Shared at 2004 Washington DC Falun Dafa Conference
(Clearwisdom.net) Greetings Revered Master. Greetings Dear Fellow Practitioners.
Today, I would like to share my experiences of working on the Internet team during the past two years. In summary, this project is a process of eliminating selfishness.
At the very beginning of the Fa-rectification period, Clearwisdom.net became the extremely important center for clarifying the truth on the Internet. Because of this importance, the evil was very afraid of our websites, and it never stopped its attempts to interfere with us on the Internet. The evil hired hackers to attack Dafa websites, block Dafa news from overseas, sent virus files to Dafa practitioners, pretended to be practitioners to earn others' trust, and deceived practitioners into installing spy programs so that they could monitor practitioners' Internet communications, etc.
I was involved in investigating how the evil tapped into Dafa practitioners' e-mail boxes. The investigation revealed a large number of e-mail boxes being affected. The severe problem made me lose sleep at night. "It is bad, it is venomous, and it is evil. And just like poison, if you want it not to poison people it can't do that--that's just how it is." ("Teaching the Fa at the 2001 Canada Fa Conference")
Actually, we could have avoided many losses if we had paid attention to security. I would like to give an example here. During the 2002 Iceland activities, when I overcame lots of barriers and finally arrived in Iceland, I was happy to see many other Internet team members there. Some of them had been abducted by the Chinese government when visiting China, some are leaders of local Dafa Associations, yet they all passed customs in Iceland. This indicated that the security of computers, the Internet and other communication channels is very important. I realized righteous thoughts also mean we do not provide any omission for the evil to take advantage of.
We have some technical support practitioners in each area. However, a big tribulation all technical support practitioners face is "loneliness," since not many people understand the technical issues we are facing. Many times we are on our own. and no one can help us when we run into technical issues. The technical difficulties, stressful work, "loneliness," and all kinds of interference, are the biggest challenges for practitioners in technical fields. The Iceland trip reminded me that in order for practitioners in the technical field to have effective communications, it is vital that we share our understandings about the Fa.
Everything we do on the Internet team is completely dependent upon our personal understanding of Fa-rectification. I often felt lost: Is the program I am developing useful? Will anybody visit the website I am developing? More often, I observed the craziness of the evil's interference in this invisible web world, which gave me a strong sense of urgency in Fa-rectification.
I experienced severe interference. It was this difficult experience that made me start considering how to change the unorganized situation for the Internet team in order to catch up with the Fa-rectification process. For some time, I often heard "Practitioner A suffered interference in the form of sickness. Practitioner B fell behind and stopped Dafa work." I saw how the old forces' affect many other practitioners. At the time, I suffered severe symptoms of physical illness myself. To make things worse, my spouse was working in a different city. I was working full time, and had to take care of my three and a half year old daughter. I took several days off, and went back to work though I was still in pain.
I started to consider carefully how I could seek help from fellow practitioners. I understood that my own omissions caused this interference. I was concerned about not letting other practitioners be affected by my omissions. On the second day after my problem occurred, I told several fellow practitioners in other parts of North America. The team clarifying the truth through the Internet is small -- less than 10 people. In the past, we would share experiences through phone conferences at least once a month and we trust each other because of that long term, regular experience sharing. After listening to my problem, they all suggested I take a break and rest.
However, I could not rest. A program I was developing was almost finished. I experienced lots of difficulties developing it, and I was down to the final stage. I felt so bad, thinking I must have done something wrong to cause so much trouble. I told myself that no matter what happened I had to finish the program. I kept reminding myself what Master said, "A Dafa disciple completely opposes everything arranged by the evil old forces." ("Dafa Is Indestructible") There are so many sentient beings waiting for us to save them. Our cultivation path was arranged by Master and I believed I could pass this tribulation with the power of Master and Dafa.
I always wrote programs at night, I could feel the loneliness during those long, dark nights. Yet, I was never alone. Fellow practitioners called me every day or every other day to encourage me. We also communicated about my progress through e-mails.
Amazingly, my little daughter learned how to feed, bathe and dress herself within a week, allowing me to have more time to finish the program. I knew it was Master who was helping me. My pain continued for two weeks and there was no sign of improvement. At that time, I promised to help another team to set up a website. That night, the pain was so severe, I felt like I was losing all my blood. A fellow practitioner sighed, "The evil is targeting you, and it is not letting you off easily."
I wished someone could tell me why I suffered this interference. Fellow practitioners kept encouraging me. Many times, when the pain was so severe that I felt I was about to give up, I looked at Master's picture. The faith in Master's benevolent smile gave me confidence. One day I suddenly realized "faith" is what I needed -- righteous faith. I remembered a fellow practitioner told me, "I believe you can overcome the interference." Fellow practitioners believed in me, Master believed in me, how could I not believe in myself to overcome the interference? Master said, "Unless you, yourself do not want to do so, you can make it, provided you want to overcome them." (Lecture Four, Zhuan Falun) I should believe in the power of Dafa.
My situation started improving, but was not yet stable. A fellow practitioner learned about my situation and helped me to pick up my daughter from daycare every day; she would feed and bathe my daughter. I went to her home from work every day, took a short break there, sent forth righteous thoughts with the fellow practitioner and then took my daughter home. When I felt weak, the opportunity of talking to a fellow practitioner and listening to her encouragement from the standpoint of the Fa was extremely precious for me.
The interference lasted about 5-1/2 weeks. During that time, every day was a test for me, every progress I made writing the program depended upon fellow practitioners sending forth righteous thoughts with me. I remember one night, I felt so much pain that I thought my life was about to end. I told myself I could not leave the world like this; I wanted to go back to my real home with Master. I sent an e-mail to fellow practitioners seeking help. Two hours later when I woke up, I felt powerful energy surrounding me. I got up and finished the program after doing exercises. It was 5:30 in the morning when I finished the program. Later, fellow practitioners told me they did not sleep that night at all, sending forth righteous thoughts for me that whole night.
Now when I think back about that period, it is hard for me to imagine whether I could pass the tribulation without the encouragement of fellow practitioners and the righteous thoughts they sent to help me. During that period, because I also kept up Fa study and sending forth righteous thoughts myself and kept looking inward to find any omissions, my understanding of Fa-rectification reached a high level. This experience helped me to recognize how afraid the evil was of truth-clarification through the Internet, and how crazy it was to interfere with us. I also realized how indestructible we are when Dafa practitioners form one body.
I started to consider the situation of the large Internet team. Several fellow practitioners also asked me to bring the small team's good environment into the large team in order to form a true, one body for the Internet team.
The Internet team is formed by technical professionals. Many of us are not good at communicating. From ordinary people's standpoint, this may be why we did not communicate well with each other. Earlier, some team members often had disagreements on the priority of different projects. The lack of communication and our attachments of jealousy and imagination turned the disagreements into conflicts. Since we are all technical experts, competing with each other on technical knowledge became the main attachment.
More and more practitioners left the Internet team. The practitioners who remained had to cover more and more work. I started to communicate more often with practitioners in other areas. The encouragement I received helped me to break through my own shyness. I saw every one of us working hard under pressure to break through the old forces' Internet blockade. I also saw how conflicts and misunderstandings among us due to the lack of communication and coordination provided excuses for the evil to keep interfering.
I kept reminding myself that I must be tolerant. When I felt uneasy about misunderstandings from fellow practitioners, other practitioners often reminded me about being tolerant; we must have "compassion that can melt steel" ("Explaining the Fa During the 2003 Lantern Festival at the U.S. West Fa Conference"). When I saw conflicts among practitioners, I would do my best to help resolve them, and to also seek other practitioners' help. I believe nothing we encounter is an accident. I also believe that unhealthy emotions should not exist. Oftentimes, we complicate the issue because we do not know each other, our understandings of Fa are different, or we are attached to our own ideas and our own thoughts. In order to eliminate the unnecessary speculation, I did my best to make issues more transparent and to explain the situation better to everyone. Each of us is making our best effort to save more sentient beings. The differences in our understandings of the Fa should not become a barrier.
There are other practitioners who had similar thoughts and wanted to improve the Internet team's cultivation environment. Until the second half of last year, fewer than a dozen practitioners on the team communicated regularly. Many practitioners who used to be active on the Internet team disappeared. During the Atlanta Conference, I asked several practitioners about their situations. I always tried to ask practitioners who used to work on the Internet team about their situation whenever I ran into them during conferences. The feedback I got was either they gave up because it was too hard, or they still wanted to be involved but did not know how. On the flight home from Atlanta, I could not stop my tears. I felt badly about the Internet team's situation.
Since Clearwisdom.net was first set up in 1999, the Internet has been a key part of Fa-rectification. "Difficulty" is just an indicator; no Dafa work is easy. We all know the evil interfered with it more because it is so important. If we claim doing Internet work is too lonely, it simply tells us that we need better communications. Every time I think back to how I overcame the illness tribulation with fellow practitioners' help, I felt the importance of the Internet team forming one body. This is the only way for us to break through the evil's block and completely deny old forces' arrangements. We could train each other to make up the technical shortcomings among us.
I knew I could not achieve the goal by myself; we need every single member's contributions to make the whole team work better. I organized my thoughts and talked to my 12 fellow members one-by-one. To seek their input, I discussed openly with them my thoughts about our goal, direction and issues. It was not easy for me, since I did not know most of them well before. The reason I chose these individuals is because I thought they were capable of doing both technical and coordination work. I told myself I was not pursuing any result, this is part of my cultivation; they would let me know if my thoughts were not right. I would consider my initial communication successful if three out of 12 practitioners supported me. As a result, I received positive responses from each one of them, they all encouraged me and kindly pointed out some things that I did not consider.
After that, everything went well for the Internet team. The most difficult first step in my mind turned out to be not so difficult at all. After that it seemed that instead of me pushing the team, I was being pushed by fellow members of the team to progress. Some important projects that were neglected for a long time began to be active once more. We also successfully organized several technical training sessions. Fellow practitioners shared experiences they had in previous years during the training, which really opened my eyes. For a long time in the past, many Internet team members were not familiar about our Internet situation as a whole. We separated ourselves from others and also separated ourselves from fellow team members who might have been able to help. Once we kept regular and effective communications, we resolved issues that were caused by our different understandings through Fa study and improved our technical capabilities through technical communications. As a result, lots of issues and difficulties disappeared.
With today's Fa-rectification progress, many tasks are not as difficult as they used to be. At the same time, the Fa's requirements for us are getting higher and higher. If there is anything we did not do well, it must be caused by our own incorrect thinking. On the surface, it might appear to be technical difficulties or communications difficulties but now that I think back, there was nothing truly difficult. Only when I could not let go of my own attachments, did I feel that everything was difficult. When I could treat everything with righteous thoughts, it was just a small step for me to overcome the barriers.
Above are some of my personal experiences working with the Internet team. Please kindly point out any mistakes I may have made. Thank you very much.
