By a practitioner from Jiangsu Province, China

(Clearwisdom.net) Greetings, Dear Master! Greetings, Dear Fellow Practitioners!

I am grateful to Master for once again giving the Dafa practitioners in China this opportunity to validate the Fa and improve and purify ourselves. I also want to thank people at the Minghui/Clearwisdom website for providing us this platform, by which we can share our understandings and improve together. Here I want to report to Master and share with fellow practitioners my understandings I have gained during the process of trying to offer my husband salvation.

Prior to my beginning cultivation, my husband's care for me was well known, which had made many of my colleagues envious. After I started my Dafa cultivation he often got angry for no apparent reason. He kept changing for the worse every day. Within one or two years he had declined. He changed from a locally well-known honest and kind intellectual who cared about his reputation, into someone who talked dirty, slept outside his home, had affairs, and always indulged himself in games and pleasure. Particularly after the persecution began on July 20, 1999, he cooperated with the evildoers in forcing me to state my position toward cultivation on television.

Following my unlawful forced labor sentence, under pressure, my husband burned five copies of Zhuan Falun. My workplace froze my salary during my labor camp detention. During that time, he took a non-paid leave from his position and started a personal business, resulting in the loss of all our savings, and in the process he owed others several hundred thousand yuan.

My first experience after my release from the labor camp was someone coming to our home to seek payment of the debt. We had no money at all and we lived by borrowing. Our house was the collateral for his loan, and almost all the family belongings that could be taken away had been taken away for use in his factory. My husband had accomplished all the goals the 610 Office agents had wanted to achieve. Furthermore, he told me straightforward, "All my bad opinions of you and the reason for me having fallen into such a state are because of your doing this practice!"

Facing this huge tribulation, I knew that the evil in other dimensions was trying to force me into despair. I definitely did not acknowledge this. The process of my negating this huge tribulation was also that of rescuing my husband, as well as raising my level through cultivation.

My husband and I were salaried employees. Having bank savings of eighty thousand to one hundred thousand yuan, we had led a reasonably comfortable life. But suddenly both of us had lost our salaries and furthermore owed debts of several hundred thousand yuan. An ordinary person in such circumstances would have a tough time living his or her life. However, I am a cultivator. Even though I was faced with such a huge financial dilemma, although I felt the pressure, I always felt that Master and Dafa were with me, and I was sure I could overcome it.

Although I felt angry in my mind and also complained verbally, I knew that the more I complained, the worse the situation would become, as the old cosmic forces were just hoping that I complained about my husband. I knew I should not fall into this trap. I should immediately start doing what I was supposed to do. I first demanded that my employers re-instate my withheld salary, but they kept postponing the payment for another month. My husband suggested I contact the leader at my workplace to solve the issue, and if my salary would not be reinstated, I should stay there begging the leader until he accepted my justified demand. I did not follow his suggestions and thought that a positive approach to a negative situation was a better strategy. I could just use the fact that my salary was withheld as an appeal to people in the upper-levels of the regime to expose the evildoers and clarify the truth. I called the city's 610 Office, the Political and Judiciary Committee secretary, the deputy mayor, the provincial Bureau of Forced Labor, and the provincial deputy Party secretary. I could further call the Political Section of the National Department of Justice, and my colleagues and friends, to expose the crimes in the labor camp and reveal to them the truths about Dafa. After I made all these phone calls, more than two months later when the bill arrived, I had expected the phone bills to amount to five or six hundred yuan. I was surprised that it was only over seventy yuan. I knew that this was because Master had helped me, and because what I had been doing was right. In the following several days, my employers paid me the withheld salary and also started to pay me regularly. This has made me believe even more that I could break through tribulations only by following the path Master arranged.

I had studied the Fa diligently. I also copied the Fa by hand. I often experienced breakthroughs in my understanding of the Fa. I had done the three things diligently, and my mind also became increasingly calm, but I still could not gain a clear and accurate understanding of which omissions the old forces had exploited, because I felt I had not had an attachment to money and I could lose it without rancor. Nevertheless, financial hardships not only persisted, they became even worse.

My husband lost money on every business deal while he acted like a gambler -- the more he lost, the more he wanted to earn back what he had lost. He acted as if he had lost control of himself.

I knew there must be something wrong with me. I studied the Fa repetitively and asked Master to give me hints. I eventually discovered the following: my husband often said to me that if his deal was successful, we could immediately make several hundred thousand yuan. I felt happy hearing what he said and also held high hopes for him.

What was I happy about? Was I happy that we might have money to pay the debts, and that after paying off the debts I could then lead a relaxed life? Before we incurred the debts I did not seem to have an attachment to money, but after owing the debts, in particular when the creditors called or came in person to demand repayment, my attachment to money surfaced. I could not help thinking about how to get the money, and which debts to pay off first, especially since I had hopes of paying off the debts as soon as possible. Was this an attachment to money in disguise? Did my thinking about it mean that I was attached to it? So, while I said I negated it, I actually wanted it.

After I had reached this realization, I decided to persuade my husband to apply for employment at his original workplace, so he could have a normal source of income as before the financial disaster hit. My husband was unwilling to do so, because right at that time the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encouraged government officials to participate in attracting investments or directly start their own businesses. Some of these people got very rich, while some became miserable losers. Most of the latter group wanted to go back to their original employers to work. Because there were a lot of these people, they often needed to resort to some special personal relationships and monetary bribery to achieve their goals.

My husband did not want to return, because first of all there were many people wanting to go back to work, second, he feared losing face, and third, we had no bribe money. I kept sending forth righteous thoughts toward him and also kept clarifying the truth to him from various angles. I told him that the evil forces were utilizing him to punish me financially. I told him of the three tactics the CCP had been using to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. I also told him that only by helping me to resist the persecution could we get through this tribulation. Otherwise, we had no way to pay back the debts, no matter how much hardship we were willing to take on and how much effort we wanted to make.

He eventually agreed to fill out the application, but he still wanted to borrow bribe money. I reminded him that I was cultivating Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, and that our cultivation was much more than lip-service. I told him that practitioners need to follow Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance to be good persons, no matter what problems we face and how big the personal interests are that are at stake. His applying to return to work was reasonable, while paying a bribe was actually his adding fuel to the deviated social concepts, as well as a new form of financial punishment for me. He then agreed to try. So, without spending a penny, he submitted his application to try his luck! I sent forth this thought: This matter was up to Master to decide, and no others were qualified to interfere with this; I just followed Master's arrangements. A little more than a month later, his application was approved and he was told to go back to work in a position that had been specially created for him.

This incident greatly moved him and made him feel Dafa's supernatural powers. He started to hold Dafa in awe. The ordinary people and his colleagues also spoke of this quite a bit and asked how high a position the person who had backed us up holds and how many special connections we had used. I let them know that my family's backup system is as big as the whole universe! This turned into a truth-clarification event for me, and exposed the evil to them.

Not long after my husband had returned to work, his employers one day paid him retroactively the withheld bonuses. The other day they re-instituted the living expenses he should have received during the several years of his leave to go into business for himself. His employers also told him that his taking leave to do personal business had helped the company's many laid-off workers. The employers wanted to help him pay a part of the debts. Similar good things happened at my workplace, which one day raised my salary, and another day paid me retroactively my share of public funds, which was several tens of thousands of yuan. So, together with our salaries, we did pay back the debts of over one hundred thousand yuan.

Even ordinary people asked why we had encountered so many good things. I knew that during that year I had walked the path arranged by Master and I had worked hard to validate the Fa. During my trying to save my husband in particular, I had missed no opportunities to clarify the truth to him and used my speech and actions to influence him. His attitude toward Dafa had greatly changed. He knew that Dafa is good, and that the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong was wrong, but he still felt that the vicious CCP should not die, which I realized meant that I needed to further clarify the truth to him.

Following the payment of over two-thirds of our debts, I generated certain attachments to complacency, showing off, and pursuit. When I talked with practitioners, I repetitively mentioned that it was Master who had helped me pull through a burden of huge debts, and that I had not tried to make extra money to pay the debts. I reiterated that I had relied on my righteous thoughts to pay off that much debt, and that I had done well. In the back of my mind though, I sometimes thought that the pace of paying off the debts was slow at times. Was this due to my failure to do well in certain respects? I mistook the speed of paying debts as the criterion for assessing if I had done well in my validating the Fa.

It seemed that I had been validating the Fa for the sake of paying off the debts. Did this mean that I was seeking benefits from Dafa? Was this any different from one using Dafa to treat illnesses? The evils once again took advantage of this notion.

In May of last year, one of our relatives asked us to become dealers to help him sell something that was acclaimed a high-tech product, which sounded really wonderful, based on his descriptions. I thought then and there that if the venture were successful, it would be quite possible we would have so much money that we would need sacks to hold it all! Even if that were the case, I thought that I did not value it highly, because I was no longer attached to money (which was, in fact, an attachment to money in disguise).

As a result, the product did not function as well as had been claimed. Furthermore, we were not allowed to send the product back and we were also told to pay 30,000 yuan to cover the cost of materials. A similar incident came on the heels of this one -- we lost 14,000 yuan in that venture. The surge of financial misfortunes made me alert. Based on the Fa, I found my money-related omissions. I also found that it was mainly because I had failed to completely negate the financial persecution.

Master said,

"We negate even the very emergence of the old forces and everything that they've arranged; we don't even acknowledge their existence. We're fundamentally negating all of their things, and all of, and only, the things you do while negating and getting rid of them is mighty-virtue." ("Teaching the Fa at the 2004 Chicago Conference")

What is financial persecution? It does not exist in Dafa! Neither does it exist in the new cosmos! We should not even have this notion of "financial" persecution in our minds. We should only follow Master's arrangements.

I have utilized my owing the debts in a positive way, to offer sentient beings salvation and bring them blessings. This has been reflected in my daily life, since I treated all the issues of making money, doing business, and even paying off the debts as opportunities for rescuing sentient beings, cultivating every one of my thoughts and eliminating my preoccupation with my ego. As for when I can pay off the debts, or how much I can pay, as long as my mind is unblemished, the Fa will arrange these things. There is no use being attached to it.

After I came to this realization, my situation quickly improved. Now I treat the false manifestation of the so-called financial persecution in the same way as I do other forms of persecution. I negate them with every one of my thoughts. If I have the money on hand I will quickly pay off more of the debt. When I do not have money, I do not waste time thinking about it. I firmly believe in Master and the Fa, and I will soon be free of these confining financial circumstances.

Based on my husband's behavior and our relationship, I never dreamed he might have an adulterous affair. Since I started cultivating, I kept telling him how great Dafa was, hoping he would cultivate with me. On the contrary, the more I talked to him about Dafa, the worse he became. I felt hurt, frustrated and worried, and it clearly showed how many human feelings I had for him, and my purpose of clarifying the truth was not from a pure motive.

Prior to cultivation, I was the one who gave directions in our household. I always wanted to change my husband and our child my way. Later, when he turned into a drunkard, I felt I had lost control over him. I felt ashamed for him. I could not tolerate anything he said or did, and all I saw were his mistakes and wrongdoings. Since these thoughts preoccupied my mind, it was difficult to improve in my cultivation. I did not know how to deny the old forces' arrangements, thinking that some evil entities had destined him to have affairs so I would lose my feelings for him. I thought maybe I owed him from my prior lives, or that perhaps I had interfered with others' families before. All I thought about was my personal cultivation, and how to let go of my attachment and improve myself. I did not realize that the old forces latched on to my loophole and caused strife in a family where one member practices Dafa.

I faced tremendous difficulties and tribulations after returning from the labor camp, but luckily I had a good understanding of cultivation in the Fa-rectification period. Many of my husband's coworkers and his parents and siblings told me bad things about him. Some even suggested that I divorce him. I knew my attachments caused this. My righteous thoughts eliminated the thought of divorce. I knew the old forces wanted me to divorce. That would give them excuses to slander Dafa, but I would never let them.

I knew I must do well. I must offer my husband salvation. I studied the Fa and sent forth righteous thoughts more intensely to eliminate the financial tribulations and further my relationship with him. On average I sent forth righteous thoughts for four to five hours every day. I told my husband of the persecution Dafa practitioners suffered in the labor camp. He was afraid and asked me to stop practicing, though he had sympathy for Dafa practitioners. He worried that the police were still monitoring me. Initially, when he said that, I would immediately treat him as a police officer and argue with him. He would say, "Don't talk to me like this. I do not want to listen, ever!" I thought he chose to be eliminated, even thinking he deserved it if this was his choice. When I clarified the truth to him, I had many selfish thoughts in my mind, hoping to change him. My mind was set on ulterior motives when trying to save people, so how could I save anyone?

As I gained a deeper understanding about Fa-rectification period cultivation, I separated my husband from the evil forces. I placed him in the position of a sentient being, waiting to be offered liberation. I did not reach this understanding overnight. It took me a long time, improving my xinxing and changing my human notion of "husband." As my family's financial situation improved, my husband's attitude toward Dafa changed a lot. He started to defend Dafa. Though my safety was his main concern, he was still enamored with the CCP.

The fact that my husband could not start practicing though he understood some Fa was directly related to my strong attachments. My deepest attachment was jealousy. When my husband had affairs, I could not forgive him and had many dirty human thoughts. I tried very hard to eliminate these thoughts, and noticed that when I eliminated a layer of these undesirable attachments, my husband turned better to certain degree.

Soon the old forces would create a false impression to entice my attachment. When I cleared myself at a deeper level and had a better understanding about the Fa, my husband would turn better again. I realized that my warped notions and attachments were obstacles on his way to salvation. I should not give the old forces any opportunities to stop me from rescuing him because of my jealousy.

I paid attention to every single thought and eliminated any jealousy as soon as it surfaced. After a while, my husband changed back into a nice person.

This experience made me better understand the concept of "compassionately taking care of sentient beings." When I corrected my thoughts according to Dafa, I was compassionately taking care of sentient beings. Every single attachment and warped notion Dafa practitioners have are shackles around sentient beings' necks, stopping them from entering the new universe. If we do not cultivate ourselves, but rather hope to change others, we will not succeed. Once I realized this, I felt sorry for my husband and the woman involved in the affair with him. My attachment to jealousy had caused them to be utilized by the old forces.

I visited the woman in the spring of this year and clarified the truth to her and her family with my pure heart. As a result, most of her family members withdrew from the CCP.

I mentioned above that my husband was still emotionally attached to the evil CCP. He had previously written many articles praising the CCP and liked TV shows praising the CCP. Since the publication of the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party I started to tell him the content. He said we practitioners were involved in politics, and again turned against Dafa.

My husband was controlled by the evil CCP specter. No matter what he was doing, as soon as I mentioned the evil CCP, he got a headache or became dizzy and needed to rest in bed. I sent righteous thoughts toward him and cleared out personal, CCP-related belongings, tore and sold more than 100 pounds of evil books as recycling paper. My husband was furiously angry, scolding me for not consulting him before I did that. I answered him in a way ordinary people could understand, "You lost hundreds of thousands of yuan without asking me. How many books could that buy?" He did not know what to say. He became better after I had cleared out the evil things. Since his office was full of evil books, he turned bad again in several days. The evil specter controlled him. He got drunk and cursed family members who had withdrawn from the CCP. Ever since last year's Chinese New Year, he started crying when he got drunk and repeated, "I am dying, I am dying soon!" I felt pity for him. He let the CCP evil specter completely control him.

In the summer of last year, my younger sister and her child came to visit me. I noticed that my husband was happy when talking to my sister. I used this opportunity to talk to him again about withdrawing from the CCP. He got angry immediately and said to my sister, "None of your family members would succeed in cultivation." I felt irritated, kept thinking about his comment even when going out with my sister. I petitioned, "Master, could I give him up? I did everything I could." As soon as I had this thought I fell into a water puddle. I realized my mistake and said, "Master, I know I am wrong. I will save him with great compassion that could melt steel." Since then, I sent forth righteous thoughts toward my husband as long as he was at home. He was afraid and tried not to come home.

One night he was drunk again and came home at about three or four o'clock in the morning. I thought the evil CCP specter must be controlling him, and it was a good opportunity to send forth righteous thoughts and eliminate the evil. Could be the evil have known I wanted to eliminate them? My husband went straight to bed, and did not cry or scream at all.

I had made up my mind to eliminate the evil that night, so I said to my husband, "I need to talk to you." He said, "Let's talk tomorrow." I said, "No, please listen to me!" I started to tell him how the CCP killed people, and other contents from the Nine Commentaries. Within minutes, he started screaming, hitting his head and fists against the wall, "I have to go, I am dying, I am dying soon." I held him and said "Don't move!" He could not move at all. I stared at him and thought, "You old forces, this is a person I must save. I forbid you to interrupt! Master, please help me to eliminate the evil specters behind him. The Fa rectifies the Cosmos, the Evil is completely eliminated."

After four or five minutes he woke up and said, "I know you are good to me. You do not care about fame or money, and all you want is to improve me with Dafa." I knew this was his true nature, so I talked to him about withdrawing from the CCP. He listened and said, "Let me think about it. I will let you know tomorrow." I said, "No, you have to think about it now. I will answer any of your questions." He said, "OK, I withdraw."

As a result, the evil specters were eliminated. My husband changed dramatically after withdrawing from the CCP. He read the Nine Commentaries and started practicing Dafa within a month. My family became harmonious again, and my family life changed fundamentally since we are a family of cultivators now.

What I have written are my personal cultivation experiences within the framework of my family. Please kindly point out any mistakes.

Wishing our Great, Benevolent Master the best! Let us all cultivate diligently and reach consummation.

Posting date: 12/10/2006
Original article date: 12/10/2006
Category: Practitioners' Insights
Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2006/10/27/140583.html

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