PureInsight | August 31, 2006
[PureInsight.org] (United Kingdom Experience Sharing Conference, 2006)
Having enjoyed exceptionally good health for ninety years, I developed
a careless and irresponsible attitude toward my own physique. As a
child I had the serious influenza of 1918 (which killed some two
million in this country, more than the heavy warfare mortalitie sin
1914 to 1918) and seventy years later I survived pneumonia, which in
the absence of medical facilities at the location, was not diagnosed or
treated by antibiotics. But otherwise I have always remained perfectly
healthy.
On being introduced to Falun Gong in 1999 I paid no particular
attention to our obligation to regard disease not in health terms but
as prompting us to look within for gaps and unperceived attachments.
And I mistakenly considered our obligation to forebear / endure to mean
purely passive acceptance, without taking into account the parallel
requirements to eliminate in righteous thoughts demonic interference,
and to search within.
Two years ago a boil developed on my chest, to which I paid no heed,
and it expanded and became a considerable nuisance. I passively endured
it. In the absence of counter action in righteous thoughts and seeking
within, the condition persisted and deteriorated. It took up a
long time to clean the eruption every morning and evening and keep it
covered. But I experienced no pain and, as I live alone, it attracted
the attention of no one else. Last November, while bathing in the sea,
a friend who had had some medical training saw it and, without telling
me, perhaps as he knew my view on endurance, described the symptoms to
a doctor who interpreted them as a cancerous tumour requiring the
earliest possible removal. Again, without my knowledge, the doctor
arranged an early operation with a surgeon. When at last informed, I
readily agreed to what I still supposed to be merely a removal of a
nuisance, as, intentionally or otherwise, there had been no mention to
me of cancer.
Having hardly ever entered a hospital I was pleasantly surprised at the
amenities of the Royal Free Hospital and enjoyed the whole experience
as a pleasant holiday. The operation removed quite a lot of tissue but
I had no discomfort and after ten days in hospital with many visits
from practitioners I returned home glad to be shot of the trouble. Some
weeks later I learned that if the operation had been delayed for
another two weeks it would have been inoperable.
Since then I have, thanks to the help of experienced practitioners,
studied Master's teaching on sickness karma. As my mind had run for
nearly ninety years in the deep grooves made by technically brilliant
but relatively shallow western science, it was not easy to replace such
conditioning with the vision of energies in interacting dimensions and
to understand that disease is a prompting to look within. Our
materialist culture encourages us to devalue the human condition as a
mere insignificant speck in a mindless universe. On the contrary, as
practitioners we know from Master that humanity in this planet is the
focus of a cosmic battle of light against darkness in which we are
enrolled as warriors.
The tireless demons know where we are most vulnerable: they whisper to
me that the aged are worn out and in any case there is little they can
do. On the contrary our energies are constantly replenished by the
exercises. Still more important than physical activities, we have, in
the concentration of righteous thoughts, means to directly help
determine events at the levels where they are in fact shaped. When the
self is got out of the picture and our minds are aligned to the
characteristics of the universe in tranquillity, it becomes possible to
have a clear conviction that our thought has worked and effected
change.
Contact with other practitioners is a continuing source of help and
above all we know that Master's Fashen will guide us if our minds are
pure. Any minor disabilities that I now experience I see not as
primarily matters of health but as prompting to look within.
I now have a fairly recent disability to act as a new reminder. I have
somehow dislocated a hip joint and have the right foot permanently
splayed out, requiring
to be dragged without any capacity to spring. I am encouraged to
persist in looking within by the sharing of the elderly practitioner in
Hebei, published on 21 April, who suffered for months from intense head
and back pains and breathing difficulties. She intensified her inner
search for buried attachments and eventually, helped by group study of Zhuan Falun,
she saw that she had not let go of her attachment to illness.
Continuing her studies and resuming truth clarification work in spite
of great walking difficulties, suddenly, on the 9th of January, the
symptoms all disappeared and she regained her health.
I must refuse to acknowledge that the apparent dislocation is a health
matter, resist my increasing inclination to have as much rest as
possible and increase participation in our activities. At the same time
I must not form a new attachment to getting rid of the disability.
Sickness in old age is one form of reducing one's karma and to that
extent can be welcomed. I much appreciate the help given to me by the
practitioners who enable me to read a chapter of Zhuan Falun with them five times a week.
I am sure that I have been given extra years of life by Master to
enable me to cultivate. I have no desire to hang on to life for its own
sake, though I continue to enjoy it, but I am deeply grateful to Master
for granting me the opportunity to make up for lost time in the long
period before I was enabled by Master's grace to become a practitioner.
