The Difference

My son is 3 years old and he loves Dafa disciples’ songs on the internet very much. He had been learning the song of “a letter to Mom in prison” recently. The leading singer was a little girl. He always followed her singing energetically. One time when it was time to send forth righteous thoughts, I said to him: send forth righteous thoughts and the demons won’t dare to come to you. However, he said: "[shouldn't we] send forth righteous thoughts to rescue the little girl’s Mom?" I was shocked at that moment and found the difference between my son and me. He had not been contaminated by the dye vat of everyday people’s society and could think of others first. By contrast, my selfishness was revealed entirely.

Except for the scheduled times to send forth righteous thoughts, mostly the motivation for me to send forth righteous thoughts were the following: to eliminate the evil which interfered with my Fa-studying; to eliminate my son’s fever which interfered with my job and spreading the Fa; to eliminate the interference with fellow practitioners around me; there were karma-eliminating symptoms on my body; my computer was not working when I was doing Dafa work or I was unable to make appointments with certain politicians successfully, and so on. Simply speaking, mostly the reasons were around “me”. And it was rarely for the overall situation. Especially there was not so much power for me to send forth righteous thoughts for those things that were far away from me, such as rescuing Yoko Kaneko, Hong Kong Article 23 and the fellow practitioners in prison.

In Master Li’s article of “Non-Omission in Buddha-Nature” of “Essentials for Further-Advancement”, it says: “I also want to tell you that your nature in the past was actually based on egotism and selfishness. From now on, whatever you do, you should consider others first, so as to attain the righteous enlightenment of selflessness and altruism.” Through this, I saw my selfishness and my son indeed educated me on this issue.

Translated from: http://www.yuanmingeurope.net/articles/200302/17295.html