(Clearwisdom.net) (Note: This article was written in 1999 before the persecution started)

I am a retired 73-year-old teacher. In June 1997, I was fortunate enough to read the book Zhuan Falun and learned many high-level truths. I remember what Master said, "...the entire cultivation process for a practitioner is one of constantly giving up human attachments." (Zhuan Falun)

On my seventh day of cultivation, I found some I-owe-you notes from the past when I had a small store. Counting it all up, I found about forty notes indicating that people owed me almost one thousand yuan in total. I thought of ways to collect the money, and as a result, the thought of money occupied my mind. I could not clear my mind when doing the exercises. I then found many attachments to money and realized that I must get rid of them. I discussed this with my practitioner wife and said, "We are cultivators, and cultivating is about eliminating attachments. Let us burn these notes and not collect the money." My wife agreed, "We should burn the notes and eliminate the attachments. It's worth it." After we burned the notes, our minds became more serene.

Soon, a bigger tribulation came. Fifteen years ago a person named Sun killed one of my sons. Sun was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and was released this year. In past years I had thought of ways I could kill Sun in revenge. Fifteen years ago, all my children were young. I could not leave my wife alone to raise the children. Now I was getting old, and I felt as if it was time to go for it. In all these years, my mind went through great agony whenever I thought about my son and thoughts of revenge shot up to the surface. After beginning cultivation, I understood higher level principles, and I understood that as a Dafa practitioner, I cannot have the thought of killing. Once I let go of the attachment, the hatred disappeared. When others mentioned the person who killed my son, I felt calm and free of hatred. My daughter said, "Dad has truly changed."

After the big test, smaller tests kept coming. One day when we were playing a videotape of one of Master's lectures, the VCR stopped working. We had to ask the repairman to fix the VCR, but I stopped talking to this repairman years ago for personal reasons. Should I ask him for help? I realized that this was a good opportunity to purge myself of the mindset related to personal favors and settling scores, so I called the repairman, who agreed to come and help. Before he came, others told me that the VCR had begun working again. I realized immediately that Master was helping me to eliminate attachments. Tests could come from all angles.

The roof of my next-door neighbor's house is higher than ours, and one of their rain pipes is aimed at our fence. When it rains, water flows into our yard. I figured out a way to guide the water back into their yard and felt I was even. Since beginning cultivation, I felt uneasy about this and removed the device guiding the water back. Now water flows into our yard, and I am no longer upset by this.

We have a vegetable garden, and every year bugs ate the vegetables and we had to spray chemicals on them. This year we bought a bottle of chemicals as usual, but discovered later it was a counterfeit product. I realized from this that cultivators should be benevolent and not kill the bugs. I talked with my wife, and we agreed that we would not spray chemicals this year. Nonetheless, we did not have a single bug in our garden this year and had a great harvest, much better than our neighbors, who did use chemicals.

Though my wife's and my cultivation began relatively late in life, all of our illnesses have disappeared. We are both healthy now and cultivating wholeheartedly.