My Journey toward the Fa

I have titled my talk today “My Journey Toward the Fa”. And that journey has only just begun. I hardly feel adequate to be speaking here since I have only been a practitioner for about 10 months, and I know a very long road lies before me. So I will be brief, but I would like to share with you a few of the details about how I discovered Falun Dafa, and what it has done for my life.

This story starts in February of 1999 when I came down with a serious neuromuscular disease. All of the standard treatment options for my condition can have very dangerous side effects, and I decided that I wanted to find some alternative path that avoided these hazards. With help from a colleague from India, and by reading the works of the 19th Hindu philosopher Vivekananda, I learned to meditate. I tried to give up my attachments, and generally I adopted more of the Eastern outlook on physical illness. Within a year, to the astonishment of my doctors, I recovered from my neuromuscular disorder without any conventional treatments.

I also noticed that when I meditated conscientiously, unusual things would happen to me. One day, when I answered the phone, I suddenly knew in exact detail what the caller was going to say before he actually said it. On another occasion, I was able to tear open a very tightly sealed bag as if it were a piece of tissue paper, when two much stronger men had been unable to open it. I came to see that the spiritual traditions in the East had an understanding of the human mind and body that was far beyond Western scientific thinking. “They know things that we don’t know,” I thought. And so the stage was set for me by events in my life that I now feel did not happen by mere chance.

The next step in my journey came when a Chinese student in my department at the university where I teach came to see me one day and started to tell me about her practice of Falun Dafa. My mind and heart were open to this now because of my previous experiences. The Chinese student and an American practitioner brought me tapes and taught me the exercises. I got copies of China Falun Gong and Zhuan Falun and began to read them.

To a Westerner, so many things in the books at first seem like science fiction. The ideas of existing in other dimensions and of living beings in our bodies, the notions of the Immortal Infant and Bigu – to use American slang, these things seemed “far out and hard to swallow.” In the West, we get no training that would prepare us to think in these ways. In our Christian society, we are not taught to believe in reincarnation, and we have no background in the concepts of the Buddha school. But I could tell that the exercises made a difference, and many of the things that Master Li had written captured my imagination. And so I persevered.

Then in the summer of 2001, I took a giant step in my journey. I decided that I wanted to go to an experience-sharing conference. I was really curious to see Master Li, but my student convinced me that going with that attitude was an unacceptable attachment. So I tried not to think about it. I booked a flight from my home in Columbus, Ohio to Washington, D.C. for the July conference.

I did indeed see Master Li that day. And after I left the conference, I was puzzled. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about – on the surface there didn’t seem to be anything different or special about him. But I as you all know, I was wrong. And somewhere between Washington and Columbus on my way back home, something happened to me that turned everything in my life around. I still don’t completely understand it. I can only say that I was changed profoundly. Somehow the Fa took over. It is not my imagination. My family also notices that there has been a remarkable change in me – a change for the better.

We all know that cultivation is hard. Following any set moral principles means denying one’s human desires and instincts, and that is always difficult to do. But somehow, the concept of Zhen-Shan-Ren makes it easier for me than when I had tried before to upgrade my xinxing. Even though I was raised as a Christian, I never really understood what Jesus was all about until I studied Zhuan Falun. To me, this Fa has a universal simplicity that gives a ready answer to what I should do in any situation. Now I try to assess every circumstance by the standards of the Fa, and I don’t find it difficult or burdensome. Everything in my life seems to work out better when I act and think according to the Fa. So in a very real way, my life isn’t harder now that I cultivate – it’s actually easier.

And so today, I stand before you telling my story. I imagine that this is typical of what has happened to many other Western practitioners. Sometimes I feel that I was very lucky to be in an environment where I knew Chinese people and was able to meet practitioners and to learn about Dafa. But in our practice group, we have practitioners from tiny little towns and out-of-the way places. So I know that this Fa is spreading and will go everywhere where there are people to embrace it.