Acting as one Body

Greetings, Teacher Li. Greetings, Fellow Practitioners.

My name is Zoe. I am a practitioner from here in Toronto. I am a music student at a nearby university and a wife and mother of a two year old son. It is a great honor to be here today.

It has sometimes been difficult to be steadfast and strong in my cultivation. At these moments I have previously felt alone and ashamed, as if other practitioners could not understand me and as if they would look down on me because of my weakness. Whenever I do share my problems I always find another practitioner has experienced similar feelings and they have usually experienced them recently, often on the same day or week that I have. At that time I no longer feel alone and the problem seems very small and is easy to overcome. Teacher mentioned to us in The North America Lecture Tour, “After experiencing this wave of tribulations, you are able to understand the Fa more deeply and have become more mature while cultivating and validating the Fa.” It is my current understanding that this means Falun Dafa practitioners experience waves of tribulations together. Our tribulations have been arranged and I feel we must overcome them together. I want to tell everyone that it has been very hard for me in the past because I did not understand the difference between personal cultivation and cultivation during Fa rectification. I took these tribulations, and negative thoughts personally so I felt alone and inadequate as if they were solely due to my poor Xinxing [Mind/Heart nature, moral character]. I am trying now to have faith in the group and Teacher and not only understand the Fa [Law and principles of Falun Gong] with my intellect but to actually enlighten with my heart. I would like to extend a request to you all to assist me in this regard. From now on I will strive to understand the Fa that I read and listen to every day from my heart.

We have all talked a lot lately about improving our environment here in Toronto. We all know that Teacher has told us that we are one body. I want to share my understanding about something Teacher has taught us in Washington this year. “The next person’s things are your things. We don’t talk about the unity everyday people do, which is a forced, superficial thing” (From “Teaching the Fa at Washington D.C. FA Conference July 22, 2002”).

There are here in Toronto a number of places where westerners meet and study the Fa. It was rare that westerners met as one large group and talked together. There appeared to be some sort of tension between the groups. As a member of one of the groups I felt that, in certain people, there was a very uncomfortable imbalance and lack of harmony in several regards. I decided to look inside. I found that I had also always assumed that some practitioners were “better” cultivators than I was and that they knew the Fa better than me, and so on. In the audiotape of the nine day lecture teacher mentions people who have fallen due to interference from their own mind. He describes the practitioners who praised them because of their celestial eye visions as “not very responsible”. Because I was not taking responsibility for my own understanding and valuing it, I helped to create a sort of hierarchy within my own environment. I feel it may have been a sort of mutual inhibition sort of effect. I also felt that others were too busy doing important work and so I felt afraid to call them or ask them for help. I have stopped the group from progressing as it should by not participating as a true equal. Indeed the problem that seemed to involve a few practitioners was in fact my problem, as a group dynamic is created by everyone in the group. Hence their things were my things once again. Because of the assumption that they were somehow more capable than me, I did not offer my help for fear that I would mess things up. The end result was that I was not there for them when they needed me.

Teacher mentioned that we as a body are linked with a force far more significant than so-called “unity”. I read an article forwarded to the group that mentioned that practitioners must fuse together to form an impenetrable whole that will form the future colossal firmament. If I am fused to you then I am totally open to you in every possible way. We share everything. My human side feels afraid when it thinks of another person knowing my very heart and soul. That is because I still have the notion of self and a fear of being somehow exposed. I am in this human realm immersed in qing [emotion]. Without this qing we couldn’t live here. In fact those bad attachments are not my true nature. Why should having shortcomings make me feel ashamed? I just have to try hard to minimize any damage my human side may do. I wonder, does being steadfast mean you don’t make mistakes or does it mean that, no matter what, you keep trying to improve your Xinxing?

It is my understanding that we all share the same shortcomings in different forms. As I read Teacher’s Fa Lecture at the Florida Conference I realized that the things I haven’t taken care of in my own field and dimensions can manifest in another practitioner in any number of forms, including helping to fuel his or her so called “personal short-comings”. I have been very selfish in the past when I distanced myself from others by seeing them as having “shortcomings”. I was, in fact, not taking responsibility.

When we these “short comings” are manifested I want to be totally forgiving, not to judge others or myself and to address the problem with rationality and compassion from now on. I want to let go of my notion of self and have the courage to be forthright about what I am experiencing so the problems we are collectively facing can be addressed by all of us. I want to enlighten to how I am responsible for any conflict even if it seems that I’m not directly involved. Most of all I want to learn to listen to others very, very carefully and with all my heart.

I have thought a lot about what has kept me from openly sharing with all my heart in the past. There is obviously the fear of losing reputation but I feel that is just a part of it. What are the deeper reasons? A courageous practitioner posted an email recently about true compassion among practitioners and he felt he didn’t really get a helpful response from his fellow practitioners. True his approach was rough around the edges but he felt he got the same stock answer – “look into yourself.” On the surface, that response, and “study the Fa more,” are always good advice. You will never sound stupid handing out those two phrases. It got me thinking though. What is the most effective way to respond to practitioners who are having trouble? We all know we should look inside and study the Fa more.

I want to talk about the concept of dogma. It occurs when people accept a form of rhetoric and recite it without understanding from the heart. The Fa is vast and we do “study” it but it is my understanding that we must enlighten with our hearts and it is not the same as an intellectual exercise. I see in retrospect that it was not good when I used helping others as an exercise to “prove my point”. Proving one’s point is an attachment as Teacher mentions in the 9-day lecture recording. I feel that something is not quite right about using a portion of Teacher’s Fa to prove a point. I have often read emails where people quote Teacher at length. I read them and, as we all study the Fa, I am familiar with the content. The emails that truly touch my heart contain the writer’s cultivation experience. They leave a lasting impression that an intellectual exercise in proving a point cannot have.

I feel that to truly form one body and eliminate our problems collectively we need to deepen our sharing and ability to truly help one another and be helped by one another. I have felt helped the most when practitioners share their own experience and righteous enlightenment based on the Fa. When practitioners are brave and take risks to tell the Truth. Thinking of this made me think about why Teacher has reminded us to broaden the scope of our righteous thoughts and send them on a larger scale. I feel we must continue to broaden our minds and hearts. I really want to do this.

I was on the bus and started to recite “Lunyu” [An explanation using language; the first set of writing in Zhuan Falun] in my mind and I felt what I had to say I had truly enlightened to. Every phrase of “Lunyu” resonated with the new understanding I held in my heart.

I felt that as a group we shouldn’t let our current understanding of the principles of Falun Gong become conventional thinking or the root of each problem will “forever remain a mystery”.

When we use the Fa to point out the problems of others or prove a point I believe that we become intellectuals not cultivators. Teacher says, “Is it a religion is it a philosophy? That is only the understanding of the modernized Buddhist scholars” (“Lunyu”). When we share our enlightenment based on the Fa and what we personally have come to understand, that is what always touches my heart and I have found that kind of honest sharing very, very helpful.

“They regard it as a philosophical category for critical studies” (“Lunyu”). When I take an approach that is not from the very bottom of my heart, because his problem is my problem, is it possible I am a scholar and not a cultivator?

The problems we have now can all be answered by cultivating better, reading more and looking inside, but I want to go even further and suggest that doing all these things (especially looking inside) as a group might allow us to make a quantum leap forward.

“Whenever we mention specific phenomenon of the Buddha Fa someone will claim” ‘this is already the electronic era and science is very advanced yet you still bring up these outdated superstitions.’ To put it frankly, as advanced as a computer is it is still not match for the human brain, which to this day remains an unfathomable enigma.” (“Lunyu”). When I read this I felt that I have had a similar attitude to that of ordinary people. It seems to me that whenever we bring up specific phenomena of our cultivation that look like personal problems on the surface the conversation would quickly give way to talk about what we need to achieve. This lead me to feel that we are already in Fa rectification and here I am, swamped in these human emotions, my sharing is too low level and inappropriate. I now think that I was wrong, and Teacher reminds me there is still no match for the human experience, since I am a cultivator and what I am cultivating with are my human things. Because we can share these embarrassing attachments, eliminate them or minimize their damage and enlighten as a group we can stop thinking about just flying to other planets and truly transcend so we can genuinely introduce Dafa to people. I feel that honest sharing is key in eliminating a lot of interference as well.

“Some people even dare not face, touch upon, or admit the fact of phenomena that objectively exist because they are to conservative and unwilling to change their conventional thinking” (“Lunyu”). This describes the state that I was in. I have been unwilling to admit how my problems would affect others. I have kept my problems to myself and have not looked to the group for help. I had a lot of conventional thinking based on self-cultivation thinking that has stopped me from improving. I have been too conservative and I have guarded myself. I have felt cynicism when practitioners bring up ideas I feel are off the wall. I have used the excuse that I am being rational or sensible to cover the fact that I have not fully melted into the Fa, and, instead of understanding the Fa from the Fa I used human criteria to decide whether something was rational or not. I have not opened my mind and heart so that they become broader and wider. In short I have refused to accept that I am a part of the one body and I truly must be responsible to each and every one of you and to all sentient beings.

I really feel I need to be more genuine and to hear more genuine discussion that really comes from a deep place in each of us and without fear. We have a lot of ordinary human sentiments because we are here in the human realm. I saw something strange while sending forth Righteous Thoughts this week. I saw there was tension among practitioners because we were getting rid of our problems and coming together as a whole. I saw that if we pointed out one another’s attachments with a big finger, treated each other harshly and didn’t look inside and failed to understand that “his things are your things”, we would instead create a kind of tension or turbulence and it would take slightly longer for everything to be ironed out. Things would go to extremes for a little while until we all enlightened. We were interfered with and we were stopped from studying the Fa well, sending forth righteous thoughts and clarifying the truth for that period of time. I thought about Teacher mentioning that we should conduct ourselves with “tolerance, kindness and niceness” (Washington, D.C. 2002). Why niceness? I had this thought. It is a fact that we all have varying degrees of sentimentality. I myself have plenty. As we are eliminating our own problems together I feel it might be good to relate to one another’s understanding that each of us has human sentimentality. If we aren’t nice and empathetic we will create this tension that can be taken advantage of. Understanding that the next person’s things are our things enables us to harmonize the situation by finding the portion of the shortcoming, whatever it may be, that exists within ourselves. This might enable us to truly understand the other person and make a true connection that brings us closer together and makes our environment more harmonious.

I want to thank all of my fellow practitioners for attending and participating in the magnificent and beautiful event. It has been an honor to be here. If you find anything incorrect in my thinking please feel free to point it