Fear Is Useless

There were no cowards in cultivation. You could be stupid, you could be foolish, you could have any flaw imaginable, but you absolutely could not be a coward!

Only with a fearless heart could you shatter every rule!

Do not look before and behind, fearing wolves here and tigers there. The more you feared something, the more it came for you.

Once you feared nothing, whatever came no longer mattered, and it could not hurt you in the slightest.

Take dating, for instance. The more you feared losing someone and the more you cared, the easier it was to lose them.

Many times, when you were unafraid and simply let things be whatever they were, it instead lasted longer.

There were only two kinds of people in this world: the timid and the bold.

The timid were mortals; the bold were gods.

Only by being bold could you possess the strength to overcome everything!

If you feared wolves ahead and tigers behind, then at most, you were food. If you wanted to eat wolves and tigers alike, then they were all prey in your eyes.

Cultivators had to make use of their own traits, make use of human nature, and place themselves at the very top of the food chain.

The food chain of the cultivation world was this: people feared ghosts, ghosts feared gods, and gods feared those who did not give a damn about anything.

There was a saying: if a man was not afraid of death, Heaven could not destroy him. As long as you had enough pride and an unyielding heart beneath the heavens, Heaven would not take you away so easily.

The Heavenly Dao allowed the strong to be strong and the weak to be weak. It would not destroy someone for being strong, nor would it help someone for being weak.

If one could become a Buddha without killing, then monks would not even eat grass.

If killing was evil, then butchers would have long since died without descendants.

What good begets good and evil begets evil? Your own heart had always been selfish, judging everything from your own perspective. You yourself were evil.

As an evil existence, how could you have the nerve to speak of what goodness was?

Cowering and scraping low could only earn you the contempt of others.

Be strong when it was time to be strong, and weak when it was time to be weak. Be like water: when heated, it became steam and rose into the high sky; when cold, it became ice, harder than anything.

Put it in a bowl, and it took the shape of a bowl. Put it in a cup, and it took the shape of a cup.

A cultivator's heart was like water, without a fixed form, able to change freely in any environment.

Of course, this change differed somewhat from water's change. Water changed passively; cultivators changed actively.

If you were unaffected by any condition or environment and could freely control what you actively chose to think, then you had gained a little skill.

I remembered hearing this saying: when you gazed into the abyss, the abyss also gazed into you.

For ordinary people, gazing into the abyss was terrifying, because they worried that one day they would be swallowed by it.

But if you could change your state of mind, then when you gazed into the abyss, you would no longer be the one who should be afraid.

Because not only could it not swallow you, it would instead help temper you. Once you grew stronger and stronger, the abyss would instead be swallowed by you.

If your heart faced the sun, you feared no sorrow. If your heart could burn as fiercely as the sun, then all darkness would flee far away.

Fear the darkness, and sooner or later you would be swallowed by it.

So long as it did not involve the greater good of the nation and was not for selfish gain, any means could become a weapon for subduing demons.

If no one came to make me angry, how could I train myself to control my temper?

If no one made me sad, how could I train myself to break free from sorrow?

Everything complemented one another; it only depended on where you placed yourself.

Life was sometimes like fighting monsters and leveling up. If you could not get past something today, then let it come at you a hundred times, and it would become nothing but bullshit in your eyes.

Back when I worked at the factory, an older sister there teased me and asked whether I was afraid that one day my girlfriend would stop dating me and get with someone else.

I gave a chuckle and said, "Of course not. If she was mine, she would not go with someone else. If she went with someone else, that meant she was not mine."

The older sister said she was only saying it casually. What if it really happened? Then I would have my day of regret.

I said, "If someone had only ever dated one person, wouldn't they be very afraid of breaking up? That was inevitable. But if you had dated many, would you still be afraid?"

Some people were terrified of divorce the first time they got married. Some had fucking divorced three or four times already—could they still be afraid?

Fear meant you did not understand. Not understanding meant you had never experienced it. As long as you experienced something enough times, it stopped being a big deal.

If I said I was afraid of death, would that keep me from dying? If not, then what was there to fear?

In one lifetime as a human: first, understand yourself. Understand what sort of thing you were.

Second, learn how to make use of your own patterns so that you could live this life Without Resentment or Regret and without fear.

Third, cultivate diligently until you possessed the ability to alter the length of your own life, so you could leave a little later.

Fourth, after leaving, regardless of whether consciousness could be cultivated to immortality, Laozi would still be a warrior charging ever forward!

There was no sorrow greater than a dead heart. If the heart did not die, then one would not perish.

The heart not dying here referred to the true heart not dying.

The true heart I spoke of was merely an adjective.

All cultivators had heard the four words "Enlighten the Mind and See the True Nature." Enlightening the mind meant knowing what this current mode of thought was—this thing we had always believed was ourselves, our soul—and understanding what kind of existence it was.

Seeing the true nature referred to the true heart's Innate Nature hidden behind this mode of thought: complete in itself from the beginning, free of discrimination, and unmoving as such.

If this true heart's Innate Nature did not die, then a person would not perish.

When the mind died, the Dao was born. This meant that if you subdued the Discriminative Mind that thought and distinguished things from the self-centered perspective of ordinary thought, no longer allowing it to control you, then you would see the laws of the heart—that was the birth of the Dao.

If you could not understand that, listen slowly and think slowly. Do not rush. Take it slowly.

Everything you encountered and everything you thought of came to help you cultivate yourself.

What were tribulations? Tribulations, tribulations—they were difficulties given to you by your inner demons.

When you eliminated demons, you eliminated your own inner demons. Once you removed them, you became a Buddha.

Inner demons were all those tormenting stray thoughts in your heart that caused you pain and that you turned over and over in your mind without being able to understand.

For example, you put your heart and soul into a relationship, but in the end you broke up and could not bear it.

Then that matter became your inner demon.

When you could not get past something in your heart, you were only bullying yourself.

Who the fuck could feel your pain for you? Only you were making such a scene, acting like you wanted to die.

Use that time to become awesome and show her. Let her know that she had been blind back then and missed a dark horse like you.

Once you got better and she envied you, she would have to come crawling back with a shameless face to ask to reconcile!

But remember this: if she came back, you could not take her back, because what she wanted was not you at all. What she wanted was only vanity.

Do not ask why. If you asked, the answer was that your big brother had tried it. Hahahaha.

Once you became strong, what woman could you not have? Do not fucking keep acting like you wanted to die over one woman. She was not your mother.

Girls were the same. Do not keep locking horns with a scumbag forever. If you found him flirting with every flower and chasing every butterfly, dump him early.

The better and better you became, the better the people you met would be. Once you stood back up, look back and see what terrible fucking taste you had back then.

You should even thank them for helping you temper your trial of love. There was not a shred of hatred in it. Ahem, ahem, ahem.