(Minghui.org) Greetings, Master! Greetings, fellow practitioners!
I started practicing Falun Dafa in May 2001, right after the Canadian Falun Dafa conference was held in Ottawa. Due to my poor inborn quality, however, it was not a quick or easy process for me to obtain the Fa. On the surface, it looked easy since it seemed as if I just walked right into it all by myself after two brief encounters with Dafa. But it was quite the contrary!
I came to Canada in 1974 from South Korea to study pure Mathematics, so my professional training was as a logician. To me, everything had to make sense and be logical or there was no discussion. In math, before you argue your theory, you clearly lay out the boundaries where you claim your theory holds true. Without stating this assumption, there would be no argument and no theory to prove. There lay my enormous difficulty in discussing the divine.
To me, divinity was a matter of blind belief since one cannot prove the existence of God and there is no logic involved. The existence of God could serve at best as an “assumption” for discussing many other things. But how could I accept the assumption that divine beings exist when we do not know for sure? Therefore, I would not waste my breath discussing the divine, dreams, supernatural phenomena, or anything not concrete to my senses or that couldn’t be proven true. To people like me, it is impossible to believe in the divine because it defies human logic, and human beings were designed to be unable to prove its existence.
In Lecture Two of Zhuan Falun, Master Li Hongzhi said,
“They do not believe what they cannot see. In the past, such people were considered to have poor enlightenment quality, though some people could not explain clearly why these people’s enlightenment quality was poor.”
I had always been a person of very poor inborn quality by any measure, and I did not even know it.
In 1994, a fateful event took place in my family. My daughter, who was 10 at the time, got too sick to go to school and skipped many days due to flu-like symptoms. The following year, she missed even more days of school, and her illness became more persistent and chronic. I was very distressed and started looking for a cure for her myself rather than just relying on medical professionals. It became clear that Western medicine was unable to diagnose her condition and incapable of helping her in any substantial way.
I turned my attention to so-called alternative practices like Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, chiropractic, medical clairvoyance, hypnotherapy, etc. I sought out all possible medical approaches I could find and would take her to try them out whenever possible. My daughter detested such attempts and intrusions into her life and it tormented her, but I was too busy trying to heal her and did not consider her feelings. I was strongly attached to getting her cured and did not want to give up. During those desperate times, I started reading books about alternative medicine.
One of the first things I read discussed the concept of curing vs. healing. That notion hit me hard and deep. Intuitively, somehow I knew the difference: curing is like a bandage while healing comes from within. I often wondered about the soul: I knew I had a mind and body, but what is a soul? How do I know I have a soul? I read many, many books to find out what souls are. While reading New Age books, contrary to my stubborn beliefs, I found many compelling examples that divine beings exist, that we do have souls, and that we continue to exist after physical death.
Once I accepted the fact that we have souls and we continue to exist even after our physical bodies die, which was a leap of faith for me at the time, a floodgate of questions opened. I immediately had so many questions popping up in my mind, such as, “Where do we come from? Where do we go when we die? Why did I choose this particular life? Why did I choose my parents and my family? What do souls do between lives?” I had so many longstanding questions, such as, “Who was I?” Why was I here?” and “What was the meaning of life?”
To find answers, I kept reading: I bought books; borrowed from libraries, friends, colleagues, acquaintances; and asked everyone I knew for books on the subject that I could borrow. I was obsessed with these questions to the point of forgetting that I was supposed to help my daughter be healed! I read intensely for seven years, at which point I faced a dilemma.
The problem was that, while I kept reading books, instead of finding answers, I found more questions. I did not know whether I should keep reading or stop. If I continued to read, I’d just have more questions, and if I stopped reading, there’d be absolutely no chance of finding any answers. I was in a total quandary and in agony. Only after I learned Falun Dafa did I understand why this was the case.
In Lecture One of Zhuan Falun, Master says,
“It states that while a monk was sitting in meditation, his Original Soul (yuanshen) went to the Paradise of Ultimate Bliss and saw its scenery. He spent one day there; when he returned to the human world, six years had already passed. Did he see it? He did, but what he saw was not its true state. Why? It is because his level was not high enough, and what he was shown was only the manifestation of the Buddha Fa at his level.”
Indeed, the experiences described in many books are often contradictory since they were written by people at different levels. So they do not perceive things in the same way as others but rather only see things at their own level. These discrepancies were a major reason why I accumulated more questions as I read.
During this seven-year period, I had a brief initial encounter with Falun Gong, but I had no inclination to find out what it was about since I was too busy looking for answers to my questions. Then one day, I saw a huge photo of an Ottawa University student on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen. It said that she was trying to rescue her father, who was a visiting professor at McGill University. He was jailed in China when he visited his elderly, ailing mother because he practiced Falun Gong. I thought it was quite odd that, in this day and age, people still had such strong convictions that they would endure terrible ordeals and even die from torture. That left an impression on me even though I had no idea what Falun Gong was.
A while later, the real triggering event happened. I was flying home from Tampa, Florida, on a Friday evening. When the airplane touched down in Ottawa, I was preparing to deplane when I noticed two young Asian students across the aisle. We smiled. I casually asked if they were in Ottawa to visit family or friends, but, no, they were coming to attend a Falun Dafa conference over the weekend. One of them handed me a Falun Dafa News flyer. I had no interest, but I accepted it to be polite.
I noticed shortly afterward that the customs area was filled with people: some were young, some were old, some looked like regular business people, and others were elderly Chinese women who did not look wealthy or well-educated. Many of them wore yellow t-shirts.
By then, I knew they were Falun Gong practitioners coming to attend the weekend conference. That scene left an impression and made me wonder why they were spending a lot of money and effort for a weekend conference of a purely personal nature. The two students I met on the plane were no exception. Naturally, I was quite puzzled. What were these people taught to be crazy like that, so committed and devout?
5. Reading Zhuan Falun for the First Time
The following week, during my lunch break at work, I googled “Falun Dafa” and saw millions of results retrieved! That’s when I decided to learn about the teachings. Otherwise, I’d never understand this movement. In just a couple of clicks, I found the Zhuan Falun book and started reading. Almost from the very beginning, I felt this book was quite unique, not like the many other books I had read. As I read, my jaw dropped, and I could not believe what I was reading. I’d never imagined I’d find such a book! I could not stop reading, so for the rest of the afternoon I could not go back to work. Over the next two evenings, I read the whole book.
By then, I knew I would not need any other books, only this book. This book not only answered all my important questions about life but much more than I could have imagined. Even though it seemed the book did not directly address all my questions, it gave me a much higher understanding of human life. This book was truly magical!
I understood then why Chinese practitioners even risked their lives for it. I knew that I would also practice it myself and that there would be no going back now that I had found it. I would be practicing it for the rest of my life. I still do not know answers to many of the questions I had, but it does not matter to me. I have the whole picture!
Being a lesser Dao, I took my time and did not start to practice Dafa right away. For the next few months, my husband and I attended an instructional workshop three times in a row. I remember one evening after a workshop, while walking to my car, my body felt so light and comfortable. It felt so good. Now I know Master had cleansed my body.
Shortly after that, we joined a local study group, and then I began to notice many wondrous things happening to me. Like many women, I had a benign tumor in my uterus. However, it was not that common to have a tumor much bigger than a baseball, and I was advised to have surgery to remove it. But I didn’t. Within a few months of practicing Falun Dafa, one day I suddenly realized to my surprise that the huge lump in my belly was gone! In addition, my very rough skin was also getting smoother, and the feeling of constant tiredness was also gone.
But more than anything else, my mind became much more peaceful, and I could feel that my deep anger, strong resentment, and negative feelings were gradually subsiding and lessening. It felt like a miracle, and obtaining the Fa was my rebirth. I sincerely thank Master Li for giving me my new life, my second life. I hope that I will learn to fully commit myself to cultivation to get rid of my numerous human attachments.
I feel so fortunate to have become a Falun Dafa disciple, and it is such a great honor and privilege to practice Dafa. I feel greatly blessed by Master’s compassion. I will try my best to do the three things better. I’d like to end my sharing with the poem “Gaining the Fa” from Hong Yin:
“Cultivate Dafa with all your heart,Nothing could be more important.Become one with Dafa,And Consummation is, in time, certain.”
Thank you, Master. Thank you, my fellow practitioners.