Susan G.

Introduction: My Present Cultivation as Related to the Past

I am not a good judge of my own cultivation. If you were to ask me, I would say I have done poorly because even as diligent I have been with studying Zhuan Falun every day and doing the exercises without fail, I have been slow to become tolerant and compassionate. Nowadays, I get angry with myself less and have recently let go of expecting so much of others. I still have high hopes that I can become the person Master knows I can be, which helps me stay out of most forms of depression, blaming, and self-pity. Knowing that I am a Dafa disciple does not make me happy, as I have much work to do to fulfill that title and my mission. Master says if we have obtained Dafa then we deserve it. Yet most of my life things have come easily to me; I was born with many gifts and abilities that I have not developed. I have been a dilettante rather than a schooled artist or musician as I could have been. The miracle is that I always place Dafa first, studying and doing the exercises every day, whether working or not. I have never thought of stopping.

My consistency with Fa Study and two hours of exercises throughout these 17 years still amazes me, a person who quit so many jobs and was even fired more than once. I may feel like I am in solitary confinement in this lifetime, but without Master I would probably be in a padded cell or in a strait jacket. Yes, I have had those experiences and could potentially regress to that state if Master had not recognized my sincere desire to cultivate myself while being my own worst enemy at the same time. This might sound outlandish to some people, but I kid you not.

At present, Master might be happier with me than I am with myself since I am also my worst critic. Since cultivation of speech is my pressing concern, whether in my own writing or in clarifying the truth to others, and since I still don't have much wisdom to know what should or should not be said, even though my xinxing keeps rising, I could really have used an editor to cut away much of this article! I planned to join Macon Toastmasters to help me with this dilemma, but my antisocial streak is still strong at present!

Who can see one's own gong? My tianmu was open from an early age, but there was something wrong: when I was voted class artist unanimously in the First Grade I had the thought that, "These people are crazy." When I scored well on academic tests, I thought, "How little the world requires. They call that good?" So self-hate, self-doubt and destain for the world have been part of my psyche as long as I can remember. I hand-wrote my first book when I was seven years old, but proceeded to tear it up because I was sure it was no good. Now the standard in Dafa is higher and so is mine. I rarely, if ever, meet the standard.

My attempts to write Experience Sharing Articles several times in the past ended when I'd break down in tears after a few sentences. Blinded by the qing of despair, I could not see how I had cultivated anything. Today is a valuable opportunity to complete the requirement. I want to share too much about the psychological aspects of my cultivation but there is no time now. Someday I will be able to compose stories about it for the benefit of others.

Obtaining Dafa: My True Self Wakes Up

The circumstances at the time I obtained Dafa still amaze me and I would like to recount some of them.

First, I did make a conscious decision with my own rational mind and True Self to cultivate in Dafa; but that happened after attending daily Falun Gong group exercises and reading Zhuan Falun a few times, and especially because of the content of Lecture Six. Looking back, I see that everything is predestined. At the time I sensed that Lecture Six contained all that I needed to understand, admit, and work on. The sections entitled, "Your Main Consciousness Should Dominate," "Demonic Interference From One's Own Mind," and particularly the description of the person who cultivates truth, also known as someone with "true insanity," rang especially true for me. Was I one out of 100,000 people? The monks and priests had put me in a small minority as well. Now I was probably in an even smaller minority but it made no differene, since this situation "does not have any impact on society. . . ." [Zhuan Falun, Lecture Six]. When I shared the details of this with a Chinese practitioner who is now at the Mountain, she just smiled. She knew I had been hospitalized more than once for "being a danger to myself."

I even have some personal tragic-comic anecdotes from my past of running out of the house to no avail, or being kicked out of my own apartment, after dark, barefoot in early spring, confident I'd find my way to people who could help, not to mention more horrifying tales of an attempted scientific experiment with feces preserved in perfume, and than coming to Milledgeville only to find in the hospital museum an exhibit of a peculiarly diagnosed human brain preserved in formaldehyde. This echoed an episode I read only last year by the great fiction writer Koontz whose villain kept his murdered father's eyes beside him in a similar liquid. I have many of these "believe it or not" episodes to remember and recount even from my present lifetime. However, regrettably, even after nearly 18 years cultivating in Dafa, my heart is still moved. I continue to do my best.

I was receiving Social Security Disability Income on July 20, 1999 when I first heard about Falun Dafa on a radio broadcast at 5:30 a.m., the first day of the persecution. At the time I obtained the Fa, my Assistant Consciousnesses were overly developed and I had a very weak True Self. I had suffered for years with severe eating disorders which I learned to control, but working in the world was nearly impossible since I would have suicidal thoughts after a day's work around people; constipation plagued me from childhood, and I needed herbs to sleep. From an early age I didn't trust the doctors in my family who misdiagnosed me or were unable to find solutions to any of my problems, though they were held in high esteem by their many patients. I was aware of the mind/body connection with illness and bad fortune. For me, the feeling of despair was always accompanied by some physical dis-ease. I had been alcohol and drug-free for seven years, but still feared people, particularly their selfishness and lust. It is said, "If you spot it, you've got it." This attachment appears as being overly affected by other people.

As I listened to the radio report, on July 20, I felt a stabbing sensation, a knife in my heart, the same sensation I would get when praying before the Blessed Sacrament, the Body and Blood of Jesus at the Trappist Monastery in Conyers. As a result of my being influenced by two women from St. Philip's Episcopal Cathedral who delivered me from various spirits, I became a Catholic in 1985. There were other reasons, such as my common law marriage to a warlock who masqueraded as a Baptist minister which ended in a legal divorce in 1976. He hated the Catholic Church. Like the CCP, if he said something was bad, it was most definitely good. I was made to take two years of Catholic instruction because of my unstable past.

I looked to the portrait of Jesus on my wall; he confirmed what I already wanted, that it was a good idea to follow through and find Falun Gong in Atlanta. Because I despised the world, I spent a lot of time at the Monastery. The only people I saw regularly were monks and nuns. When I called the practitioners listed in the Aquarius newspaper and they called me back within a day, I was surprised. Only my mother and the monks ever called me back.

Fear gripped me as I approached the Georgia Tech Student Center for my first Falun Gong exercise experience. I had gotten a parking ticket there years earlier. The 6:00 a.m. time couldn't have been more convenient. I was used to early morning daily Mass for the past 14 years. The practitioners had apologized for the early hour, but I had been thrilled; now I turned back and drove home. I decided to call the young girl who had called me and tell her what happened. After all, she had been so kind to call me back. When she laughed at my fear I was convinced I would come the following day. I had high hopes that this Falun Gong could help me transcend these paralyzing fears. My greatest fear in writing this article is that I would try to defend myself, explain myself or glorify human attachments; I have spent too much time hating myself for being human, and now there is a chance to remove these elements. I do not want to rationalize or water down the truth. In the end, they will have to go.

Shortly before obtaining the Fa, I did a past life regression. Why did I have such a strong resentment toward my mother all my life which was not warranted by the reality of her words and actions in this lifetime? I discovered I had committed suicide twice in previous lives, and she had been my mother in one of them. She had improved in this lifetime. According to the Fa, this explains the karmic build up in me of self-hatred and guilt. In Lecture Seven, Master talks about "lonesome spirits and homeless ghosts" who suffer from hunger and thirst. I relate this to my insatiable hunger and the alcoholism of a past life, developing into clinical diagnoses in the world this time.

Within 60 days before I obtained Dafa, my former confessor, a monastic priest of 60 years, died. He had spent his life studying the Second Coming of Jesus and was held in great esteem by his brothers. I was happy for him because he always talked about looking forward to being with Jesus in heaven. At the funeral everyone else was crying. I was puzzled. Approaching his body, I said to him in my heart, "Fr. Joachim, I am so happy for you; everyone else is crying." And I heard in my heart, "Dearie, it's just beginning!" After a few sessions of Falun Gong morning group exercises, I had a vision of him flying around my living room — the other monks always joked about his having wings — crying out "Master Li, Master Li, Master Li!" Could Falun Dafa be the advent of Jesus' Second Coming? Since my Jewish people had never accepted Jesus, could Master be the Messiah we had all been awaiting? I thought this in 1999 and it has taken until Shen Yun of 2016, or was it 2017 in which one song proclaimed, to paraphrase, "This is the Messiah you have been waiting for?" I tried to share this with Chinese practitioners back then, but no one knew what I was talking about or could understand me.

After two years of cultivating in Dafa, in 2001 and before my real cultivation began in Milledgeville, I went with Atlanta practitioers to Geneva, Switzerland to validate Dafa at the UN assembly. Master appeared in my dream telling me that I had a great amount of thought karma but that he would help me remove it. I shared this with two Swedish practitioners I'd just met. "That wasn't Master," one said. "Are you sure that was Master?" I was sure. The practitioner repeated his words, doubting me. Looking inside, I see this was another opportunity to become clear-headed in what I had experienced, letting go of incorrect thoughts and constant self-doubt.

Because I am judgmental of myself and others, I often run into other people's judgment of me, even practitioners say that they are right and I am wrong, or assume I am muddle-headed, as if I have not thought about something that I have actually been pondering deeply for a very long time. They impose their thoughts before considering to ask how I may have come to a certain understanding. Have I also done the same thing to others, assuming I know more than they do?

I, too, can hardly believe I am walking my own path. It is wonderful to know that I have one of my own and that I will be able to accomplish the Three Things Master has required of us all as I do my best to cultivate My True Self as it manifests on the narrow path before me Like the practitioner in Lecture Nine, Zhuan Falun, p. 423 who saw so many wonderful things but did not believe them, an overriding attachment of mine is surely this disbelief. It is hard for me to believe the evil I run into is as bad as it eventually shows itself to be. Facing the reality of who I am and why I am here, especially in relationship to other people in society, has always been challenging for me, even as a Dafa disciple. I look inside and daily ask myself, as I cultivate, why is it this way? Is it really this way? I look inside and I believe Master allows these special interactions with people so that I can learn to calmly respond to those who give advice without knowing the karmic situation I face, and to become more confident on the path that He has set for me. If others are insensitive, I am probably too sensitive. I must do better. I still judge myself more harshly than anyone could.

My Personal Identification to Fa Rectification

A practitioner once said to me, "You take the Fa too personally." I thought that was funny and I had no words to respond at the time. I could have said, "You mean you don't?" Of course Dafa is here, whether or not I cultivate in it. Here are only two mysterious but hard-hitting examples:

A. The Flushing Incident

In 2008 Chinese thugs, illegal immigrants who ruined their chance to get green cards were hired by the Director of the Chinese Consulate in New York to destroy our literature at the Flushing Public Library and attack practitioners. I went to Flushing with Atlanta practitioners to stand before the CCP representatives and Send Forth Righteous Thoughts. The lawyers who took our case were with the New York Civil Liberties Union, a branch of the ACLU where I had worked as a secretary in the early 70's for over three years. I recognized the name of the lawyer responsible for our case, Norm S. We had had the same boss. He was a law student and I was secretary to the lawyer who had marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama, 1963.

When I returned to Milledgeville, I found the attorney's name on a brief published on the Internet and called the phone number. Alan answered himself. "Susan, what are you doing down there?" I hadn't seen or spoken to him for over 35 years. I knew his wife and he had visited me in the hospital. It was great to hear he knew Falun Dafa is good. "It's a good case," he said. His whole life has been consumed with defending Freedom of Speech, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I sent him a package of information on Dafa and Compassion magazine. Included was a newspaper clipping of our Millegeville practice site which had recently made the front page. A young man who had never come to practice before or since but who could quickly double cross his legs was pictured learning with me.

B. One Week Selling Ads for The Epoch Times

In 2010, the Chinese Epoch Times coordinator invited me to join the advertising team. I thought he was kidding. I can't think of anything for which I would be less qualified except rocket science or engineering. But our lives are arranged by our karma, not our abilities. He liked the way I promoted Shen Yun. "Talking about art comes naturally to me," I told him. Nevertheless, I thought I would try. I was probably flattered and should have known better.

My first assignment was to call a small moving company to explain the benefits of having their ad with us instead of The World Journal. The company name sounded familiar. Wasn't it founded by my friend and former drug dealer, whom I had known since I was 10 years old at Trail's End Camp? He had also come to the South in the 70's. The past that we practitioners are generallly encouraged to forget keeps coming up regularly in my face. Master says, "Some people have very special situations." I asked the man who answered the phone about Danny, "Yes. He founded this company, rest his soul." Danny had been murdered 18 months before. (In the '80's I had cautioned him about work he was doing for an evil being and some phony qigong that he had told me about.) Now representing The Epoch TImes, I had called the night before Thanksgiving. Was Master hinting to me to begin valuing my life? This hit me hard and I became even more determined to cultivate.

My Mother

My mother, and how she followed me into Falun Dafa, from her home in Florida, on her own volition is a story unto itself. After a few years, she admitted to me that she did not want to let go of human emotions and thus could not cultivate Even when one wants to cultivate and is determined to cultivate it is difficult. She deserves volumes but I will only say a few words here. I was never able to be tolerant of her. No matter what I say to describe her, there is no excuse. I did not do well. She read Zhuan Falun many times. She did not believe in Dafa principles but said she did. She only disbelieved a few things, she said: she thought gay marriage was good and poor people were poor because they didn't have money. Actually, she thought that Master was only a very good person and Hitler was the worst person in history.

Somehow, many great practitioners who had temporarily come to Florida after 9-1-1, like the Chinese practitioner anchor for NTD TV and her husband, the coordinator of Chicago practitioners whose mother had come out of a Chinese jail and his wife, the former Shen Yun bus driver, a Chinese professor and his wife, and a practitioner who works at the Epoch Press these days, all came to my mother's home for Fa study every week. My mother was a most unusual person. They stopped coming when her qing (she would serve ice cream during or after Fa Study) got in the way.

The week before she died in 2015 we had NY Fahui. Riding back to Georgia from NYC on a public Chinese bus was grueling and the bus broke down in Greenville, SC for a while. She died the following Tuesday. I know she had always done her best for me despite our terrible communication. I still see her in another dimension with Master, although she's alone studying Zhuan Falun, preparing for her next lifetime. She has always forgiven me for my intolerant speech, and I have forgiven her more than once for never knowing my heart. She knew Dafa was good.

The following ordinary poem, entitled "Heaven," appeared on the back of a NYC MetroCard when we were there in May 2015. Ironically, it was reprinted with permission from the University of Georgia Press. Upon returning home and after my mother's death, I read this to our Milledgeville writers group. They know I practice Falun Dafa, though my ways of clarifying the truth to them, from time to time as different topics arise during our monthly meetings has not had much impact on them. Writers, as artists, know that all art connects heaven and earth and I haven't been intentional yet about how and what I want to write to validate Dafa, because I still do not know exactly how myself. Master will show me at the right time, I am sure, just as he fulfilled his promise to help me complete my portfolio the following year, in the Spring of 2016, when I had barely a clue as to how to proceed, and I had just totalled my car with no bodily injury to myself. So I read this poem for them in a straightforward manner in hopes that they might grasp the supernormal nature of this in light of the events I have just mentioned above, and maybe connect it to my reason for going to NYC, our FaHui, practically prophesying my mother's death. No, that's all my wishful and overly dramatic thinking! But now they were amazed: a Georgia boy's poem on a NYC subway ticket! It goes like this:

Heaven
by Patrick Phillips, b. 1970

It will be the past
and we'll live there together,

Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.

it will be the past.
We'll all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.

It will be the past.
And it will last forever.

Cultivating My True Self in Milledgeville, Georgia

The real story of the way I came to Milledgeville, Georgia, from New Jersey and New York, via 30 plus years in Atlanta, the how and why, remains to be told and I will find a way to tell it some other time, revealing the mystery, not solving it.

Does anyone know what this Falun Dafa is? Master has said, in better words, we do not. My purpose will be to validate Dafa through creative writing, which is different from journalism, aiming for a truth beyond accuracy, defying past, present, and future. The great American writer, Flannery O'Connor, who lived and wrote in Milledgeville once said, "I am not a journalist." She also said, "The truth doesn't change according to one's ability to stomach it." I was not capable of appreciating her until I became a practitioner. Before then, my gong had not caught up to my xinxing, my sentimentality was stronger than I can now remember, and so her characters were too grotesque for me to face. The truth of the Deep South is hard for anyone to bear, and she was even despised by her neighbors in her lifetime for telling it. When I lived in Atlanta, I was not fully aware how far it is from the Deep South in both time and space. I am 100 miles from Atlanta, but at times I can imagine being back in antebellum days. When I read Flannery now, she makes me laugh. Though she died in 1964, I wonder if she isn't a Falun Dafa practitioner yet?

In Atlanta I was rightly called out by a practitioner for my zealotry and "speaking too high." I didn't learn how to speak lower. At first, in 1999, I identified more with Chinese practitioners than with the the Westerners. After a few years, I felt the CCP mentality in our Atlanta community closing in on me. In 2002 during the Asian Pacific Conference I went to Mexico. When Jiang Zemin's motorcade passed, an icy chill down my spine followed me home and all hell broke loose at work, bringing up unresolved issues of my past. I was not able to be tolerant of coworkers admittedly practicing evil cultivation or small worldly ways. When I went to Taiwan in January 2004, I did well at the Palace Museum with another Chinese practitioner, teaching a doctor Falun Gong and clarifying the truth. My trip to Taiwan gave me hope that I could continue cultivating. Additionally, I had gone to a practitioner's family wedding celebration in Jongli and the similarities with the Jewish wedding traditions of my family were comforting and interesting.

At the Easter Sunday Fa Lecture at the 2004 FaHui, I was inspired by Master to go to Milledgeville to spread the Fa. This was my conscious decision. There were other deeper factors. I was enlightening to the Fa from within the Fa at different levels, though I had only inklings of this at the time. During the lunch break at the 2004 NYC FaHui, I bounded down the escalator to encounter the Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde Museum as I exited onto Sixth Avenue. Unable to contain my laughter, I knew this had something to do with the newly conscious intention to spread Dafa in Milledgeville. It took several years, not until 2013 as I tried to write about this incident on my way to a storytelling workshop, that I began to make heads or tails of the unexpected laughing reaction. On that day I met the great niece of Sallie Ellis Davis, the African American educator who taught in the very building in which we were meeting, now a museum. Sallie E. D. had received her BA in 1899 from Atlanta University and had studied with W.E.B. Dubois, activist writer and historian. When I told Van about my limited understanding of race relations in the Deep South and how many things I was learning were contradictory and very different from the one-sided way we Yankees understood the evils of slavery, she proceeded to enlighten me regarding many economic issues that emerged from stories of her ancestor's father's efforts to safeguard his black offspring, since a white Confederate officer or any white man was not legally able to marry a black woman. Yet his ironlad will made it impossible for his white children to steal money from his black children, which they did try to do. And then Van said, "You know, Susan, in the South it's a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde." My jaw dropped. I was on to something. In 2014 Van and I went to Shen Yun in Augusta.

Within three weeks of returning from NYC, I came to Milledgeville for the first time and found my way to the Powell Building, the Administration Headquarters of Central State Hospital. Staff members invited Atlanta Falun Dafa practitioners to participate in a Health Fair for the staff in June. Two Atlanta practitioners came to support me at our booth. The Red Cross and Oconee Hospital booths were also represented. We taught the exercises and distributed flyers. Not only was Milledgeville the Antebellum Capital of Georgia, before Atlanta, it was the site of the largest mental hospital in the world at one time, having been established in the early 1800's as the Central State Hospital for the State of Georgia.

Now closed, the sprawling campus, like a spooky Oxford or Cambridge, is being redeveloped and I attend monthly meetings of the Redevelopment Authority which is staffed by community leaders including the mayor, county commissioners, the State Senator, professors, etc. We began teaching Falun Gong at the Georgia War Veterans Home because of an administrator who attended these meetings and believed in what I said about Dafa. The Executive Director saw Shen Yun back in 2009 or 2010, two years before I handed him a flyer. I was recruited to the meeting by a retired hospital staff member, a 50-year veteran, when he came to our writers workshop. I met the facilitator of the writers workshop because I was promoting Shen Yun at our mall. I handed her a flyer but she had seen the show the year before, loved it, and invited me to the workshop. Thinking I was there to save her, she was helping me to find my True Self. I came with writers block, afraid to admit I am a writer, afraid of myself. Even to this day I am working on this through cultivation and Sending Forth Righteous Thoughts.

Master led me to an Introduction to Creative Writing class in 2016. Everyday people encouraged me not to quit and to produce an A+ portfolio, giving me some confidence on my path. Even if I still don't feel good enough, I will continue to move forward. In the writing textbook it stated that to be a better writer one must become a better and wiser person. This confirmed what I long believed and what Master has said about true art -- the better one cultivates oneself, the better he can produce the work that can benefit, save, people. I discovered that most writers have some fear, or at least approach the blank page with a courageous and honest spirit. As much as I value truth above all, it has been hard for me to be honest with myself. Many practitioners think of me as having an over abundance of human emotion. Actually, I am mainly afraid to face life, my own and life in general. And it is not my emotions that have been the worst attachments, but the human notions behind them.

My conscious decision to move to Milledgeville in 2005 was based on the determination to face all fears I have of being myself in the world so that I could be useful in this Fa Rectitivation period. We are not all made from the same mold, Master has told us. We are each unique and play different roles. An elected County Commissioner who also was head of the Dept. of Pardons and Parole, born in Milledgeville, was a customer of mine before I retired. He said, "Susan, don't you know Milledgeville is like the Twilight Zone?" He was referring to the way different dimensions and various supernormal capabilities are simply part of daily life here. The whole culture and economy was dependent on and assimilated to the hospital and prisons. He had worked in security in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and had knowledge of the Russian KGB. He understood some things about the CCP's tactics. He liked The English Epoch Times which I delivered around town for several years. If Atlanta was too superficial for me, Milledgeville has proven to be more beautiful, painfully real and raw. I prefer the latter. Reading more about the evil's M.O. in the Nine Commentaries has helped a lot.

I was condemned by a practitioner for "trying to escape" when I announced my intention to move from Atlanta to Milledgeville. In retrospect I would have said, "Don't people escape from Milledgeville rather than to it?" This may be one time in my life when I am not trying to escape from myself. Ironically, though I came to face my fears, when the time came to face them head on, I was terrified. Again, I was in disbelief. If I were to have known what to expect, I would have still ventured forward in order to confront these fears because I never would have believed it if I hadn't come. The only way to face the multitude of demonic spirits which surrounded me, inhabiting human bodies, was to look inside myself for the root attachments. How ridiculous of me to get angry at the evil and hate myself for it! Why not eliminate my own thought karma, those incorrect notions with Righteous Thoughts, and those demons attached to those thoughts will also be eliminated? The karma is of my own making. Why not face my attachments?

Only lately are my Righteous Thoughts strong enough and getting stronger on my own. I am complaining less. The tribulation still exists but I move forward. I seek Righteous Fruition, not the end of a tribulation. Actually, the main tribulation is the very nature of human life itself, which I have never liked much. Now I am simply striving to accept it, accept myself as I am and hope Master will help me to change. If I can construct a story to entertain someone, to point them to some truth that I have come to see, to direct them to Dafa, the confusion will not be wasted. I was able to construct a one-act play, Diatribe Against Depression, where the hero, a weak-minded youth, has enough courage to meet the Spirit of Depression and give him a piece of his mind. It was acclaimed by my classmates and teacher alike, while the pretentiousness of the dialogue was pointed out to me, in which case I laughed even louder and came to understand the ego-driven emotions of human nature are just that. I will trust Master more and continue.