Being Rational and Awakening

Greetings Everyone. Greetings Master.

A few months ago I had the honour of learning one of Master’s poems in Hong Yin 2, my first in Chinese:

lî zhì xîng jué
shâo xī zì xîng tiãn zhèng niàn
míng xī bù zú zaì jing jìn

Be Rational, Awaken
Rest momentarily for self-reflection, add righteous thoughts.
Analyse shortcomings explicitly, advance again wholeheartedly.

Li Hong Zhi
Sept. 4, 2003
--Hong Yin 2, provisional translation.

I should add that at the surface, I chose this poem because…it is simply the shortest poem in the book. But as it turned out, it’s exactly the Fa (law or principles in Falun Gong) I have needed to remember since. Somehow, reciting the verse in Chinese has a power absent from the English.

The self-reflection, that genuine self-reflection that is described in the verse, has become for me an important part of raising my level, and beginning to let go of some of those more deep-seeded and hidden attachments.

It has been 6 years since I discovered Falun Dafa, yet I have only been able to truly sit in lotus for the last 8 months. I had had reconstructive knee surgery years before, and I had been convinced that lotus was simply impossible for me. But with some sharing with a series of practitioners over a few months, I realised that I COULD do it, and one day after Fa study I put my up my legs, properly for the first time. It lasted about 5 seconds – but since I have been steadily increasing my sitting time in lotus. It is still excruciatingly painful, but there are days when the tranquillity is greater than I have ever experienced before. I was inspired by Master’s description of the practitioner who’s legs were severely broken due to torture, deciding to bear the pain and sit in full lotus nonetheless – and within a short period of time she completely recovered. I realised, I can really do better in this regard.

Now when sending Righteous Thoughts, my understanding is that I should not be in pain, or more correctly relaxed and not distracted by any pain. Usually, I decide to make the decision about whether to sit in lotus at the beginning of sending forth righteous thoughts, just before starting to eliminate bad thoughts, notions, and interference.

Those first five minutes, as I understand it, are crucial. Cleaning out all of the things that interfere with the sending forth of the purest, strongest Righteous Thoughts possible sets the stage for the next 10 minutes. It is also the easiest time for me to get distracted by precisely the flagrant thoughts that I am letting die before starting to send Zheng Nian proper.

I strive to hear these words reverberate when I say them in my mind, so I express them with total dedication, especially on the word, mie.

Recently I was sitting sending Righteous Thoughts with another practitioner, who until recently got lost in the everyday world for awhile. He is a childhood friend, and for years I was attached to seeing him do well, yet felt uncomfortable when he actually did so – a tacit attachment that Master has described as jealousy, in my understanding. So, the attachment came from both sides, on one hand I felt as if I wanted to “save” him – but the reality was that as a practitioner he was already having to make the fundamental decisions about his dedication to Falun Dafa himself. On the other hand, when he did do well, I secretly begrudged it, just a little; there was a sort of fear, I believe, that he would do better than me and be ahead in levels. What an attachment! In Zhuan Falun, Master says:

“The issue of jealousy is very serious as it directly involves the matter of whether you can complete cultivation practice. If jealousy is not abolished, everything that you have cultivated will become fragile. There is this rule: If in the course of cultivation practice jealousy is not given up, one will not attain Right Fruit—absolutely not.” (Zhuan Falun, Third Translation Edition)

Although I know that this attachment has been gone some years, I have been searching in myself, though not obsessively, for any attachments that the evil may be trying to take advantage of. I was forced to admit vestiges of this sort of jealousy, namely with those cultivators closest to me, such as my wife.

We have been living on and off in Thailand for the past year. Thailand has had its share of difficulties over this time, for example with Chinese refugee practitioners being arrested under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP’s) embassy in Bangkok. Through these difficulties however we have seen an incredible positive change in the cultivation environment in Thailand.

Some of the pivotal moments over the past year have centred on eliminating evil in front of that embassy. I want to share with you one brief experience from that time.

After the arrests last December, my wife shared with us her understanding, namely that absolutely ANYTHING that prevents Falun Dafa disciples from validating Falun Dafa and eliminating the evil should be considered interference, and that we should not capitulate to is. This came in the context of the Thai police alternately threatening us with arrest or deportation, and then also apparently being “nice” by warning us ahead of time that arrests would happen if we came to the embassy again. Both of these approaches were geared at having us not eliminate evil at the embassy, my wife reasoned, and that this was all interference that should be eliminated with strong righteous thoughts. I was moved by the righteousness of her words, aware that while I was reaching that level of understanding as we shared, her understanding had been “better” than mine – again there a bit of that sort of mental discomfort that I described before. But, I also quickly eliminated that.

When thinking about going to the embassy the next time, despite being very calm and collected about all the events thus far, I realised that I had some fear. Perhaps they would deport me, and I wouldn’t be able to go to Thailand again? Perhaps they would try to arrest other practitioners? I immediately realised that these were again notions being taken advantage of by the evil—but a bit of this fear still lingered on. I resolved to eliminate it, knowing that what we were going to do was righteous.

When we arrived at the embassy the next time, I immediately sat down to Send Forth Righteous thoughts. I had been eliminating my notions prior to arriving. The moment I sat down there and uttered the Fa Zheng Nian formula's, all of the fear instantly vanished. I put my feet up into lotus, and managed to sit that way for the better part of an hour, sending strong Righteous Thoughts all the way through. As I sat—this was the most incredible experience—I felt as if Master’s Fashen was behind me, sitting in lotus erecting His palm. I became a conduit for the elimination of evil. Yes, it was I that was doing it, but I incredibly conscious of Master’s support. Droves of evil were eliminated that day in other dimensions. But I have not experienced something quite like that since.

I realised recently that when it comes to Righteous Thoughts, I had been sort of going through the motions, instead of truly, deeply sending forth Righteous Thoughts as I should. Another way of putting it, perhaps what I was doing when sending Zheng Nian may have been fine as a standard some time ago, but now this standard has now changed, and I know that I must do better. I realised again just HOW important strong, focused Righteous Thoughts are, though this is not surprising given Master’s regular comments on the topic.

For the last month or so, I’ve been suffering from some very strange sort of symptoms of illness—this is one of the things that got me thinking seriously about Righteous Thoughts and attachments. It started soon after I decided to go to Poland for a month to help clarify the facts, and the Polish practitioners decided to hold the first Polish seminar on the Nine Commentaries on The Chinese Communist Party¹ while taking advantage of me being there as an extra hand.

This, what I first thought was sickness karma, caught me totally unawares. It started slowly, little sores coming up first on one and then many different parts of my body. Almost six years ago, when I started practising, Master gave me a new life, as I recovered from the rare neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome. I have not had any significant symptoms of illness since, until now.

At first, I thought that it was just karma being released, as the sores were not really a big problem, and I felt that I had really been held back in the releasing of karma through my years of avoiding sitting in Lotus position. But as I began my trip to Poland, I suddenly found that I couldn’t walk properly, the sores on my foot leaving me with a bit of a limp if I wasn’t consciously trying to restrain it. This only seemed to get worse and worse, and during a visit to Norway I realised that it was really impeding with my ability to do what I needed to do.

Master arranged for me to stay with practitioners who had experienced some really severe sickness karma, and the sharing we did helped me upgrade my understanding: I realised that it was the evil that was interfering with me, using the fact that I was still concealing some of my fundamental attachments. The evil has no business interfering with Falun Dafa disciples’ historic missions.

I had a realisation then, but for awhile I seemed to have “forgotten” about it. In “Teaching the Fa at the 2004 International Fa Conference in New York,” Master says,

“You can have this thought: "During the Fa-rectification of the cosmos, I can make a reasonable arrangement for those of you who don't interfere with my validating the Fa; I can have you become beings in the future. Those of you who seek a benevolent resolution should leave me and wait in my surroundings. If you really cannot leave me, then don't have any part in interfering with me. In the future I will be able to achieve Consummation, and I will offer you a benevolent resolution. Those who are completely bad, who still interfere with me and who cannot remain will, according to the standards, have to be eliminated. Even if I don't eliminate you, the Law of the cosmos won't let you remain." If you have that thought, it is tremendously merciful to some of those extremely low-level beings, and it will make it easy to eliminate those who still interfere.”

When I read these words, I was struck by Master’s boundless compassion, by his true desire to see all sentient beings saved. As I understand it, Master was answering a question about thought karma, but I believe that the same applies to all forms of interference.

So now, back to Poland. There are very few Falun Dafa practitioners here, and putting together a seminar virtually on our own has been a significant challenge. We started by setting the topic, China and a world without communism, and a young Polish parliamentarian stepped up to sponsor the event. Given the highly partisan nature of Polish politics, we had to work hard to find representatives from several different political parties to attend. As we started to seriously promote the forum about two weeks before the actual date, many of the speakers were still not confirmed. Also, contact lists had not really been compiled, and I found myself spending 15+ hours per day mining emails and other contact information so that as many sentient beings could have the chance to read our promotional materials as possible.

Then, the young parliamentarian I spoke of earlier was promoted to the role of Vice-Minister of Economy, and had to give up his hosting of the conference due to new duties. I felt a small bit of panic. Even though we had succeeded in finding some excellent speakers and guests, there was SO much which was still up in the air, and the work that we were doing one to two weeks ahead should really have been started at least a month earlier—I say this as someone who has worked professionally in organising events.

We shared together, and saw that the evil was trying to interfere with us even more than before, now that we were meeting with more success. I even suggested that since the parliamentarian had pulled out for a legitimate reason, this could be a good opportunity to postpone the forum by a few weeks, giving us a chance to promote the event more completely and take care of many loose ends before the very last moment. I also saw the evil acting on our omissions in allowing much of what we needed to do to be left to the last minute.

However, the young dynamic Polish practitioners would have nothing of that. They declared that it was the evil that was trying to stop us, so we should continue as is. In our discussion, they saw me as wanting to postpone the forum, and perhaps some small part of me did. However, I let them know that really I was there as a support person, one who really wanted them to know all of the options, and that whatever we decided, I would support it with my whole heart, with total dedication.

This is perhaps the biggest the lesson I have learned over the past year. When practitioners take this approach, namely to support each other totally even if the methods employed aren’t exactly what they would have chosen, the evil suddenly has A LOT less room to operate. I have seen this again and again: When practitioners are very fixed in their way of doing things, this creates a huge loophole for the evil to take advantage of. And when these same practitioners decide to put aside their differences and work together as one body, the evil is shocked and retreats.

Working as one body, we recovered from the loss of the sponsor quickly, and within days there were several other parliamentarians wanted to endorse or participate in the forum. Five speakers on a variety of topics directly related to China were quickly found, including a China scholar, a Polish parliamentarian with the Taiwan-Poland trade association, two independent journalists, and an Epoch Times Editor. Some well-known personalities wrote letters to support the forum.

Several VIPs and embassy representatives attended, just part of a total of approximately 100 people—nearly a full house. Thousands across Poland received invitations for the forum, so at the very least they had a chance to learn the truth of the situation in China.

The evil continued to try to play its old tricks, but Polish practitioners continued to deny it at every step. One participant, an elderly Polish self-proclaimed communist, said something very telling as the forum drew to a close:

"Is it really all true," he asked, with tears in his eyes. Clearly, he had been moved; the strength of the truth of the Nine Commentaries had broken through his conditioning. At this forum, Polish citizens took a historic step in denouncing the CCP.

Note:

1. Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party: Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party is a series of essays published in late 2004 that reveal the true nature of the Communist Party. The Nine Commentaries have led millions of people to renounce their membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and come to gain a clearer understanding about the wrongful persecution against Falun Gong. "A book that has shocked all Chinese around the world. A book that is disintegrating the Communist Party." http://ninecommentaries.com