The purpose of cultivation is to help you understand yourself
rather than to ponder over external matters.
No matter how one practices, it ultimately leads to a dead end.
Human destiny is inescapably tied to birth, aging, sickness, and death.
In this world, no one can escape the constraints of birth, aging, sickness, and death.
The idea of immortality is a seductive delusion.
The meaning of life lies in understanding the essence of human nature.
How to face the experiences of birth, aging, sickness, and death with composure as time passes.
You are the master of this life.
Therefore, the first step in cultivation is to find yourself.
Only by finding yourself can you recognize it, align with it, and be true to yourself.
However, people are often deceived by their own perceptions and awareness.
Seeing good and evil! Hearing right and wrong! Feeling pleasure and pain! Knowing right from wrong! That is oneself.
This perception and awareness arise from interactions with external conditions.
Instead, one often neglects to ask who the master of this perception and awareness is?
Thus, finding the master of perception and awareness should be like searching for gold veins.
Only by locating where the gold vein lies can one excavate a gold mine.
By refining this gold mine can one obtain real gold.
It is not through blind practice that stones can be turned into gold.
Such cultivation would only yield dust.
Human perception and awareness are where the gold veins lie.
In this colorful world filled with good and evil, right and wrong! Goodness and badness! Rightness and wrongness.
This perception arises due to conditions. It changes and flows.
If one cultivates based on this perception alone like stones will ultimately return to dust.
Consider whether there could be good or evil without conditions for perception?
When conditions arise, can you know who the master of seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing is?
Thus ancient sages said: Goodness and evil are inconceivable; at that moment you are your original self.
If (you believe), then that is you yourself.
But often you are influenced by your own concepts and understanding.
(With habits unremoved; intrinsic nature unrefined).
Therefore like a gold mine that still needs refining to discard impurities while retaining essence.
If cultivated correctly using this perception as true gold can be obtained.
by – Teacher Liu Hongming
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