To be honest, true cultivation was vastly different from the cultivation people commonly imagined.
Many people talked about achieving Nirvana Rebirth after enduring hardship.
About how things would become better after this or that.
About this torment and that pain, as though a layer of skin had been peeled away.
Honestly, none of that really counted for much. It was merely a temporary circumstance, a hurdle in the heart one could not get past. Given enough time, it would slowly fade.
True cultivation, Nirvana Rebirth, Breaking the Cocoon to Become a Butterfly, meant completely shattering and overturning one's habitual patterns of thought and understanding.
If one compared those thoughts, those ideas, those notions to the human soul—
Then cultivation was smashing that soul completely to pieces and reassembling it.
What did it mean to be reborn?
It meant destroying the original self, then creating a new self all over again.
Breaking through appearances was not simply having different ideas from others, nor was it having some exceptionally unique understanding, being higher or lower than anyone else.
It meant personally smashing your entire way of thinking into dust. Those who had never endured such torment could never imagine it.
The simplest way to break through appearances was to see all living beings as Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, as people who had come to guide you across, to test you.
It sounded simple, didn't it? But how many people could truly do it?
Do you know how awkward it felt, how utterly unacceptable it was, when I did this?
Someone else had clearly provoked me, yet in my heart I still had to refuse to hold it against him, thank him, and treat him as a Bodhisattva. Dear—cough cough—that was not something a normal person could do.
One or two incidents were still manageable, but every single matter had to be viewed that way.
Ants, mosquitoes, people—even a single plant had to be regarded that way. Could you imagine what kind of state that was?
When my heart was unsettled and irritated, that unrest and irritation were both tests from Bodhisattvas, testing whether I could avoid becoming impatient or emotional.
It was like grinding my teeth to bits, forcing them down my own throat, and still saying, "This is truly wonderful."
That pain was not about some event being hard to accept, nor about how bitter something felt. It was about things that, in ordinary people's eyes, were simply impossible.
I endured that process.
I truly treated everything as a test, and all living beings as Bodhisattvas. Parents and family were the same; I treated them all equally as Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
Of course, they did not always appear in the form of a Bodhisattva. When someone helped you, it was Guanyin Bodhisattva, Savior of the Suffering, manifesting herself. When someone gave you money or lent you money, it was the God of Wealth manifesting himself, and so on.
I did not know many gods or Buddhas, so my distinctions were simple. They were all Bodhisattvas.
Being at odds with someone was a Bodhisattva testing whether I could manage my own heart. He was helping me train myself not to be influenced by these outward appearances, testing whether I could refrain from becoming emotional and instead see the other side.
After persisting for a while and forming a habit,
My thoughts and understanding underwent a tremendous transformation. Toward this world, toward the people I had known, toward the entire environment and everything in it—whatever I saw, whatever happened—the answers in my heart were no longer what they had once been.
In an instant, it was as though I had fallen into a strange world, where everyone seemed like puppets, or perhaps machines.
Everyone operated according to a pattern: when they were happy, when they were sad, what they thought at what time—it was all within that pattern.
The loneliness in my heart was incredibly intense. I wanted to wake up the people around me, but I could not wake them. Instead, they felt that I had become somewhat strange.
Only then did you truly understand the profound meaning behind the saying that there was only you in this world, and why some people compared life to a game where, apart from themselves, most people were NPCs.
Think about it: if you could see everyone's patterns of thought, and could discern from those patterns what they would think and do at any given time, what do you think that would feel like?
When someone stood before you, with just a sentence or even an expression, you could guess seven or eight parts out of ten of what he wanted to say.
And you could deliberately say certain things to guide him into saying what you wanted him to say, or make him think in whatever direction you wanted.
There was no fun in it at all.
It looked miraculous, but it was all just minor methods and petty tricks. The principles were absurdly simple.
First, you analyzed a person's character through details. Then, based on that character, you figured out how to communicate with him so that he would say what you wanted to know, or so that you could guide him into thinking about certain things.
You could even know how to phrase something to make a person happy, and how to phrase it to make him suffer.
You could even use this method to control people's emotions.
Sometimes, you did not even need to examine what someone's personality was like, because ordinary people's thought patterns were all the same.
For example, if his close friend died, he would definitely be sad. If he won the lottery, he would definitely be happy.
Sometimes, these things did not even need to actually happen. You only needed to hint at them and guide him to think in that direction, and emotions would naturally arise.
Simple principle, wasn't it?
He had too many distracting thoughts, could not control his tendency to overthink, and felt miserable from head to toe with all sorts of emotions tangled together. Yet when he went to the hospital, they could not find anything wrong.
Then you hinted to him and told him that he had an affinity, that the immortal family behind him was tempering him, that they wanted him to become a spirit medium and establish an altar. He needed to settle the old immortals into a Household before he could get better.
Then he truly could not think of any reason. Looking back, he really had felt this discomfort and that discomfort, and the doctors could not find anything wrong. If he did not believe it, he still would not know what was going on.
One person said it, then another said it, and everyone said it. As he kept thinking about it, he believed it.
Then they rattled off a whole set of sleight-of-hand tricks for him, babbling away while carrying out an entire procedure with utmost seriousness and solemnity, making him believe it completely.
Once he believed it, his heart became steady.
That was fucking how it all worked—taking advantage of the patterns of the human heart.
The human heart had a peculiar pattern: the more you believed in something, the more it existed for you.
Otherwise, everyone lived on the same ball of rock. You had the Heavenly Court over here, while they switched to Heaven over there?
You had the underworld over here, while they switched to Hell over there?
You had these gods over here, while they had those gods over there.
If you went over there and believed, then your understanding would contain what they had there. If they came over here and believed, then their understanding would contain what you had here.
This was fucking cultural conditioning. It was like throwing you into a foreign country and raising you there—you would become a foreigner, and until the day you died, you would not believe a place called the underworld existed. Nor would you believe in the God of Wealth.
Likewise, if you threw a foreigner here and raised him here, his understanding would not contain those foreign angels and whatever else.
Humans were things that formed different understandings under different cultural conditioning.
A frog at the bottom of a well did not know how vast the sky was. A sheep in a pen did not know grasslands existed. A pig being slaughtered did not know that the person who would ultimately kill it was actually its adoptive father.
If I told a frog that the sky was vast, it would not believe me. But if I told it that this well was the best place in the world, it would believe without a doubt.
If I told a sheep that there were grasslands outside, perhaps it would call me stupid. But if I said sheep were supposed to live in pens, it would agree wholeheartedly.
By the same token, people were like that too. It was difficult for people to recognize things beyond the scope of their own understanding.
When they did not understand, they blindly believed in certain things.
Cultivators used your own blindness to help guide you through your hardships.
Because blind faith was also, in another form, believing in yourself.