Chapter 113. Only When You Know Yourself Can You Pursue the Truth
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… There is nothing God despises more than the prayers of religious ceremony. Prayers to God are only accepted when they are sincere. If you have nothing sincere to say, then keep quiet; don’t always speak false words and blindly make oaths before God, trying to deceive God, talking about how much you love God, about how much you wish to be loyal to Him. If you are incapable of achieving your desires, if you lack this resolve and stature, do not, under any circumstances, pray thus before God. When people pray before God with this kind of disposition, then at the very least, this is deception. At worst, if you do this often, then you are of utterly contemptible character. If God were to condemn you, it would be called blasphemy! People have no reverence toward God, they know not how to revere God, or how to love and satisfy Him. If the truth is not clear to them, and their disposition is corrupt, God will let it slide. But they bring such character before God, and treat God as the unbelievers treat people, bowing and scraping before Him in prayer, using these words to try and deceive God, and when they are finished, they not only feel no blame, but also have no sense of the seriousness of the problems of their actions. That being the case, is God with them? Can someone who is utterly without the presence of God be enlightened and illuminated? Can they be enlightened with the truth? If they can’t, then they’re in trouble. Have you prayed thus many times? Do you do so often? When people spend too long in the outside world, the stench of society becomes too great, their evil habits too grievous, they are suffused with the venom and lifestyle of Satan, what comes from their mouth are fake words, deceitful words, words that are heartless, or else words that always contain nothing but their own motivations and aims, and seldom have the proper motivations. These are serious problems. When people take these satanic philosophies and ways of living before God, do they not offend God’s disposition? And what will be the consequence of this? On the surface, these prayers are attempts to deceive, to try to fool God, and are incompatible with His will and requirements. Fundamentally speaking, this is caused by human nature; it is not some momentary revelation of corruption.
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Whether you now perform your duties or pursue the initial stages of dispositional change, no matter what corrupt dispositions are exposed in you, you must seek the truth to resolve them. … If, for example, you always try to disguise yourself with pleasant words, if you always desire a place in the hearts of others and to make others look up to you, if you have these intentions, then that means you are being controlled by your disposition. Should you speak these pleasant words? (No.) If you don’t speak them, then do you simply hold them in? If you find a cleverer phrasing, a different phrasing by which other people can’t detect your intentions, this is still a dispositional problem. What disposition? That of evil. Are corrupt dispositions easy to resolve? Doing so involves man’s nature and essence. People have this essence, this root, and it must be dug out bit by bit. It must be dug out from every state, from the intentions in every word you speak. It must be analyzed and understood from the words you speak. When you become ever more clearly aware of doing so and your spirit ever more astute, you can then achieve change. Resolving corrupt dispositions requires care and diligence. You must pay great attention and reflect little by little on your intentions and states. When you constantly reflect on the ways in which you usually speak, the day will arrive when you suddenly realize, ‘This is evil, it is a corrupt disposition, and is not normal humanity.’ From the day you possess this awareness, you will ever more clearly feel the grave severity of this evil disposition. So, what should you do next? Ceaselessly reflect on the intentions that exist in that same way you speak, and through the process of your incessant digging, you will be ever more able to truly and accurately determine that you have this sort of essence and disposition. When the day comes that you can genuinely admit to yourself that you do have an evil disposition, you will finally be able to loathe and detest it. When a man goes from believing that they are a good person, that they act uprightly and justly, that they are endowed with a sense of justice, that they are a man of honor and honesty, to recognizing their nature and essence as being arrogant, hardened, deceitful, hateful of the truth and wicked, only then will they be able to accurately know their place, and to know exactly what they are; true hatred of oneself can never arise through verbal recognition alone. Coming to know oneself is the most difficult thing to do.
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