My name is Tomek; I'm a Polish Falun Dafa practitioner. Even before I started to practise Falun Gong, I felt that nothing happens without a reason, and I saw my life as a chain of events which were leading me to the one righteous direction. I didn't see at first, however, the reason for being born in the city of Skierniewice. Some time after starting my cultivation, I came to realise how long ago I had actually started to search for Falun Dafa and the opportunity to fulfil my vows.
My mom says that when I was born I didn't cry, I just looked around with a very serious look on my face, and in my first month I just looked around like I was trying to find something, crying very rarely. Soon I started to crawl and I started walking when I was 9 months–my mom says I was all over the place.
Family and friends from my childhood say that when I was 4 or 5 years old I started to read, and when I was 6 years old I was reading books of 100 pages. When I was 7 years old, instead of playing with other kids, I was reading a 300-page book every 2 days. At the same time, I started to learn foreign languages by myself, as I always felt the need for speaking different languages. My mother says that when I was 10 years old I was translating cartoons from English for my sisters.
Until I was 14 years old, I continued to read a few books a week. By the time I was 14, I had already travelled all over Poland, and when I was 16 I had started to travel all over Europe. I walked through the mountains, I sailed over lakes, but I still couldn't find what I was looking for.
Then I started high school, and I drifted away doing things which were polluting my heart and body, and I forgot about wanting to find the book that I could read the rest of my life. But learning languages still seemed interesting to me.
The summer of 1999 was my fourth summer spent in Italy earning money that allowed me to easily study in Poland without any worries. But in July of 1999, I was accused of not filing some documents, and the result was that I had to leave Italy and could not enter the European Union for 5 years, but I couldn’t stop the feeling that now I was going in the right direction. Actually, it was like a wake-up call with a really hard whack on the head by a big stick. I got back to the books trying to find the meaning of life, but this time it was scientific books–physics, chemistry, mathematics, and in between I was just reading the encyclopedia.
During the years of 2001 and 2002, some experiences with supernatural abilities assured me that there does exist something more in a person’s life than what can be seen with the eyes.
Starting my Cultivation in Falun Gong
One night in the beginning of Summer 2003, I was lying in my bed trying to solve the problem of how to store the energy I was stealing from plants in every cell of my body, so the cell could be replaced by some kind of high-energy matter. A thought jumped into my head: “I need to do some exercises to achieve the transformation of my body,” so I stood up and tried to do some moves, but it didn't seem to have any effect.
So I thought, “I need to find somebody who can teach me some exercises.” And at this moment a thought sparked in my mind: “Falun Gong”. I don’t remember if I had heard of the Falun Gong practice before. Of course, I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was right after midnight–the time for sending righteous thoughts in Poland. I turned on the computer, typed in “Falun Gong”, and found the falundafa.org website and the Polish Falun Dafa website. I downloaded the exercises and the book Falun Gong. I started to do the exercises, and the next day I read Falun Gong twice. On the website there were practice sites in Poland listed–one in Warsaw, and the other in my home town!!
So I called practitioners in my hometown and met them the next day at the exercise site. While doing the exercises, I felt very strong energy, stronger than any I had ever felt before. After the exercises I asked a couple of young, married practitioners if I could spend more time with them that evening, as the next day I was leaving for the US for 4 months. I stayed at their home until 3am in the morning. What a great experience it was! For the first time I could talk about things I was experiencing with just regular people, not sounding weird, and we just talked about different things like they were totally normal.
At midnight that night I sent my first righteous thoughts. Before I left I was given Zhuan Falun, Lecture in the United States, Lecture in Sydney, Explaining the Content of Falun Dafa, Guiding the Voyage, and Essentials for Further Advancement One and Two. I got home, I packed my bags, and at 5am I left for the airport. As soon I got there, I started to read Zhuan Falun. I was reading it lecture after lecture flying across Europe, while waiting to change flights, reading it while flying over the ocean, and after arriving at NYC Columbia University. The next morning I noticed a huge banner there advertising the local Falun Gong exercise site. Then, I read the next lectures on the bus to Cleveland, Ohio, and while waiting for the next connection to Sundusky. I remember I was reading the ninth lecture on my last bus connection to my final destination, and I couldn’t wait to finish the book so I could start reading it again!!
In those few days a lot of special things happened to me which made me feel I was finally finding what I had been looking for. One of the things was a dream I had on the night I spent in NY at Columbia University. After I had this dream, I forgot it almost immediately, and didn’t recall it completely until sometime later. One of the times that I recalled this dream was in March of this year, when I was taking part in some activities during the New York Falun Dafa Experience Sharing Conference It just so happened that there were some meetings at Columbia University that I attended, and after the meetings, I walked by the bench where I had read Zhuan Falun for the first time almost 3 years earlier, and by the building I had spent the night in then. At that moment, I recalled the special dream:
. . . I was sleeping when some loud screams woke me up, and when I woke up, I felt that I dreamt about something really important, but I couldn’t remember what. I fell asleep again and the situation repeated itself. After I was again awakened by some terrible screams, I felt again that I was just dreaming about something special, but I couldn’t remember what. Even though some part of me wanted so bad to recall the dream, some part of me actually felt I was not supposed to remember it. The situation repeated itself two more times. The last time the scream was about to interfere again with my dream and I was going to wake up, some part of me decided to remember the dream. I woke up and I did remember it: I was having a conversation with two other people, we were discussing some things and they were explaining to me what was going to happen and what I was going to have to do. But I felt I knew them really well, and that they were actually only reminding me of things I knew a long time ago.
The person who was speaking the most was the author of Zhuan Falun. (Yes, at this time since that was just my first time reading Zhuan Falun my side here only knew that He was the author of Zhuan Falun) A split second before I woke up the last time, we all agreed that it would be better for me and better for the whole situation if I did not remember our conversation and did not remember the dream. Obviously that was my opinion as well. But while in the process of waking up some human part of me felt really strong sadness at going back to the world of illusion and sadness about forgetting this precious experience. I guess this human part of me somehow managed to remember what I just described. But I didn’t remember it for very long; soon I completely forgot what happened on that special night, and I recalled it again only recently.
When I finally reached my final destination, and after reading the last few pages of Zhuan Falun, I started to read it again. There were no practitioners in the small city where I was staying–not anywhere close--so for the next couple of weeks, even when I was working overtime hours, I managed to read all the books given to me by the Polish practitioners, reading as well the entire Zhuan Falun between each two books. At that time I can’t say that I was practising; I was only doing some of the exercises. I guess my mind needed some time to process all the things I read, so after I read all the materials, I devoted myself to my work and other things I was doing, but I was also trying to improve my heart according to things I read. I was doing the exercises only occasionally, so I wasn’t ready to consider myself a Falun Gong practitioner.
In November I came back to Poland, and contacted the Polish practitioners who offered me so much help before I had left. Actually, they were surprised when I called them and said, “I’m back! When can we read some Fa together and do exercises?” It took me a month of reading and exercising with this young couple to get rid of the attachment to being an individual and independent from anybody, and in the middle of December I accepted our benevolent Master as my Master, and I decided, “I AM A FALUN GONG PRACTITIONER!” Shortly afterwards, I started going to the embassy and taking part in activities to expose the persecution and introduce the practice.
I shared this story before with some practitioners and it was suggested that I write an experience sharing paper on it. Sometimes when I get busy I tend to forget how predestined we all are. At these times it always helps when somebody new asks, “And how did you start practising?” Then you can share your story, and by telling about it, you can recall how predestined you are as well, how well-arranged our paths are, and that nothing is without a reason.
Fulfilling my Vows
Since I was a kid I always felt it was urgent for me to learn foreign languages, and at present I have a good command of a few of them. Apart from the fact that I can use this ability to clarify the facts in a few different languages, it convinced me that a person can learn any language. So some time after obtaining the Fa, a thought about learning Chinese to read the Fa written in Master’s original words was totally natural for me–you know, just another language.
At the end of August in 2004, thanks to Master’s arrangements, I suddenly had lots of free time: I was abroad, my documents were stolen, so I could neither work, nor could I leave the country. While waiting for my papers, I devoted all my time to Hongfa activities, and I started to seriously learn Chinese. decided not to use “special computer programs” to learn the Fa, I decided to just keep on reading it until I understood it–just as I had with Polish and other languages.
I started with Lunyu, using the pinyin Romanization and dictionary. Lunyu was difficult for me to learn, but when I showed persistence and patience, I finished it and went on to the first lecture really fast. I was translating character by character in each paragraph, and then I was going back to the beginning of the paragraph reading it again and memorising the characters. And so it went on paragraph by paragraph. After finishing the entire book, I would go back to Lecture One and read the book from the beginning again. After a couple of months I read Zhuan Falun—in its entirety—in Chinese.
At that time the Polish translation had been in the process of proofreading for few years already, and it was still not good enough to be published. In early 2005 it was decided that it would be better to translate Zhuan Falun again anew, as the previous version was translated by a practitioner who had spent most of his life abroad. Some practitioners started to work on this project.
I thought to myself, “Maybe I could help with the translation; maybe I could help translate some expressions directly from Chinese.” So one evening I sat down and translated the first section of Lecture 1 just to share how, in my understanding, it would sound in Polish, what structure and words I would use. While translating it into Polish directly from Chinese, after a few paragraphs I noticed it was coming out quite good. It was in Polish but I could feel the Fa in it. I then took a break to go to the print shop where I was going to print out what was left of the book.
While walking, something suddenly opened, and I felt a very strong energy current going through my body from the top to the bottom, and in a split second, I saw myself from childhood trying to learn different languages, making it easy for me to learn them, preparing myself to learn Chinese. Since I had started to learn Chinese, I was grateful to Master for arranging my path to prepare me for reading Chinese.
But this I had already realised before--that my path was leading that way so that I could read the Fa in the original language of Chinese. But in this special moment I saw the past and I felt the future. How I could be so selfish to think that all of that arrangement was only so “I” could read the Fa in Chinese?! I saw clearly that it was not the end of the path. Now I felt that this arrangement was so that I could share this ability with others and help them read the Fa in Polish translated directly from Chinese, closer to the original.
Right after this realisation, some unrighteous thoughts came to my mind–“But how can you do it? You’ve been learning Chinese just for a half a year--there’s no way you could translate the book! And what will other practitioners say–“You’ve just been practising for a little more than a year and you want to tell all those practitioners whom you never met in person who’ve been practising all these years in Canada and the US, that you want to translate Zhuan Falun?! Come on! What are you thinking!?”
But I felt somehow that that was not righteous. I decided in my heart that I had to try it, because if it were my path, then it would be such a great loss if I ended up walking a different one. All of this happened in just a split second of time. So I came back home, and I sent the part I translated to practitioners who were translating Zhuan Falun from English, but I never talked about my experience.
There was no response. So obviously I thought my sample of translation was not good enough. I decided to start working on my ability to translate the Fa into Polish, just in case someday in the future I would be allowed to help to translate the book. A few months passed. When summer arrived, I got a response from the practitioner who was to be the main translator. She wrote, “The more I read your sample, the more I think it’s better than my translation. You can really feel the Fa in it. What would you say about being the main translator, and you could do it directly from Chinese into Polish?” I wrote back that I had been preparing for it for a few months, and so I started the translation. That was about one year ago. As of now, we are in the final stage of proofreading the book. We have found the publisher, and the contract is almost completed. We should start printing by the end of this month.
Exposing the persecution and introducing the practise in a country with only a few practitioners
In March of this year we were organising a Forum to introduce Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party in the Polish Parliament. As there are few of us, we decided to contact the politicians, media, and NGO’s, etc. via email. We already have an address and email list of all MP’s and Senators and most of the medias–we gathered this information in December 2005 while sending them copies of the Polish newspaper version of The Nine Commentaries. Now we just needed to add email addresses.
Using email extractor programs, we were able to obtain even more email addresses. So we sent about 600 emails to politicians (MP’s, Senators, Members of the President’s office, as well as Ministers and other staff of all the Ministries), 700 emails to media (journalists, reporters, editors, etc), emails to all embassies in Poland, almost 2000 emails to local and city councils, and almost 2000 emails to NGO’s and people interested in human rights issues. All together we had about 6000 email addresses.
In order to send the invitations to the Forum, we used the mass mailing program. Additionally, the program was set up so that all the politicians, media people and local and city council members received an email addressed in their name. The response surpassed our expectation. We received emails wishing us success, and over 100 people showed up for the Forum.
At the end of April, we sent mass mailings about organ harvesting, and a few newspapers published this information, with some TV stations broadcasting it as well. Basically, almost every time we send our mass mailings there is a response in the media. When in May we held a conference about organ harvesting in the Polish Parliament, about 30 MP’s came and when we talked to them some of them said, “Oh yes, I heard about it; I’m receiving those emails and I always read them carefully.”
Once we sent mass mailings about what Falun Gong is, and we received this response: “I started to read your emails carefully. I feel ashamed but I always thought Falun Gong is some kind of military religious organisation, who is fighting for a free China using protests and acts of violence. Today after reading your email I finally opened my eyes . . . It looks like I too was fooled by the propaganda of Communist China . . . A person should learn something new about the world each day . . . I’ve learnt something today . . . Thank you.”
Another time, a Taiwanese person called asking about the practice. When asked where she got the number from she said she’d been receiving those emails from us, and she’d be interested in the practice. Then I spoke to her husband. I thought they might have some business with China and that’s why they were on our email list. But he said, “I have absolutely no idea why we are receiving those emails; we do not have anything in common with China.” I said, “I’m sorry, if you wish I will take you off of the list.” But he said, “Oh no, please, we are always carefully reading your emails; can you leave us in your database?” Then he said that if we were ever around his city to visit them for a cup of tea or coffee, and he even gave us his address there and then just in case.
In this period of time, Falun Dafa practitioners can choose among many ways of clarifying the truth so as to save people. Thanks to the mass mailings, we can reach almost every city and town in Poland, all the local and national media, all the politicians, and many, many more. The propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party has strong roots in people’s hearts, but since we started mass mailings, I can feel that the environment in Poland has changed a great deal. It feels like with every single person who learns the truth, a field of righteousness is getting stronger. We are still planning to expand our database. I wanted to share this with you all–especially in the countries were there are few of us, clarifying the truth via mass mailings can save many.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for your righteous thoughts and righteous actions in the last few days.
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