The Practitioner’s Confusion for Thousands of Years

Xuefeng

January 12, 2021

In 2008, I hired an African girl to help with my housework in Zimbabwe. My reason for choosing her was that she went to church every week and I believed that regular churchgoers must be good in both character and in learning. Then my neighbors, an elderly British couple, later told me that she had stolen several things from them when I had her clean their rooms and yard when they went on a trip to South Africa and left their home in my charge. This is being noble when entering the church but absurd when leaving it.

Here is a similar phenomenon: everyone in mainland China who is more than fifty years of age has been educated in Maoist philosophy for decades, but what happened to these people after China’s reform and its opening up, especially those who are officials? Needless to say, everyone knows that few of them really serve the people; instead, they are bribing each other and neglecting their duties to benefit themselves. When Mao was alive, they were the people’s servants; but now, they have become their masters.

Fifteen years ago, there was an upsurge of learning about Western spirituality and Osho. The situation at that time can be described as the birth of masters like bamboo shoots after a spring rain, talented people appeared frequently on the web, everything they said were all spiritual contents, and all of a sudden there was the prospect of creating a new world, but then, ten years later, the ebbs and flows of the tides disappeared.

Many years ago, Master Jing Kong and Chen Dahui’s movement to restore traditional culture could be said to have been “in the ascendant”. For a time, traditional culture seemed to be making everyone become like Yao and Shun; like saints and sages. Sometimes, when a lecture hall is full, it can make everyone feel that traditional cultural values really have the ability to become the model for the world; however, when they come out of that lecture hall and face reality, they are slapped back to their original shapes, which are still being “noble when entering the church but absurd when leaving it".

Since Chairman Mao left us, there have been waves of spiritual cultivation in China which can be described as, “each leading the pack for three to five years”, but no traces of footprints were left on the beach after the storm. Today, people in social media groups are playing all kinds of tricks and it seems that another time of “a hundred flowers looming” is coming. Masters and experts are born like crucian carp crossing rivers; all sitting straight and seriously, preaching like Bodhisattva, and feeling that “everyone is drunk but I alone am sober”, and they talk about love, awakening, perfection, healing, Buddhism, Taoism, emptiness, and hearts, which all seem reasonable, and might even have profound insights.

The sad reality is that no matter who you are, after you have learned so much, spoken so much, and understood so much, you will often find that after just a few years or decades, you are standing in the same place, you have not entered the Elysium World, you are still having constant worries, and that your beautiful bubble has burst instantly.

This is the confusion of the practitioner for thousands of years. The problem is that you did not build a life and a LIFE program according to what you have learned and wanted. Without the guarantee of the program, you were quickly, or even instantly, beaten into a prison of trouble by the cruelty of reality, and you had quickly compromised to reality and further surrendered. At this time, you can only sigh, “Once you get into this world, you have to deny yourself more or less”!

This is the reason why I believe that program construction is more important than moral education. Looking back on the history of mankind, people who want to be sages and saints have come in rapid succession, but very few have actually followed through. The key to the problem is that mankind has not built a program that can create many sages and saints and maintain their states throughout their lives.

In 2009, I built a program which after ten years of practice had born nearly a hundred sages and saints. If you can imagine, many farmers with only basic school educations have the qualities and understandings of sages and saints, and they live beautifully like celestials. If there were no such program, if I had only written articles on the web which just continued on and on, then all this would have been impossible, and if I were to abolish this program and let those saints and sages return to their original lives, then before long, they would soon return to being mortal, or even laity.

So, I want to tell every practitioner that even if you study online all day and if you have learned something that can be taught to others, if you do not build a program and that supports it, then with only your preaching, it will all come to nothing. If the African girl whom I talked about at the beginning of this article had been kept in an environment like her church, then she would have never developed a heart for stealing and she would never have stolen. My other example was the phenomenon of official corruption; no matter who you were, once you entered the New Oasis for Life program that I created, you would never become corrupt or accept bribes because the program does not have the soil and conditions to ever make you that way.

Practitioners, you must step out of this practitioner’s puzzle area, or what you have learned and done every day will have been for nothing and you will learn that in the end, all your efforts will have been illusions and passing clouds.