A twenty-two-year-old guy said he felt dizzy when he got to work that morning and wanted to take leave to go home and rest.
Then the foreman refused his leave on the grounds that they were short-handed. The kid gritted his teeth and held on until noon, but the moment he walked out of the factory building, he toppled face-first onto the ground.
By the time the ambulance arrived, he was damn near cold. Later, I heard he really did go cold on the way to the hospital.
That made me so furious I couldn't help cursing that old man from my dreams in my heart.
See? I said something would happen, something would happen. He said he'd cover it—so how damn long had it been? Just one month, and something had already happened.
That factory hadn't had anyone die in years.
Even calling it a coincidence, there was no damn way it could be that much of a coincidence.
After that, I kept getting hung up on it and secretly swore in my heart that righteousness and evil were irreconcilable as fire and water.
If I ran into some evil cultivator in a dream, I'd beat the shit out of him.
Well, after some more time passed, I learned in a dream where one evil cultivator was. He had two helpers with him.
I was afraid I couldn't take them on if they outnumbered me, so in my dream, I asked two fellow Daoists to go deal with him with me.
And guess what happened?
I pressed my palms together and chanted Amitabha like mad, because I didn't know anything else back then.
Fuck, the instant we met, that bastard struck at me with his palm—and there was even a magic circle on it.
All that mental focus of mine was completely useless.
With a crack, that fucker slapped me awake!
Half my body hurt like hell. The pain dragged me straight out of the dream, and it took a long time before it finally eased up.
That pissed me off so much that I cursed and said, "Fuck, if I ever run into you in a dream again, I'm definitely hitting you back!"
After that, I kept cultivating, charging ahead at breakneck speed.
But even now, I still hadn't run into that evil cultivator again.
A few days ago, I remembered an uncle I'd worked with when I was young. I'd been pretty rebellious back then, and that uncle had a stubborn streak too. But he and my dad had been close. There had been some minor friction between us, though nothing serious, and it was resolved afterward. He'd treated me well too—whenever he had something good to eat, he always thought of me.
Thinking of him made me feel sentimental, and in my heart, I admitted that the way I'd been so immature back then was wrong.
I didn't even know whether he was still in this world.
And wouldn't you know it? That night, I dreamed of him directly, pacing back and forth inside my house. I asked what he was doing there, told him to go where he belonged, that the paths of the living and the dead were different, all that stuff.
He just looked at me. I said, "Uncle, go on. Don't come again next time, or I'll hit you, okay?"
He ignored me. Holy shit, that made me furious. I formed a Vajra hand seal, but it didn't work, so I immediately switched to the Five Thunder Finger Technique and fired Twin Dragons Emerging from the Sea in his direction.
The scene shattered in an instant, and I woke straight out of the dream.
Fuck! I'd spoiled him too much! I was only lamenting how ignorant I'd been in my youth. It wasn't like I had some grudge against him, let alone anything else.
I was just worried about him. And he came looking for me in my damn dream?
Wasn't that just begging to be beaten?
Hahaha, this is a story. Even though it really happened, just listen to it as a story and that's that.
Because there was karma created by attachment in it.
Some friends might definitely ask whether, after cultivating to my level, I could still have things like this happen.
Of course. Whatever I deliberately thought about, I drew in. Even though I could control my thoughts at will, when I deliberately indulged in sentiment within my thoughts, it still brought this kind of effect. But it was no big deal. Nothing worth a damn happened—two lightning blasts settled it.
No matter how far you cultivated, you still had to keep cultivating. You couldn't feel that you'd achieved a little something and decide that was enough.
You still had to continue realizing things amid all things under heaven, applying them with subtlety, and persisting.
Because everything in the world came to help you cultivate.
Even delusive thoughts, if used well, could become good things.
The method I teach, turning thought into a sword—wasn't that sword formed from our deluded mind?
Otherwise, where would a sword come from in your heart? You were merely giving your mind a thought, an image, visualizing it for fun again and again. When needed, you used it to break other delusive thoughts.
And "delusive thoughts" didn't refer to just one thing. There were many delusive thoughts; every scattered, chaotic thought was one.
This method of turning thought into a sword was merely a cultivation technique I created. Its principle came from the idea that one thought could stand against ten thousand thoughts.
That meant focusing your thoughts on one point, and then you could break the other thoughts.
Now I basically only used it once in a while. Mostly, I just used it for visualization practice.
From this, it wasn't hard to see that if you wanted to cultivate, sometimes a person needed a little imagination!
Imagination and mental power actually worked on the same principle. For example, you believed chanting scriptures possessed great power and could bless you.
Then you focused your mind on chanting scriptures, thereby blocking out other distracting thoughts.
My method worked on the same principle as chanting or copying scriptures. It just required imagination, which was a little more convenient.
A few days ago, when my girlfriend and I bought takeout, a girl was cooking noodles for us. I saw that her hands were a little too restless—she was directly grabbing the noodles with her hands, then touching her nose one moment and touching her body the next.
I was afraid she'd grab the vegetables for my noodles with those hands too. To be honest, just seeing her act like that made me pretty uncomfortable.
I saw it, sure—but what if I hadn't? Before I arrived, hadn't she been touching this and that too? After I got there, she hadn't washed her hands and went straight to grabbing noodles.
At that thought, I didn't show anything on my face. I just watched her cook the noodles normally. When she turned around to get something, she looked at me twice.
Maybe my stare gave her the creeps, because her hands behaved after that. She stopped touching this and that, and even added an egg each for my girlfriend and me without charging us.
When we got home, my girlfriend asked whether they'd added eggs. I said, "No. Aren't eggs included?" She said they weren't; normally, they had to be added separately, two yuan each. What we'd bought had been the standard order.
Then I thought, huh, maybe that girl making the noodles had gotten scared by my stare.
As I ate my noodles, I reflected on myself. You tell me—if I'd already gotten rid of self-attachment and Discriminative Mind, why was I still bothered by whether what she made was clean or filthy?
If you said I was bothered, that was discrimination. If you said I wasn't bothered, fuck, I really did feel a little sickened inside. Hahaha.
So I summed up the principle: sometimes the dirty thing on a person was their thinking, and sometimes it was their habits.
Her dirty behavior stirred up dirtiness in my thoughts. Since I'd already bought it and hadn't said I wanted a refund, then fuck it, don't dwell on it. Just eat it. What clean or filthy? If you made it yourself, it was clean; anything anyone else made was unclean.
You were too damn lazy to cook, so who could you blame? Fuck!
If you had the nerve to think other people's food was filthy, then be more diligent and cook for yourself. Otherwise, stop making such a fucking fuss over cleanliness.
You didn't say you wanted a refund then, and you didn't bring up whether it was clean or filthy. Once you got home, what kind of after-the-fact bullshit were you firing off? Right?
Hahahahaha.