this dimension they make people have this body, this mortal body that we have. Once you have this body, you can’t take it when it’s cold, you can’t take it when it’s hot, you can’t take being tired, and you can’t take being hungry—you get the idea, you suffer. When you get sick it’s hard to bear it, and you go through birth, aging, sickness, and death. It’s to have you pay off your karma by suffering, to see if you can return, and to give you one more chance. That’s why human beings have dropped into a realm of delusion. After you drop here this pair of eyes is created for you to keep you from seeing other dimensions or how matter really is. If you’re able to make it back,
you will see that the most painful hardship turns out to be the most valuable. You have to experience a lot of hardship when you try to cultivate your way back by awakening in the middle of delusion, and that’s how you return quickly. If you become worse you’ll be annihilated, so in their eyes, being human isn’t the meaning of life—it’s to have you return to your original, true self, to go back. Ordinary people can’t awaken to this. The ordinary people out in the ordinary world, they’re just ordinary people, and they think about how to get ahead and how to live the good life. And the better they live, the more selfish they get, the more they want to have, and the more they stray from the nature of the universe. So they’re heading for destruction
When it’s turning clockwise the Law Wheel can automatically take in energy from the universe, and when it’s turning counterclockwise the Law Wheel can send out energy. Turning inward (clockwise), it saves oneself, turning outward (counterclockwise), it saves others.
So think about it, everybody: there are two major systems in the universe, the Buddhist system and the Daoist system, and without either of them it wouldn’t make up a complete universe, you wouldn’t be able to call it a complete universe, so we include Daoist things here. Some people might
say, “Hey, there’s more to it than just the Daoist system. What about Christianity, Confucianism, and all the other religions?”
I can tell you this, when cultivation in Confucianism reaches extremely high levels it becomes Daoist, while a lot of Western religions are of a Buddhist nature when their cultivation reaches a high level, they’re one set of teachings in the Buddhist system. Those are the only two systems that are major
When you practice you should take virtue seriously. So while you're doing the exercises, if you don’t have good thoughts, at least you shouldn’t have bad thoughts, and the best is to have no thoughts at all. The reason is, you need to build a foundation while you’re practicing at low levels, yet that foundation serves a critical function, and that’s because your thought process has some effect.
Why haven’t you gotten healthy when you’re always exercising? Maybe some people don’t think about those bad things at their practice site, but they always want to get some abilities when they exercise, they want to get this, they want to get that, they have all kinds of states of mind, and a lot of strong desires. So they’re actually practicing in an evil way without knowing it.
But the truth is, their gong doesn’t come from those hardships that they go through. Then where does it come from? It’s just like with any person: he has a lot of attachments when he’s young, and when he gets older his attachments are naturally let go or worn out as time goes by and as his hopes for the future fade away
If you’re going to be real practitioners, you have to look at things from a really high level, and you can’t use ordinary people’s opinions to interpret things. When you think it’s a health problem, you might just bring on health problems. The reason is, once you think it’s a health problem, your character is about as high as an ordinary person’s. Qigong and true cultivation, and even more so that cultivation state, won’t lead to health problems. You know, with people who really do have health problems, 70% of it is psychological and 30% physical. It’s usually that they collapse psychologically first, that they fall apart, and have a huge mental burden, which causes their condition to rapidly deteriorate.
You’re a practitioner, so if you always think it’s a health problem you’re actually asking for it—you are asking for that problem, and now it’s able to set in. To be a practitioner your character has to be high. Don’t always be afraid that it’s a health problem. Fearing that it’s a health problem is an attachment in itself, and it can bring you trouble just the same. In cultivation you need to eliminate karma, and eliminating karma is painful—how on earth could you increase gong in total comfort! And how else could you get rid of your attachments? I’ll tell you a story from Buddhism. There was this person who put in a ton of effort and finally cultivated into an Arhat. He was about to achieve a True Fruition and become an Arhat—how could he not be happy? He was breaking out of the Three Realms! That happiness was an attachment, though, an attachment of excitement. An Arhat should always be in a state of nonaction, with a mind that’s unshakable. But he dropped, and he cultivated in vain. Since he cultivated in vain he had to cultivate all over again, so again he cultivated himself upward. After he put in a ton of effort, he again moved up by cultivating. But this time he got worried and said to himself, “I’d better not get happy this time. If I get happy again I’ll drop all over again.” When he got afraid he dropped again.
You practice, but maybe your spouse doesn’t, and in that case you can’t get divorced just because you practice. The point is, we should take it lightly—you can’t take it that seriously like an ordinary person would. The other day I said that “Buddha’s light shines everywhere, propriety and righteousness harmonize everything.” It means that the energy emitted from our bodies
can rectify all wrong states. But it’s not without exception—in today’s environment all you have to do is flip on the TV and take a glance, and there’s all kinds of stuff, and it can easily stir up desire
What’s it mean to “breed demons in your own mind”? A person’s body has a material field in every dimension. In a special field, everything found in the universe is cast like a shadow into that dimensional field of yours. Even though they’re shadows, they also exist materially. Everything in your dimensional field is controlled by the thoughts in your brain. In other words, when you look at things with your Third Eye, if you calmly observe with no thoughts added in, what you see is real. But as soon as you use your mind, even if it’s just a little bit, everything you see will be false, and this is “breeding demons in your own mind,” which is also called “transforming according to thoughts.”
When you just want to get ahead in the ordinary world, you’ll fail the tests of those tribulations, and you won’t be able to improve. If you live a plush, comfy, and luxurious life among ordinary people, how can you cultivate? How’s your karma going to be transformed?
Some people ask me, “Teacher, why is it you don’t straighten this out?” Think about it, folks, if we straighten out all the obstacles on your cultivation path, how are you going to cultivate?