(Minghui.org) I joined a private enterprise in 2019. No one there knew that I practiced Falun Dafa, except for an old colleague. I planned to create an environment for rectifying the Fa by using my daily actions and words. Within a month, Master miraculously arranged a great opportunity for me to validate Dafa.
One morning I was riding my bicycle to work when I saw a necklace on the ground in the carport. I picked it up and thought it looked expensive. Because I recently joined the team, I didn’t know who might have lost it. So, I went upstairs and turned it in to the office manager. Upon seeing it, she was taken aback, “Oops, when did my necklace fall off? Why didn’t I realize it?”
When she touched her neck, sure enough, the necklace was gone. She was very excited and told me that it was an expensive piece of jewelry. She said, “I was lucky that you found it in the carport on the ground. If it were someone else, they would not have turned it in!” There were two companies in our building, and there was a lot of traffic in and out of our building. So it was quite a coincidence that I happened to see the necklace and return it to the owner.
That owner is a person with a lot of influence in the company. After she spread the news among the various departments of my returning her necklace, almost everyone in the company knew that I was honest. Everyone had a good impression of my character. I was conscientious at work, and did not compete with my colleagues for fame and profit. Thus my relationship with colleagues in the office was very harmonious, and the situation was moving in a good direction. However, negative interference also came along.
The police officers in my residential community went to my home to carry out the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) so-called “knocking on doors” campaign. They discovered that I had rented out my home and was living in a rental place. A group of people, including police officers from the local police station, people from the 610 Office, and the community directors immediately went to my home to conduct a household investigation.
One of my family members and I clarified the truth to them to tell them, “Freedom of belief is every citizen’s basic human right.” and “Practicing Falun Dafa is legal in China. Falun Dafa is not what the CCP says it is.” But, they didn’t want to listen. The police officer in charge of the area began to speak in a louder tone, threatening us not to cause trouble for him. The community staff person brought me a form and asked me to fill in my workplace and contact number, saying that this was something that all tenants had to complete. I refused to do so by saying that my personal privacy would be compromised. The police officer promised again that he would only report it according to relevant regulations, and promised not to harass my company. I was annoyed by their harassment, and only wanted them to quickly leave, so I did what they told me to do.
I enlightened afterwards that I responded to the tribulation with human emotions, instead of using righteous thoughts and denying the persecution. At that time, I should have insisted that they produce proof of their law enforcement requirement. They could not have produced anything to prove it, as there was no such regulation. Even when signing a rental contract, only the names, ID numbers, and contact numbers of both parties are required. There was no requirement for one to list their workplace.
After the local police received the information about my workplace, they went there the next day to talk to the president of the company. That afternoon, the president notified me and my colleague in charge of security to go to his office for a discussion. He first asked me how long I had practiced Falun Dafa, and if I still practiced it. I answered truthfully and clarified the truth to him about how I benefited from practicing Falun Dafa.
The president told me that he was previously the secretary of the CCP committee in another area and had been in charge of persecuting Dafa. He said, “This company is directly managed by the township, and was originally not allowed to hire practitioners, but the situation has not been as tense in the past couple of years. After the police station in your original residency transferred your information to the police station here, the police station found me here.”
The president then asked me to promise that I would not mention Dafa either at work or outside of work, nor have any contact with any practitioners. Otherwise, he’d have to report me to the township. Then, I wouldn’t be able to keep my job. He was very aggressive during the conversation. I didn’t say anything more because I wanted to protect myself. So my truth-clarification didn’t achieve a good result that day. I just promised to abide by the company’s rules and regulations. After he talked to me, the office environment became tense. My colleagues in the department deliberately distanced themselves from me. Except for a few words when explaining something work-related, no one at work spoke to me.
One day, the office manager came to my department. She said to me with a smile, “In the future, only talk to customers about your work, don’t mention other things.” I was a little confused when I heard this because I hadn’t talked to anyone about any sensitive topics, and I hardly went out on jobs these days either. I only went to a business with colleagues that morning to conduct an inspection. During that time, someone consulted us about a registration. My colleague coaxed her to come and pay us first. I reminded her to also settle a previous payment first; otherwise, the registration matter she mentioned might not be completed. Could this be the matter that the office manager was referring to? I turned to look at that colleague, and I saw that his expression was very unnatural. I became upset at that time. What kind of thing was this? Going behind my back and making trouble for me? Who knows what he told the office manager, or whether she thought badly of me. But after calming down, I felt that she might be intentionally reminding me to pay attention to someone spying on me and tattling to the leader.
During those few days, I was thinking that the atmosphere and environment at work was very bad. The company president had worked with police officers when the persecution was at its worst, and they had to arrest a practitioner who had to go from place to place, resulting in that practitioner being detained in a forced labor camp. And the president was still following the persecution policy under the evil CCP. Moreover, my colleagues at work were good at protecting themselves. They knew how to cater to their leaders, and understood the leaders’ intentions, using them as a main guide for their behavior. They were indifferent to the choice between good and evil, or were deliberately avoiding it. For a period of time, I felt an invisible pressure at work. However, I also understood that Master asked me to cultivate myself well to save sentient beings. I was able to join the company because the president had an eye on me; otherwise, it would have been impossible to get in without connections, and I had no connections. Secondly, the CCP is still persecuting Dafa. So people who knew me were surprised to learn that I worked in this company. Now my identity as a Dafa practitioner has been revealed to the public. No matter how hard it would be, I had to keep going, as assisting Master in rectifying the Fa is my mission.
I was given the “cold shoulder” at work, but a month later things suddenly turned around for the better. One day, the president held a meeting and announced that I would be solely responsible for a certain project, and no one else would participate. The project was funded by the township government and had always been supervised by the president himself. It was still one-and-a-half months from completion and acceptance, but it had fallen behind in terms of quality and progress. Three colleagues had been working on it, but they knew that the person in charge of the construction unit had a good relationship with the president, so they turned a blind eye to what was happening at the construction site, and just went through the motions. This project involved the livelihood and security of the people in the surrounding area, and might face the possibility of not being completed on time. The president was anxious, and thought of me, a professional, to take over this hot potato.
Without saying a word, I went to the construction site to learn about the situation there, and I re-established a schedule of construction goals with the person in charge of the site. I came early and left late every day, became familiar with every worker on site, and clarified the truth whenever I had the chance. During that time, my colleagues still kept their distance from me. The president was worried about me during the National Day holiday and asked me to call him every day. I knew that the police had put pressure on him again, but I was not affected by it, and recalled that Master said we should consider others first and treat others kindly in any environment. During the holidays, I still went to the construction site to inspect the progress and quality of the project, and sent a work briefing to him every day.
I thus successfully completed the project. With that, everyone on our side and the construction side was happy. At the end of the year, the president invited everyone in the company for dinner. At the dinner table, he proposed to give me a pay raise and criticized my colleagues in the department, saying that they ganged up to bully me, and thought the management didn’t know about it, but in fact he saw it all. I saw that those colleagues were very embarrassed, so I quickly took over the conversation to smooth things over. From then on, the atmosphere in the office was much more harmonious, and my colleagues and I became much closer.
I clarified the truth to a friend who worked for the township government in 2020. He didn’t quite accept what I said. I felt it was because he had recently graduated and had actively joined the Party in college, so too many bad things had been instilled into his mind. I wanted to give him a USB flash drive with truth-clarification information about Dafa loaded on it, so he could go back and read it carefully, but he didn’t accept it. He just said he would keep it a secret between the two of us and wouldn’t tell anyone. Meanwhile, he reminded me to be careful.
I trusted him very much, and didn’t expect that he would report me to the township leaders. A few days later, the president called me to his office and asked me, “Whom did you clarify the truth to again?” I said I didn’t remember.
He then said, “You know so-and-so in the township, right? What did you say to him?” I understood immediately, and started to complain deep down. How could someone do these things? Why do people nowadays say one thing to your face and another behind your back? The president also emphasized that I should promise not to clarify the truth to others anymore. He said, “The township leaders now know about your situation. I protected you this time. But doing something like this again means you don’t want to work here anymore.”
He added something which made me very sad, “Let me ask you... You’ve talked to them about all these things. Who did you change?”
To be honest, at that time I truly felt a bit down. Why were these people so hard to save? On the other hand, I felt grateful that he protected me, saving sentient beings from committing a crime against Dafa. But what I didn’t realize was that my gratitude towards him was out of sentimentality. I also had an incorrect notion, that my clarifying the truth to people would bring trouble to him, and have him worry about me. I felt a bit sorry for him.
The president asked me in 2021 to complete the administrative licensing approval process for a project as soon as possible. If the license was not obtained in time, it would affect the construction progress. In sorting out the relevant reporting materials, I found that the original owner set a big trap on a flow meter unit on the facility. When the both parties transitioned the facilities, the person in charge of the facility told me that the flow meter was damaged and the matching remote metering terminal had been scrapped and discontinued. I went to the site to check it and found that the remote terminal was indeed discontinued, so there was no response when the power was plugged in. But, the flow meter was in a deep puddle, surrounded by silt. If people wanted to access it, they needed to use a ladder and drain the water, which was as deep as two feet. The other party said the workers were gone and he couldn’t find anyone to clean up the site, so I had to work it out myself.
The other party’s boss said they had settled all the fees with the administrative unit in charge, and that he had a good personal relationship with a certain director. So even though the metering unit had not been checked for a long time, and they made no declarations on it for several months in a row, it was still fine. I believed what the other party said and signed to accept it. Later, we entered the site to install a new meter. When the water was drained and people could get to the flow meter, I was dumbfounded by what I saw-- the meter was not damaged, and the reading on the meter differed from the data reported online, by tens of thousands of tons, which meant that we had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover this. I reported the situation to the company leaders, and said we can’t pay these hundreds of thousands of yuan. The president agreed that we shouldn’t pay it, but if we went to question the other party, they would not admit it. He then asked me if there was any way out. I said that we could only adjust the metering device. He agreed and told me to have it done.
After leaving his office, I regretted it. Wasn’t what I proposed considered fraud?! Why did I take the initiative to propose such a bad idea?! But if I didn’t suggest that, I figured it wouldn’t work to report it truthfully online either, and who would pay the hundreds of thousands of yuan? I couldn’t afford it myself. So I comforted myself by thinking it had to be settled that way, and I didn’t do it out of personal gain, but for the good of the company. The main responsibility for this matter lay with the original property unit. They falsified information, which had nothing to do with me. After returning home, I couldn’t calm down when doing the exercises, as this matter occupied all of my mind. I knew from the Fa that this wasn’t done right, but I still tried to justify it to myself. This matter was in my mind for two days. I thought there was no other way around it, so I asked someone to adjust the meter. After preparing for all the application materials, I sent them to the administrative approval unit as soon as possible and waited for the approval.
I was thinking again about the meter adjustment one day. Because the approval department required that the old meter be handed in when replacing it with a new one, I lied and said that the old meter was removed and discarded by the workers. I asked myself, “Was I going to make the same mistake again?” Suddenly a thought appeared in my mind: What I did defamed Dafa! My colleagues all knew that I practiced Dafa, practitioners came to uphold the universal principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, but I went against these principles! I cheated to reach my goal. How was I any different from regular people in society? On the surface, I did it to complete the work assigned by my boss, but deep down it was to prove that I was a capable and strong person! This is a manifestation of selfishness.
I knew I had to correct this mistake. The next day at work, I called the staff of the approval department, told him the truth of the matter, and sincerely apologized to him. I said, “I made a mistake. I asked someone to change the metering device.”
He was silent for a while, and said he would report this matter to his superiors. He said, “Wait to hear from me, but changing the metering device on one’s own is not a trivial matter and will be penalized. But the responsibility is not all yours, which I can understand.” When I apologized to the staff person on the phone, my colleagues were there. I had also wanted to use this opportunity to convey a message to my colleagues that knew I made a mistake, and I was correcting it. As a practitioner, I would be honest.
I later learned that the staff member had retrieved the database and found that the online metering device had not uploaded data for several years. According to the relevant regulations, the approval unit must review and report data every quarter, which showed that they were irresponsible, and there was improper supervision. Finally, the staff member informed me that they wouldn’t penalize me, since the new metering device has been installed, the online metering has resumed communication, and everything was back on track. In the end, the company successfully obtained the license without delaying the construction progress.
This incident was a wake-up call for me, as what I said and did were not consistent with the Fa. It showed that I hadn’t studied the Fa well. Moreover, I hadn’t looked inward, but instead blamed my actions on the overall environment of society, as I felt there was fraud and deception everywhere in society. I attached too much importance to results, and treated validating myself as validating the Fa. I couldn’t maintain a calm mind in Fa-study, and failed to maintain my xinxing. When I received my promotion and pay raise, it bred several attachments in me, such as vanity, lust for how I dressed, a show-off mentality, and others. With these, the interference and tribulations followed.
During the few years when I rented a place, the local police officers came to harass me whenever there was a “sensitive day.” One such time, my wife was home alone, and two police officers knocked on the door, but she refused to open the door. They didn’t leave until they had knocked on the door for a while and shut off the power. And a few times when I was dealing with some sticky matters at work, they made harassing calls. As my attachments were strong, I felt the other party’s evil intention, but I didn’t have kind thoughts come forth to help them understand the truth. Instead, I was afraid that they’d take this opportunity to persecute me. Thus, as soon as I saw a call from them, I got a bit annoyed.
A police officer once tried to force me to give up my cultivation over the phone. He also said that he was taping our conversation on his cell phone. I said, “Don’t force me. I won’t agree to it. I’m working outside right now, and it’s not convenient for me to talk on the phone.” Then I hung up the phone.
The police officer probably thought that I was making things difficult for them by not cooperating with him. So they became malicious and began to harass the landlord, asking him to stop renting the house to us, and to force us to move out.
In addition to this external interference, I also developed an abnormal physical condition. I suffered from hair loss beginning in 2020. It wasn’t serious at first, but it became serious the following year. I initially thought it was because I spent less time doing the exercises, and my body had slowly changed. I later enlightened that “hair” and “Fa” shared the same pronunciation in Chinese. For me to suffer from hair loss was a reminder that I hadn’t studied the Fa solidly.
I wondered, what did I do that wasn’t consistent with the Fa? One thing was that I had gotten the vaccine injection, and the second was that I used WeChat on my cell phone. That was when I was involved in epidemic prevention and control, so I had to use WeChat for work every day, which made me uncomfortable. When the company required me to have a second vaccine shot, I insisted on not taking it. My boss talked to me twice and said that everyone in the company was required to be vaccinated. I took not being vaccinated as the right thing to do in cultivation, so as to break through the persecution towards me by the old forces. I thought I’d rather lose my job than be vaccinated. When Master’s new article “Wake Up” was published, I realize I had a wrong understanding and had gone to an extreme. Fundamentally, it came down to my not studying the Fa effectively and to my harboring fears of my level dropping and of being taken advantage of by the old forces.
But what I feared turned out to be true. I was reported to the police a few months later, due to my clarifying the truth about Dafa to people face to face. Then officers from the Domestic Security Division of the Police Sub-Bureau brought a few officers from the local police station to arrest me. They also ransacked my home. Thanks to Master’s compassionate protection, my family member who is also a practitioner and I managed to oppose the persecution with our righteous thoughts. I regained my freedom in one day, but lost my job.
After I returned home, I spent a lot of time studying the Fa and doing the exercises, especially extending my time for the second exercise and the sitting meditation, thinking this would definitely alleviate the hair loss problem. But that problem was still severe. Later on, I didn’t dare to look in the mirror after washing my hair. When I walked outside, my eyes couldn’t help but look at other people’s heads, and I sometimes envied young people for having thick hair. These human thoughts suddenly came to mind, and I realized I had been very attached to vanity and a good image over the years. At work, no one believed I was almost 50 years old, saying I looked like a young man. I heard this multiple times and took it as validation that I had cultivated well, and felt happy. I usually looked in the mirror before going out, and automatically fixed my hair with my hands. When I was buying clothes, I also paid attention to getting clothes with simple styles, but that were made with exquisite fabrics and workmanship, even though they were expensive.
So when my hair became thin, it affected my image and deeply touched my attachment to vanity. I then used this mentality to motivate myself to study the Fa and do the exercises more intensively, in order to resolve this tribulation as soon as possible. Weren’t these thoughts unrighteous?
Master said:
“Although you were reading the book, the purpose of your reading was to have your body adjusted or to get rid of what you considered tribulations. I have imparted the Fa to save people, to enable them to reach Consummation through cultivation. It’s not for solving some crises for people, curing people’s illnesses, or getting rid of things that people consider bad.” (Teachings at the Conference in the Eastern U.S.)
This passage of Fa woke me up. To resolve this tribulation, whether it was forced upon me by the old forces or triggered by my karma, I first of all had to set my heart right. In a tribulation, my attachments would be exposed. Would I choose to protect my attachments and worry about my loss and gain amidst the pain, or would I choose to let my attachments go completely and be a true cultivator? I’d have to break through the tribulation with my righteous thoughts!
I found another issue in my cultivation. I had a strong attachment of sentimentality. The president gave me a pay increase every single year. Others all said he treated me nicely, and I also felt grateful to him. This came down to sentimentality, which was a manifestation of selfishness. Why did I always feel there were obstacles that kept me from clarifying the truth to him? It’s because I was afraid he wouldn’t be happy with me. Indeed, why did I fear this? I was concerned about what he’d think of me. If he didn’t accept it, it could in the end harm my self-interest. It was all about my selfishness, and protecting myself.
As a practitioner, one needs to cultivate to become altruistic. I should, first of all, let go of my selfishness and protecting myself, so as to have compassion come forth and effectively assist Master in rectifying the Fa. I came to understand that clarifying the truth to people with human sentiment might not be sufficient to move them. But, if I had compassion, I’d achieve different results.
I had an aspect of selfishness that was a big problem. I consciously or unconsciously was trying to prove myself. I worked diligently and conscientiously, and pursued perfection. On the surface, I appeared to be serious and responsible, and I was very competent. But deep down, I subconsciously wanted to show myself that I was capable and better than others.
I always looked outward in my cultivation, lacked patience when sharing with other practitioners, and pointed fingers at my family members (also practitioners) for their not being diligent enough, and their having strong attachments. My mother (a practitioner) also shared with me later that sometimes when she was going through something, she felt it was very difficult, as I often looked down on her and blamed her. I felt very sad upon hearing that. I saw that I hadn’t used righteous thoughts to support and encourage others. Instead, I appeared to be superior to others, as I felt that I cultivated well. But in my cultivation, I often had a biased understanding of the Fa, going from one extreme to another, which meant that I failed to cultivate well enough.
All of these attachments became outstanding cultivation issues for me, which I need to rectify as soon as possible. They arose from selfishness. I feel so fortunate to be saved by Master himself, and to be tempered in Dafa. Besides, I hope to cultivate diligently with other practitioners, elevate myself from a selfish being in the old cosmos to a selfless being who is in harmony with Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.