Remember this: someone who truly cultivates and wants to help you will not care whether you have money. They will only look at whether you are worth helping and whether your character is good.
To a great cultivator, money is nothing more than a piece of paper, a product created for convenience in a certain era.
Cultivation is about seeing through and letting go. Once one enters the Dharma, one lets go of everything. Yet some people, even after practicing for more than a decade, still cling to the ways of the secular world. Their bodies have left home, but their hearts remain worldly. Sometimes they go even further, parading and performing worldly ways within Buddhist and Daoist sects. They must truly recognize this before they can truly let go.
Otherwise, they remain trapped within the appearances of their own understanding, turning wherever circumstances turn.
Some may say, shouldn't cultivators have a Non-discriminative Mind? But a Non-discriminative Mind does not mean being unable to distinguish anything. If you cannot distinguish anything at all, haven't you cultivated yourself into a fool? Our Innate Nature itself possesses the function of discernment. So-called Non-discrimination means clearly discerning, yet harboring no discriminative thoughts. That is Non-discrimination.
Take a cup, for example. You cannot call it a vat—that would just be arguing for the sake of arguing. If you pour me a cup of water, I can take it and drink it. But if you pour me a splash of urine, surely I cannot drink that too?
Thus, many things in cultivation whose reasons people do not understand also lead many people down countless winding roads. The Discriminative Mind makes no discriminative thoughts; this is Non-discrimination.
There is no need to obsess over this. The myriad things belong not to me, yet the myriad things are all for my use.
When I want to drink water, whether it is a cup, a vat, or a large basin, anything that can hold water will do.
When I want to eat, corn is fine, sweet potatoes are fine, but I cannot eat shit.
A Non-discriminative Mind does not mean being unable to distinguish anything. Rather, when the result is the same, there is no need to fret over the process.
It is like the matter of being bitten by a mosquito that I mentioned before.
When a normal mosquito bites you, you distinguish that it has harmed you. Yet you know that the bite will heal quickly and is nothing much.
If you fixate on that point and distinguish between good and bad, then this matter will pull and tug at you until you become irritated.
But if you place your mind in the mosquito's position, you will not give rise to resentment Qi. You will naturally accept it and cease dwelling on the bitten spot. After a while, you will discover that the bite has inexplicably healed.
So, did I distinguish in this matter? In truth, I both distinguished and did not distinguish. What I distinguished was that a mosquito was still a mosquito, and that it had bitten me. What I did not distinguish was that I did not regard it as a mosquito, but considered it as a living being.
This is called wondrous use. The falsehood was that the mosquito truly bit me, yet I still stood in the mosquito's place to consider things. The truth was that because I thought this way, I was neither irritated nor troubled, and I gained ease and freedom.
In life, discrimination and Non-discrimination are sometimes not fixed either.
If you were walking in the desert and ran out of water, then you could change your thoughts and treat urine as water without discrimination, the purpose being to quench your thirst.
But if you lived in a city where water was plentiful, then you could distinguish between water and urine, lest drinking urine made you retch.
Therefore, both discrimination and Non-discrimination can be used as wondrous applications. In different environments, arrange different understandings for yourself in order to achieve the final goal.
In other words, if a person can stand outside their own Thinking Mind, see the patterns of their own thoughts, and then use methods to deftly and freely change their own thinking and understanding, they can use this way to attain ease and freedom.
In common terms, this is called understanding yourself, enlightening yourself, and persuading yourself.
A person may not necessarily be persuaded by others, but they can certainly be persuaded by themselves. If you can manage your own thoughts well, then every problem becomes a stepping stone helping you cultivate.
In the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, regulating and balancing emotions is extremely important. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that emotional fluctuations affect the health of the human body, and that regulating emotions can achieve the purpose of treating and preventing illness.
Among them, joy can overcome sorrow. Great and sustained joy, delight, and happiness can dissolve grief; this is a method of emotional self-regulation. This method is based on the traditional Chinese medicine theory of the five emotions restraining one another: anger can overcome brooding, brooding overcomes fright, fright overcomes joy, joy overcomes sorrow, and sorrow overcomes anger. Through this cyclical mutual restraint, emotional balance and regulation can be achieved.
Furthermore, from the perspective of psychology, positive emotions such as joy can help people emerge from negative emotions, lifting their mood and motivation. Joy is a positive emotional state that can awaken positive emotions in people, help them see problems from different angles, and thereby find ways to solve them.
Therefore, cultivating a positive mindset and seeking enjoyment to increase one's sense of joy in life can help people overcome sorrow and other negative emotions, achieving emotional balance and health.
Cultivators cultivate themselves until they can summon whichever emotion they want.
In the terms I have organized myself, the process of cultivation is: breaking appearances, awakening thoughts, Shifting Thoughts, Transforming Thoughts, breaking thoughts, and controlling thoughts.
Then one can achieve Every Thought Awakened, noticing every stirring of the heart and movement of thought at the very first moment.
With Unconscious Awareness, after a long time, there is no longer any need to deliberately observe one's thoughts. One instinctively and automatically notices them.
With Awareness Beyond Awareness, later on, even the thought of noticing is unnecessary; one directly observes one's own thoughts.
From deliberately practicing at the beginning to forming a habit and letting it operate through habitual nature—this is cultivating a Dao, which is also a pattern.
But this pattern runs counter to human nature, so it can be called defying Heaven.
Some people may feel this sounds like a fantasy. Before I accomplished it, I would have thought the same way. But once you truly accomplish it, you will understand that this is the most incredible Supernatural Ability. Every other Supernatural Ability falls beneath this state.
After reaching this state, little by little, you will be able to see the patterns in many things, as well as the patterns of human nature.
From a person's eyes, physique, and expression, you can completely know what they are thinking. This is called Mind Penetration.
Being able to see such patterns is called Eye Penetration. Being able to know what someone is about to say is called Ear Penetration, and so on.
Moreover, you can completely alter their Thinking Mind and thoughts, while they remain unaware of it.
For example, when I was working at a factory in Guangzhou, an older sister asked me whether I had gained any abilities after cultivating.
From the moment she asked me that question, every word she spoke was spoken under my guidance, yet she never noticed.
Hahaha, what Supernatural Ability could be greater than that? If you can control what someone thinks and says, how is that not a Supernatural Ability?
Also, there was a period when my throat hurt badly, so I shifted my thoughts onto other matters and forgot that my throat was uncomfortable.
Then, by shifting the focus of my thoughts and attention, I truly could not feel the discomfort in my throat.
Wasn't that a Supernatural Ability?
Easy to say, difficult to do.
It sounds as though everyone can do it—isn't it just shifting your attention?
But try it yourself. When your body is in discomfort, can you control yourself well enough not to pay attention to it?
There are many wondrous applications that I cannot fully explain all at once.
I can only tell everyone about them slowly. I hope those with affinity can gain enlightenment from this and thereby obtain the method of liberation and ease.
Namo Guan Zizai Bodhisattva.