PureInsight | January 20, 2008
[PureInisght.org] I now
recognize one issue with which I could not cope for some time. Seeing
this has also helped me to see problems in our cultivation group. I am
sharing it with everybody with the hope it can also help people in
other areas.
About a week ago, when reading Zhuan Falun, I stopped in the 1st
lecture, where out Master tells us that the beings dropped from high
levels, because they developed "a collective form of social relations"
in which some of them developed selfishness. I stopped at the Chinese
word "GuanXi" (relationships).
I didn't understand why the dropping of a being should be connected to the development of relationships with other beings.
In our reading class we shared our understandings on the issue of
relationships and, as I thought about it deeper, I understood
something. I will describe our situation since it may also be helpful
in other areas. It happened that there appeared to be a relationship
between two practitioners. Because of different understandings, each of
them perceived it differently. This different perception of the
relationship gradually changed it from positive (friendly) to negative
(hostile). Both practitioners began to look for sympathy for their
behavior from other practitioners. They tried to prevent people from
seeing the other practitioner and the like. So a real mess of
relationships developed. Some supported one of them, some supported the
other, some said both have their reasons, so the situation of all the
practitioners became very complicated.
But it helped me to understand one issue. Similarly, after the
development of relationships between beings, the beings fall down. I
understood also another thing, that relationships can prevent us from
having true compassion, because when we support one, we are "against"
the other one, so there is no compassion. As I understood this severe
issue, I started to send forth righteous thoughts to clean the
relationships between me and other practitioners and another level of
compassion appeared, in which I am able to understand more beings.
According to my understanding, it can be exactly the clouded
relationships between practitioners, and also between practitioners and
everyday people, which prevent us from "ascending." They cause us to
fall and they prevent us from going up.
In our language the words for "predestined relationship" (YuanFen) and
for relationship (GuanXi) are basically the same but, in Chinese, there
is a difference. Here I was talking about the relationships
(GuanXi) that are, on our level, mostly displayed as incorrect
relationships between men and women, by anger in relationships between
practitioners, emotions in relationships, and the like. I was not
trying to say we should do anything with regard to predestined
relationships. Interestingly, the Chinese word for relationship
(GuanXi) means something like "door to prison" or "bonding belt."
On a more positive note, after clearing our relations just a bit (we
still did not solve all of the relationship problems), we made a huge
leap forward in our big project. Before, we had a hard time calling
sponsors and asking them for sponsorship. On the second day after our
discussion on our relationships, a sponsor called us by himself,
offered us a sponsorship, and apologized for not being able to give us
more. This reminded me again to work more on our relationships.
