(Clearwisdom.net)
Learning the practice of Falun Gong
In October 2002, within a two-week period, my husband's eyesight drastically weakened from normal to about 10 percent of what it had been. This sudden ordeal caused him a great deal of pain and worry. He went to two hospitals but neither could diagnose the cause of the problem.
My husband and I are both farmers and we work in the fields every day. One day after dinner, my husband said that he had talked with his older brother while working in the field. Both my brother-in-law and sister-in-law are Falun Gong practitioners. His brother told him about the benefits that he and his wife had derived from practicing Falun Gong and asked him to come to his house that night.
My husband asked me to accompany him to his brother's house. I was reluctant at first as I didn't see how it could help, but I eventually became curious and agreed to go.
When our brother and sister-in-law saw us, they warmheartedly welcomed us into their home. After we entered their house, they began to teach us the first exercise and taught us the accompanying verses. I asked, "You also have books, right? I want to take a look at them when I get home."
After we arrived home at about 9:00 p.m., I opened Zhuan Falun and saw Master's picture. I had a feeling that Master was trying to tell me something then, and I began to read. Suddenly, I heard my husband say, "Aren't you going to sleep?" I realized that it was already midnight. I held Zhuan Falun and didn't want to put it down. I also did not want to disturb my husband's sleep, so I put the book next to my pillow and fell asleep.
That night I had a dream with Master in it. After that, I finished Zhuan Falun in three nights and my view of the world changed--I had obtained the Fa.
Studying the Fa in a group
I studied Master's lectures written before and after July 20, 1999 (when the persecution began). At that time, I not only felt Master's immense mercy but I also the raging injustice that was brought upon Dafa by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In July 2003 I joined the local Fa-study group. At that time, there were only five of us in our group.
We work in the fields during the day and study the Fa at night. Some practitioners are illiterate but they are very simple and pure. When I first joined the group, every time we finished a paragraph, there would be practitioners who asked very simple and easy questions. Then we would share our understandings and experiences. We only read a few pages a night. I was quite unaccustomed to this way of reading and thought that this was inferior to when I studied the Fa by myself at home.
One day when I was studying Fa, I was thinking that if one does well, it's just one practitioner that does well. I realized my selfishness and that I was only caring about myself. We should study the Fa together because only when all practitioners improve will there be true improvement as a whole body.
Exposing the evil, clarifying the truth and improving as a whole
In our village, many practitioners have been persecuted and have suffered greatly. The Party members in the three nearby villages have extorted 300,000 yuan from practitioners.
Some practitioners were arrested and sent to forced labor camps and brainwashing centers. The authorities were very active in our area. Because the public is immersed in the evil Party culture every day, they don't see the beauty and compassion of Falun Dafa. They only see the persecution of Falun Dafa practitioners. This created great difficulty in saving sentient beings.
In 2006, five practitioners from a neighboring village were illegally arrested. Fellow practitioners began working together to rescue them. Some worked with the relatives of the arrested practitioners and went with them to the homes of those who were responsible to clarify the truth and ask them to release their relatives.
Others went to the brainwashing center to deliver Master's articles to the practitioners detained there and some also mailed letters. Some sent righteous thoughts near the brainwashing centers and labor camps. We did many other things during this time. We also printed a great number of truth-clarifying materials and stickers and distributed them to farmers' houses and posted them in the streets.
The next day, people who worked for the 610 Office in our county came to our village. The moment they broke into the house of a practitioner they demanded, "Do you know what happened out there?" The practitioner said with righteous thoughts, "This morning when I opened the door, I saw people reading the flyers. They also read the materials on the lampposts." The 610 Office agents left.
However, they didn't give up. Several days later, they arrested several practitioners that clarified the truth to county officials and took them to a brainwashing center. Again we exposed the evil in a timely manner.
This time, things were not as easy as before. The police officers parked their cars at crossroads and patrolled the streets on motorcycles. We knew that the evil factors in other dimensions were at work.
We sent righteous thoughts together and asked Master to strengthen us. We maintained a calm mind with righteous thoughts obtained from studying the Fa and hurried through the streets distributing truth-clarification materials. We posted notices exposing what the evil officials did. We also sent letters to every household. We also exposed the officials' conduct and posted their phone numbers on the Internet.
By working together with overseas practitioners, our actions extinguished the evil. Even practitioners who had lots of fear joined us in our efforts. We are more powerful as a whole, and people began to understand the true situation more clearly. It was no longer as difficult to persuade them to quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations.
Perfect harmony
As the situation progressed, the need for a new truth-clarification materials production site became more urgent. When I saw this problem from an overall perspective, I realized that I needed to take action. I became a coordinator in 2004 and 2005. I would go to a neighboring county to get materials such as Master's lectures, the "Minghui Weekly", and other truth-clarifying materials. I endured lots of hardship to do this but I was very happy.
In 2006, I looked for people who could access the Internet so we could start our own material production site. At that time, we didn't have enough money, so I went to a veteran practitioner who was also a coordinator. However, the veteran practitioner didn't want me to be involved in coordinating a materials site because I was a relatively new practitioner.
I was pretty upset about this, knowing that I should improve myself. That night I studied Master's lecture, "Teaching the Fa at the 2002 Fa Conference in Philadelphia, U.S.A." Master said,
"So what's their state of mind? It's tolerance, an extremely immense tolerance, being able to accept other beings, and being able to truly think from other beings' perspectives."
I asked myself: "Will I stop cultivating just because this practitioner did not think I could run a materials production site?" In time, the Internet center, printing center, and CD burning center were set up under Master's merciful protection and with the combined efforts of all the practitioners.
Breaking through with righteous thoughts and letting go of selfishness
In July 2007, the head of the police station came with three police vans and 610 Office secret police and entered my house. I was able to overcome this tribulation with righteous thoughts. After I returned home, I began to study the Fa with all my heart:
"There's something you must pay attention to: you are validating the Fa, not validating yourselves. A Dafa disciple's responsibility is to validate the Fa. Validating the Fa is cultivation, and what you remove in the cultivation process is none other than the attachment to self; you can't, instead, go and exacerbate the problem of validating oneself, even if you do it unwittingly. When you're validating the Fa and cultivating, that is a process of removing self, and only when you do that are you really validating yourself. That's because ultimately you have to let go of all your human things, and only after you've let go of all your human attachments can you step out from the throngs of everyday people." ("Teaching the Fa at the Meeting with Asia-Pacific Students")
I only wanted to lift the burden off fellow practitioners working at the materials production sites, but I was not patient enough to explain my idea to the veteran practitioner I had talked to. Instead, I was very selfish and simply imposed my opinion on the veteran practitioner, which had made it difficult for him to accept and caused him to give a negative response. After studying the Fa and looking inside myself for the reasons why, this degenerate notion of selfishness, which belonged to the old universe, was eradicated.
October 12, 2008
