Progressing In My Cultivation

Greetings to our fellow practitioners and to our benevolent Teacher!

This is the second conference I have attended, and the very first time I've shared my experiences that I have had in Faun Gong. For the past several months I feel I have been receiving many hints that I should be writing to validate the Fa (law or principles, the teachings in Falun Dafa). It is largely from reading the experiences of other Falun Gong practitioners on the Falun Gong websites that I have been able to catch up in my personal cultivation.

I started to practise Falun Gong seven months ago, in April of 2004. The initial form that my predestined relationship with Dafa took was a very big emotional attachment to a fellow Falun Dafa practitioner who I really looked up to. I thought that I had never met anyone with such high moral standards, such patience (which I knew I lacked), and such good posture! In addition to his upright behaviour, I felt he could talk with me about things that none of my other friends seemed to care too much about, and I was always more interested in these subjects than I was in all of my philosophy classes. For instance, he helped me realise that being a good person was actually a worthwhile thing to do. I hadn't been a bad person before, but I certainly never thought much about how to be good, since we never talked about it in school.

When he first told me that he tried to follow the essential characteristic of the universe, truth-compassion-tolerance, I remember thinking, "What? How could he actually believe that? Who decided on those three words out of all the other words in the world?" So I asked him, "What makes you think truth-compassion-tolerance is actually the fundamental characteristic of the universe? Those seem like such arbitrary words created by our society!" But he calmly explained that this characteristic is manifested in different ways on different levels of the universe; those three words are simply the manifestation of the principles on the level of human society. This immediately struck a chord in me. For a long time I had been realising how everyone in society operated on selfishness, including myself. I felt like all my life I had been aching to find truth in anything and everything, and that was what led me to do a major in philosophy at college. So a little part of me started to believe in truth-compassion-tolerance as soon as this very special person explained a little bit of Falun Dafa's higher principles to me.

Little did I know that this was the beginning of my predestined relationship to be a Falun Dafa practitioner! At the ordinary level, I was simply waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for this boy to ask me to date him. It took so long that all of my friends told me to stop thinking about this person. But I kept waiting. Indeed Master had arranged everything for me and we went on vacation together with some friends. During the vacation I watched him read Zhuan Falun (the core text of Falun Gong teachings) during the day and practise the Falun Gong exercises at night. Deep down, I was actually jealous of him! At that time I was reading books written by a well-known spiritual teacher because I knew I wanted to follow higher principles, but I couldn't help noticing how lucky he was to have so much more reading material than I had! Not only that, but he had music, audio lectures, videos, and a network of other practitioners to talk to about their progress. I was thinking all these things deep down, but my shyness and ordinary attachment to reputation prevented me from taking the first step to learn more about Falun Dafa. One day, he finally offered the book Falun Gong to me, and I read it through without any problems, but I wanted to read in more depth.

When we got back to school, it took me a few days to build up the courage to ask him if I could come to learn the Falun Gong exercises at 6:30 a.m. I remember the first day of exercises so clearly -- how each of the more veteran students acted around me, how the mechanisms felt, the words they used to explain the exercises. When Teacher taught the Fa back in China, he opened the tianmu (celestial eye) for true practitioners on the second day. He also says that true practitioners can obtain what they need from reading Zhuan Falun. On the second day of my practise, during the seated meditation, I suddenly saw a piercingly bright white moon in my forehead that didn't disappear even when my heart started pounding. This circle was so bright I thought the whole room would know what was happening to me, but I remember thinking, "No matter what, you must remember to keep cultivating, because everything you read in this book is true!" That was the first time I had ever really seen or believed in anything supernormal. From then on I resolved to read Zhuan Falun as much as I could.

A couple of weeks into my cultivation, as I was struggling to overcome thought karma, emotional attachments, and different forms of interference, my boyfriend carefully explained Fa-rectification to me on a low level. I was amazed to finally understand why he was always handing out leaflets and talking about the persecution of Falun Gong! From then on I casually helped to distribute Falun Gong leaflets and started talking to people if they asked about Falun Gong, but I still didn't know enough about the facts of the persecution, and I still had so much to read. As it happened, when school ended, Master arranged my summer jobs so that I could accomplish lots of reading. Every day I commuted to and from New York for 3 to 4 hours on the train, so I could read Zhuan Falun the whole time, and hand out leaflets whenever possible. My next job was painting my uncle's farmhouse in Maine, and because I was usually alone in the house, I could listen to as many as three lectures a day while I worked. In the evenings, I spent hours reading Falun Gong practitioners' articles on the Internet. Many times I felt tears streaming down my face as I realised how precious each Falun Dafa practitioner is, and how precious our relationship is. Spending an entire summer alone, I wished to talk to practitioners and share with them. My understandings were changing quickly, and I was sometimes nervous that they were not correct. Reading the shared experiences were all I could do until I went back to school. I also tried to catch up by reading as many of Master's supplementary articles as I could.

After dinner one night, as I was reading practitioners' insights on the Internet, something suddenly clicked in me. For weeks I had been sitting at home in my spare time in order to read and stick to a simple life to avoid developing attachments, instead of stepping forward to clarify the truth about Falun Gong and the persecution amidst a more complicated environment! In my understanding, while this may have been the form of cultivation in the past, this is not the form of cultivation amidst Fa-rectification. When I realised my shortcoming, although I had righteous intentions, I became quite overexcited, and was running around the house as though I didn't have a second to spare. My brother gave me a funny look, but I didn't realise that I was doing anything wrong. All I could think about was that people were waiting to find out about Falun Dafa and I had been sitting on it selfishly all along! Even though I didn't know my way around the area, I got in my car and drove in the dark until I found a store where I could make fliers, and it so happened that in the same shopping plaza was a Chinese restaurant, where I handed out many fliers.

After three months of cultivating alone, unable to meet with other practitioners, I finally made it to New York to take part in activities to let more people find out about Falun Gong and the persecution, and was so happy to see the yellow Falun Dafa t-shirts that my eyes filled with tears. I had so much energy that I felt like I had to give a flier to everyone I saw, smile without fail, and speak until my throat ran dry. The second time and third times I went to New York, I was much calmer.

Something funny happened the third day. In the last hour before we packed up our Falun Gong materials, I was standing on the street corner handing out fliers when suddenly my father's cousin, whom I hadn't seen in years, appeared on the street before me. I immediately smiled in my heart at Teacher because I understood. Only a week earlier, I had learnt that this cousin would be permanently moving to China with his wife and son within the month. I had been meaning to call him, but I had forgotten. As it turned out, he had come to New York just for the day, and would be moving to China the following week. He was of course very surprised to see me, since to him it was a great coincidence that we should see each other in such a busy city. With many smiles, he told me that he would be sure to read all of the materials I had given him before boarding the plane, because he knew that it might be difficult to read good things about Falun Gong once he arrived in China. I was very happy for him as I wished him a safe and pleasant journey to China.

Recently I realised that any shortcomings in my understanding of the Fa arise whenever I clarify the truth. One time, I was clarifying the truth about Falun Gong to a Chinese woman whose mind had been badly poisoned by the lies in China. We talked for almost half an hour, and I remained very calm and clear-headed, but when I started to think about a meeting I didn't want to be late for, she asked me a question I couldn't answer. My selfishness had been taken advantage of by the evil so that I could not clear out her final bad thoughts about Falun Dafa. Also, if I had had a deeper understanding of the facts of the persecution, maybe I would have been able to answer her question. Another example is that my mother always calls whenever I have loopholes to fix. One time, my phone bill was expensive, and she called me to tell me that I should be spending less time with Falun Dafa practitioners and more time with the students at my school. I could hear the worry in her voice, and realised that on some level, she was right. In my mind I had been repressing the desire to talk to everyone on campus because I had misunderstood the Fa, and was forgetting that we should conform to ordinary society as much as possible. I know that whenever I need to improve, my parents will blame my shortcomings on Falun Dafa, and this makes me very sad. But it also reminds me to do everything righteously so that they can know that Falun Dafa is truly good.

Even now, I am still learning so much about how to cultivate and clarify the truth as I deepen my understandings of the Falun Gong teachings. I have let go of many of the initial reasons that brought me to cultivate in Falun Dafa, like the emotional attachment to my boyfriend, my interest in philosophy, and my wish to attain a calm mind and healthy body. But I am realising my shortcomings all the time, as I continue to read and share experiences with other practitioners. Sometimes it becomes very difficult to remember how to assimilate to truth-compassion-tolerance, but at these times I try to remember that it will pass as long as I continue to look inside myself for shortcomings, send righteous thoughts, and study the Fa.

When I wake up early to read the Fa with a calm heart before class, I find that people come from all over to know the truth about Falun Dafa. While I walk to class with righteous thoughts, I see many Chinese people and western students who look at my Falun Dafa button and look at me to see what kind of person I am. However, when I do not have the wish to save sentient beings in my heart, then nobody asks me about the badge I wear, and hardly anyone looks my way. When I assimilate to the Fa, then it becomes very natural to save sentient beings, but when I struggle to walk a righteous path, I cannot truly fulfil my mission as a Falun Dafa practitioner. Whenever I give up a bad notion, I find that Teacher has been patiently waiting for me to enlighten so that I can do what I'm supposed to do.

If my experiences have helped you in any way, then I hope you will share your experiences, too, since this is one way to validate the Fa among practitioners. For me, it has also been a very good way to see one's attachments. As a new disciple, the experiences of other practitioners have helped me to see my shortcomings during some of my toughest tribulations. I know I still have to catch up with the tide of Fa-rectification in many ways. Let's continue to ascend by helping each other do the three things (study the Fa, send forth righteous thoughts, and clarify the truth about Falun Dafa to the world's people) that Teacher asks of us. Thank you also for your tolerance of my low understandings, which are just my understandings at my level.

Thank you Teacher, and thank you fellow practitioners! Let's cherish these moments we spend together and remember to always keep truth-compassion-tolerance in our hearts. Thank you.