England: Experience of Sickness Karma and Failure to Respond to its Promptings

Having enjoyed exceptionally good health for ninety years, I developed a careless and irresponsible attitude toward my own physique. As a child I had a serious influenza of 1918 (which killed some two million in this country, - more than the 14-18 heavy warfare mortalities;) and seventy years later I survived pneumonia, which in the absence of medical facilities at the location, was not diagnosed or treated by antibiotics. But otherwise I always remained perfectly healthy.

On being introduced to Falun Gong in 1999 I paid no particular attention to our obligation to regard disease not in health terms but as prompting us to look within for gaps and unperceived attachments. Within my cultivation I mistakenly considered our obligation to forebear/endure to mean purely passive acceptance, without taking into account the parallel requirements to eliminate in righteous thoughts demonic interference, and to search within.

Two years ago a boil developed on my chest, to which I paid no heed, and it expanded becoming a considerable nuisance. I passively endured it. In the absence of counter action in righteous thoughts and seeking within, the condition persisted and deteriorated. It took up a long time to clean the eruption every morning and evening and to keep it covered. But I experienced no pain and, as I live alone, it attracted the attention of no one else. Last November, bathing in the sea a friend, who had had some medical training, saw it and, without telling me, perhaps as he knew my view on endurance, described the symptoms to a doctor who interpreted them as a cancerous tumour requiring the earliest possible removal. Again without my knowledge, the doctor arranged an early operation with a surgeon. When at last informed, I readily agreed to what I still supposed to be merely a removal of a nuisance, as, intentionally or otherwise, there had been no mention to me of cancer.

Having hardly ever entered a hospital I was pleasantly surprised at the amenities of the Royal Free Hospital and enjoyed the whole experience as a pleasant holiday. The operation removed quite a lot of tissue but I had no discomfort and after ten days in hospital with many visits from practitioners I returned home glad to be shot of the trouble. Some weeks later I learnt that if the operation had been delayed for another two weeks it would have been inoperable.

Since then I have thanks, to the help of experienced practitioners, studied Master’s teaching on sickness karma. As my mind had run for nearly ninety years in the deep grooves made by technically brilliant but relatively shallow western science, it was not easy to replace such conditioning with the vision of energies in interacting dimensions and to understand that disease is a prompting to look within. Our materialist culture encourages us to devalue the human condition as a mere insignificant speck in a mindless universe. On the contrary as practitioners we know from Master that humanity in this planet is the focus of a cosmic battle of light against darkness in which we are enrolled as warriors.

The tireless demons know where we are most vulnerable: they whisper to me that the aged are worn out and in any case there is little they can do. On the contrary our energies are constantly replenished by the exercises. Still more important than physical activities, we have, in the concentration of righteous thoughts, means directly to help determine events at the levels where they are in fact shaped. When the self is got out of the picture and our minds are aligned to the characteristics of the universe in tranquillity, it becomes possible to have a clear conviction that our thought has worked and effected change.

Contact with other practitioners is a continuing source of help and above all we know that Master’s Fashen (Law Body) will guide us if our minds are pure. Any minor disabilities that I now experience I see not as primarily matters of health but as prompting to look within.

I now have a fairly recent disability to act as a new reminder. I have somehow dislocated a hip joint and have the right foot permanently splayed out, requiring to be dragged without any capacity to spring. I am encouraged to persist in looking within by the sharing of the elderly practitioner in Hebei, China published on the 21st of April who suffered for months intense head and back pains alongside some breathing difficulties. She intensified her inner search for buried attachments and eventually, helped by group study of Zhuan Falun, she saw that she had not let go of her attachment to illness. Continuing her studies and resuming truth clarification work in spite of great walking difficulties, suddenly on 9th January the symptoms all disappeared and she regained her health. I must refuse to acknowledge that the apparent dislocation is a health matter, resist my increasing inclination to have as much rest as possible and increase participation in our activities. At the same time I must not form a new attachment to getting rid of the disability. Sickness in old age is one form of reducing one’s karma and to that extent can be welcomed. I much appreciate the help given to me by the practitioners who enable me to read a chapter of Zhuan Falun with them five times a week.

I am sure that I have been given extra years of life by Master to enable me to cultivate. I have no desire to hang on to life for its own sake, though I continue to enjoy it, but I am deeply grateful to Master for granting me the opportunity to make up for lost time in the long period before I was enabled by Master's grace to become a Falun Gong practitioner.