(Minghui.org) Time is pressing. Although the evil factors have lessened, many practitioners still haven’t stepped forward. I think they are being held back by the attachment of fear. I’d like to share how I managed to overcome fear
As a practitioner assisting Master Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Dafa, in rectifying the Fa, awakening people’s consciences is what we came to this world to do. I hope that at this final moment, we’ll be able to cultivate well and awaken the consciences of more sentient beings.
Haunted by Fear
I was born in the 80s and am from the countryside. I’d always been afraid of the dark. As a child, as soon as it got dark I could feel eyes watching me. When I was walking, I always felt someone was following me, but when I turned around, there was no one there. This scared me so much that I ran home. Our toilet was outside the house, so I was even too scared to go at night by myself.
This kind of fear was still with me when I began to practice Falun Dafa. I asked myself what I was afraid of and realized that it was ghosts.
I have two siblings. I was the only one our dad didn’t beat. I think this was because when Dad was getting angry, I stopped talking, but my sister and brother didn’t. I realized later that I did that because I was afraid of getting a beating.
Since the persecution of Falun Dafa was launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), I have been arrested and taken to a brainwashing center three times. The second time I was released from the brainwashing center, I asked myself, “Why have I suffered so much, yet I still gave in against my will?” The answer was that I was afraid of being tortured.
In such an evil place, I often stayed up all night shivering in my duvet. The heartbreaking sound of practitioners being beaten in the night almost suffocated me, and I couldn’t stand being there. I felt I had reached the end of my endurance. I had studied the Fa very little for over a year before I was detained and I thought this was one of the reasons why it happened.
Before I was persecuted, I had no fear of the police. There were no streetlights at night in the countryside and it got very dark. On dark winter nights, as a practitioner, I no longer had any fear when I went out to distributetruth-clarification materials or put up banners.
In 2001, Master’s article “A Suggestion” was published. Master said:
“These people who only want to take from Dafa and not give for Dafa are, in the eyes of Gods, the worst beings. Moreover, this Fa is what’s fundamental in the cosmos, so those people who are still unable to step forward today will be weeded out after this tribulation is over. Many of them are people who have strong predestined relationships. This is why Master has waited and waited.” (“A Suggestion,” Essentials for Further Advancement II)
My home was ransacked that same year. My parents escaped, but the police took my brother and me to the police department and handcuffed my hands to a chair. I tried to appeal to the consciences of the officers who arrested me. They slapped my face with my Dafa book. I was dumbfounded. Before that, I’d always thought the police punished evildoers and were kind. I was afraid of being beaten and “transformed,” but I escaped.
Our home has been ransacked and we have been harassed many times since 1999. My dad was persecuted to death, and my mom was held in forced labor camps several times. I had formed notions to protect myself and deal with my fear. I thought that, as long as they didn’t have any evidence on hand, they couldn’t persecute me and I’d be fine.
Master said:
“But what I hope is that after taking a fall, you will all learn something good from it. Don’t always take away bad things from your experiences. When you learn bad things, you are in fact using human thinking to consider things, and becoming more cunning, and sly, which means you are becoming worse. I have spoken with you before about what a bad person is: he is someone who is cunning. Whereas someone who is kind-hearted and whose thinking is not that complicated is a good person. You need to think about things in a constructive manner, and when you stumble look for the reason as a cultivator would, asking, “Where did I go wrong?” Only by evaluating things with the Fa will you be able to learn good things from your experiences. If you can really manage to do this, things will definitely go well.”(“Fa Teaching Given at the 2010 New York Fa Conference,” Collected Fa Teachings, Vol. XI)
I was afraid of police officers and police cars. Whenever I saw them coming to ransack my home, my heart started pounding. When I was outside, I got nervous if I saw the police. Many years of persecution resulted in a thick layer of fear covering me.
I was depressed all the time. When I went out, I didn’t feel honorable, because I was doing things with a very impure heart, afraid of lagging behind. The more fear I had, the more illusions appeared. For example, one time I finished work and came home to see a police vehicle parked near my building. I was so frightened that I didn’t dare go up to my apartment. It was late at night and I had nowhere to go. When I calmed down and took a closer look at the vehicle, I realized it belonged to my landlord’s family.
After being persecuted for several years, fear became a problem for me. I magnified it, and it began to restrain me. One time after Fa-study, a practitioner whose celestial eye was open told me he saw two old force gods pressing on my main spirit in my dimensional field. He was very upset and asked how I could let them bully me like that. What he saw was exactly how I felt. My heart was filled with so much fear that I was almost out of breath. I was depressed and rarely happy. I wanted to cultivate Dafa in an upright manner and shout “Falun Dafa is wonderful! Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance is wonderful!” But I lacked the courage.
Eliminating the Substance of Fear
Everything is a being. For years, I indulged the substance of fear. It thrived in my dimensional field and grew bigger. This living being began to control me.
I quit my job in 2013 with the intention of improving my cultivation state. I began to attend our local Fa-study group. One of the regulars was a practitioner called Ms. He, who was a bit of a trailblazer. She began to talk to people about Dafa face-to-face back in 2002. She also made breakthroughs in several big trials during the persecution. I wanted to learn from her, so I went out with her to clarify the facts.
At first, I was too timid, so Ms. He did all the talking and I sent forth righteous thoughts. Sometimes, when we encountered people who didn’t listen to us or said something negative, I got nervous and scared. But I started to let go of those emotions. After a while, I occasionally talked to an elderly person, as I felt that would be safer.
Gradually I found the courage to talk to all sorts of people and awaken their consciences. When I was in the local market, I encouraged people to say, “Falun Dafa is wonderful! Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance is wonderful!” I felt my dimensional field lighten and a powerful feeling filled my body. It was as if I had been in a dark room for a long time, and suddenly sunlight filled the room. I didn’t feel scared anymore. Master helped remove the root of my fear.
It was truly as Master said: “Cultivation depends on one’s own efforts, while the transformation of gong is done by one’s master.” (Lecture One, Zhuan Falun)
As long as we have the wish to cultivate and do our best, Master will help remove the bad substances bit by bit, even if they’re as big as a mountain.
Strengthened by the group Fa-study environment, I participated in other projects to validate the Fa. One local practitioner had a pure and fearless field. She was truly courageous. Her field strengthened me. After studying, we sometimes went out together to put up truth-clarification stickers. I always looked around to make sure nobody was nearby, but she never did. She said, “We are not in the same dimensional field as ordinary people so they can’t see us.” We put up more than 100 stickers within a couple of hours.
With the outbreak of the pandemic, we all felt an urgency to inform people of the truth. We divided up our local area so that everyone had a section where they could post truth-clarification materials. We only had the desire to reach sentient beings without worrying about the outcome.
During the process, I eliminated the attachment of fear. I went from being timid to passing out informational materials in an upright manner. One time when I giving out journals, an elderly man asked me what marketing material I was handing out. I gave him one and asked him to look at it closely. He said, “Falun Dafa! You are so brave!”
As part of the effort to bring former CCP head Jiang Zemin to justice in 2015, everyone in my family filed a complaint and received confirmation it had been delivered. During the process, my fear was dismantled. As long as my heart was righteous, evil couldn’t attack me.
The CCP launched a persecution effort that entailed going to practitioners’ homes, and that impacted my family. When I faced the police, I realized my heart wasn’t racing like it used to. I was able to get them to leave. I wasn’t afraid of the police anymore, although I couldn’t feel compassion for them.
I’m sharing this experience because I want to help practitioners who haven’t stepped forward. The process of writing this was also a process of letting go of my ego. Master removed my attachment of fear. Throughout these years of persecution, it’s been fear holding us back. As cultivators, we all want to listen to Master and want to cultivate well. But we need to back these wants up with concrete actions. The more you fear, the more you breed the being of fear.
As I was copying Zhuan Falun, the main book of Falun Dafa, I copied Master's Fa: “You have already developed a habit of abandoning your Main Consciousness.” (Lecture Eight, Zhuan Falun)
Master helped me enlighten to the inner meaning behind the term “developed”. Every habit, bad or good, was developed by me, and transformed from intangible to tangible. During the process of doing things, we should eliminate fear. The process of clarifying the facts and saving sentient beings is also a process of dismantling the substance of fear. It’s a process of letting go of my ego and improving my xinxing.
Living Up to Master's Request
We came here to assist Master to rectify the Fa and save sentient beings. If we don’t do that, how can we live up to Master’s benevolent saving grace and sentient beings’ expectations? At this point in the Fa-rectification, evil factors from other dimensions have been eliminated to a large extent. Subsequently, the environment has gone through great changes and evil factors have diminished. But an optimal environment can only be achieved by taking action.
In recent years, our local Fa-rectification environment has seen great changes. Evil has lost its control. This came about because practitioners worked together as one body to validate Dafa. We put up display boards all over the place in our area to document the persecution. Everyone saw them and the evildoers were petrified. Lawyers were hired to rescue local practitioners and people in the police, procuratorate and judicial departments learned the truth. Our truth-clarification materials were handed out in person. Stickers were put up en masse, which dismantled evil in other dimensions to a large extent and created a righteous field. That’s how our local environment improved.
Fellow practitioners, we have to step forward and act even if we start with small steps. Your tiny deed will dissolve the substance of fear—that’s how you change that dark room into one filled with the light of the Fa.
In the very last program in the Shen Yun show, even when the flood that will eliminate everything is imminent, evil people don’t stop persecuting practitioners.
Master said:
“I've said before that the evil won't stop persecuting even right up until the very end. Even if it's going to end tomorrow, today that evil will still do evil just the same. That's the way things are in the cosmos before the Fa-rectification is done rectifying it. Without going through Fa-rectification it won't become good on its own--how could it turn good without Fa-rectification? Poison is just poisonous, and if you want it to stop being poisonous it can't do that. So when you look at it that way, we shouldn't have any fantasies about the evil forces and those evil people who are persecuting Dafa.” (“Teaching the Fa at the 2002 Fa Conference in Philadelphia, U.S.A.,” Collected Fa Teachings, Vol. II)
There will be tests until the very last step. We must do what we are supposed to do well and not let down Master.
Conclusion
Over the past 21 years, Master has used his immense benevolence to help us get to where we are today. Let us cultivate ourselves well in the limited time left, step forward to awaken people’s consciences, and not leave too many regrets.
All articles, graphics, and content published on Minghui.org are copyrighted. Non-commercial reproduction is allowed but requires attribution with the article title and a link to the original article.
Category: Improving Oneself
