I am a Practitioner from Washington, DC. I've been a Practitioner for a year and a half. About a week before the last NY Conference, an idea came to me. The idea was that I should write an experience-sharing article for the NY conference. Specifically, the idea was to share an experience that I had long before I became a cultivator. As I began to write about the experience, doubts began to surface. I started wondering if what I was writing was appropriate for an experience sharing conference, since the experience happened before I began cultivating. As more doubts began to surface, I found lots of things to do to keep me from writing, until finally the day of the conference arrived and I hadn't completed my article. I felt relieved not to have to read my article since I had so many doubts about sharing the experience in the first place. Now I was free to just go and focus on the conference.
Except that, the morning of the conference I woke up feeling really congested, with a terrible cough. I rode from DC to NY in a minivan full of practitioners and coughed the whole way. I coughed through the whole conference. It wasn't a quiet, polite cough either; it was loud and very deep. It sounded like I was about to cough up a very important organ. I knew I was disturbing everyone. Again, I realize, I became concerned about what others were thinking of me, only this time it was about my cough.
It wasn't until the drive home that I figured out what was happening to me. I didn't realize it all at once. It took coughing my way through the conference until we were on the ride home and a new practitioner asked me how I found Falun Dafa. I told her not only about the day that I discovered Falun Dafa, but of my spiritual journey that lead up to my finding Falun Dafa (all of which felt irrelevant before). I shared my experiences openly with her without regard for what she might think of me. When I finished telling the story, I felt an intense heat in my body that spread out to my fingertips and to every part of my body. As the heat flowed through my body, my coughing quieted until I didn't cough anymore. I suddenly realized that the coughing cleared up after I shared my experience with this practitioner. I understood immediately that all the coughing had been about my not finishing my experience sharing. Master Li found a way to let my voice be heard at that conference whether I wanted it to be heard or not. Since I didn't share my experiences, practitioners would hear me anyway and in a way that would help me to see the deep attachment that had kept me from writing in the first place: My fear of "What will people think? With that said, I would like to now share my original experiences:
I stepped off of a bus one evening on my way home from a part-time job. About a block from home, a man attacked me. I was a college student at the time and was carrying a book bag. I remember trying to use my book bag to shield me from his attack. During the attack, I didn't feel any blows to my body, I felt pushed around. I glimpsed a metal object in his hand, but never saw or felt him use it. The attack was very quick. I eventually fell to the ground, but as I was falling time seemed to slow down. I felt like I was falling in slow motion. It seemed to take forever for my body to finally make contact with the street. For that brief moment of the attack, no cars, and no people passed by. During the attack, there was one thought that kept going through my mind: "Why does he hate me so much?" I was consumed with that thought. It seems odd to me now that that thought was the only thing on my mind then. I didn't know much about karma at that time. I only knew that, as strange as it sounds, hate was so present during the attack. Hate was present like another being, still invisible to my eyes, but very present. It had become matter. It was solid like a concrete wall. If I had reached out, I could have touched it. When the attack was over, I ran home forever changed, eventually, for the better by that experience. It opened a door in me to a world that I rarely heard about and couldn't see with my eyes. The experience taught me to see beyond the world I could see with my eyes. When Master Li talks about thoughts having material substance, I know he is speaking the truth. I didn't understand how it was possible then, but after reading Zhuan Falun, I clearly understand how possible it is.
There were other events that I couldn't understand at the time, but now have a better understanding after reading Zhuan Falun. More recently I was in a job that I didn't like. It was very stressful and I didn't like going to work there.. I was desperate to leave, but I had no idea what to do or where to go. I got a call, out of the blue, from a college friend who I hadn't heard from in years. She was calling to offer me a new job. Strangely enough, I had reservations about taking it and though she hinted strongly that she wanted me to take the job, I didn't agree to it. She called back the next day and asked me outright if I wanted the job, I heard myself say "yes" to her offer, but from within my body (around the area of my abdomen), I heard a voice yell "No!." It was the strangest thing I have ever experienced. I looked quickly around the office to see if anyone else had heard it. Luckily, no one else was around. While part of me was trying to understand what where the voice had come from, the other part of me was agreeing to accept the job. . I spent the next year regretting my decision.
Unhappy in this new position, I began to search the Internet, desperate the find a better work situation. I came across a graduate program in Humanities and Spirituality. When I read the description of the program, I felt something within me (again in the area of my abdomen) leap toward the computer screen and, again, I heard that voice within me. This time the voice said, "Yes!" I was again amazed by the experience. These two experiences help me to understand how Master Li could talk about phenomenon like seeing you're your hands or having the feeling that your stomach is thinking. Ideas that would have once seemed unthinkable, I know the truth of these words through my own experience.
Before I became a practitioner, things that concerned illness and people being injured (like the sight of blood) would cause me to be sick to my stomach, sometimes I would hyperventilate and nearly pass out. As a result of this situation, I had a strange experience while working for a temporary agency. I was talking to one of my co-workers who I didn't know very well. She began to tell me that she had just been diagnosed with a life threatening disease and that she had recently begun treatment. I felt very bad for her, but what she was telling me was beginning to make me feel sick. I was afraid that if she said much more I would pass out on the floor. As she continued to talk, I tried to behave as if nothing was wrong. I quickly took a sip of water from a water fountain nearby, hoping that the water would somehow make me feel better. I really didn't want to "pass out" because I thought that would be horrible of me to do since she was going through so much already. She didn't need me to "pass out" on the floor. I didn't think I could hold myself together much longer and I felt terrible about it. I was trying desperately to control the horrible sensations I was having in my body, but I was quickly losing control. I was just about to lose consciousness when was suddenly out of my body. I was standing next to myself, watching myself listen to my co-worker telling me about her illness. It was very quick. When I was out of my body, I didn't feel those horrible sensations anymore and my body didn't "pass out" either. I felt so relieved not to feel the horrible things that my body was feeling. All I could feel was gratitude to be out of that body. I didn't even think "what in the world am I doing out of my body" and I wasn't trying to figure out how it happened, it just felt so natural. When the woman finished telling me her story and it was my turn to respond, I returned to my body as quickly and easily as I had gotten out. So when I read Zhuan Falun and It talks about the spirits within the body's shell. I know it's true from my own experience. I know that I stood apart from my own body and it wasn't me, it was a shell.
The last experience that I'll share has to do with thoughts. I had an experience a couple of years ago that let me know that my thoughts are not mine. This is again something that Master Li's writings explain fully. I was experiencing a lot of stress the summer that I went away to graduate school: financial, marital, work and school stress.. I lived and worked in DC at the time and often took the metro home from work. On this particular day, I got off the metro and walked as I normally do, through the turnstile on my way out of the station. As I went through the turnstile, I had a thought. The thought made me a little irritated, and I mulled it over as I continued walking toward home. As I got closer to home these irritating thoughts became more frequent so that by the time I got home I was not a happy camper (person). The next day, to my surprise, as I went through the same turnstile on my way home from work, I recognized that I had the same thought at this particular spot the day before. And on my way home I noticed a pattern of thoughts coming to me. I also noticed that the thoughts came more and more frequently as I got closer to home. I realized that these thoughts did not belong to me. They contained the content of my life, but they were not generated by me, in fact, they seemed to be waiting for me at certain points along my journey home. I didn't understand how that was possible until I read Zhuan Falun.
I share these experiences because when I read "Lunyu" in Zhuan Falun, I understand that many people don't want to accept things that their eyes can't see. I have discovered that these things really exist and Zhuan Falun has given me a concrete understanding of why and how they exist. I've only shared these experiences with a handful of people, for fear that no one would really understand or probably more accurately, my attachment of "What would people think? I know there is more out there than what I have been taught to see and understand, there is much, much more. What I have experienced is such a tiny, tiny bit of it, but I can never go back to not believing again.
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Thank you for listening.
