Bigu Fasting

Some of you have brought up the question of bigu fasting. Bigu does exist, and it’s not only seen in cultivation circles—there’s a good number of people in the broader society who’ve experienced it, too. Some people go years or even over a decade without eating or drinking anything, but they do just fine. Some people say that bigu is a reflection of being at a certain level, others say bigu is a sign that the body is being purified, and then there are folks who say it’s part of the cultivation process at high levels.

It’s actually none of that. So what’s it all about, then? Bigu is really a special cultivation method that people use under specially designated circumstances. And just which ones exactly? Back in ancient China, and especially before religions came into being, a lot of cultivators used the method of secret, solitary cultivation. They would go deep into the mountains or they would go into caves to cultivate, and they’d stay far away from the crowd. Once they did that, having a source of food became an issue. If they didn’t use the method of bigu they’d have no way to cultivate, and they’d die in there from hunger and thirst. When I went from Chongqing City to Wuhan City to teach the Law, I traveled eastbound along the Yangtze River on a ship, and I saw that along both sides of the Three Gorges there were some caves halfway up the mountains. A lot of famous mountains have them. In the old days cultivators would climb into them with a rope, cut the rope, and cultivate inside. If they didn’t succeed at cultivating they would die in there. There was no water and no food, and it was under these extremely special circumstances that they used a special cultivation method.

A lot of practices have been passed down that way, so they include bigu. But a lot of practices don’t have bigu, and that’s the case for most of the practices that are transmitted in society nowadays. We’ve said that a person has to commit to one discipline. You can’t just go and do whatever you want. You think it’s pretty good, so now you want to do bigu too. But what do you want to do bigu for? Some people think it’s great, they’re curious about it, or they think their degree of mastery is great, and it’s a way to show off a little—people have all kinds of motives. Even if someone uses that method in his cultivation, he still has to burn his own energy to sustain his body, so the loss outweighs the gain. You know, this was less of a problem after religions came about, since when you meditate or do a meditation retreat in a monastery there are people who provide you with food and drink, so there isn’t that concern. And this is doubly so when you cultivate in the ordinary world, there you really don’t need to use that method at all. Besides, if it’s not part of your discipline you can’t just go and recklessly add it in. But if you really want to do bigu, well, then feel free to go ahead and practice it. As far as I know, usually when a master is transmitting his practice at a high level and if he really wants to bring up his disciple, bigu might happen if his discipline has it. But he can’t do it on a large scale, and he’ll usually guide his disciple to cultivate in secret or by himself.

Nowadays there are also qigong masters who teach people bigu. Has it worked out? When all is said and done, no. Tell me, who’s it worked out for? I’ve seen a lot of folks end up in the hospital, and it’s put a lot of lives at risk. So why did that happen? Doesn’t bigu exist? It does. But there’s one thing: people aren’t allowed to just go and ignore the way of society, you aren’t allowed to do that. Let’s not worry about what would happen if tons of people across the country stopped eating and drinking, let’s just say that nobody here in Changchun ate or drank—I’d say that would save us a ton of trouble! You wouldn’t need to worry about cooking anymore, farmers toil away to farm the land, and if nobody ate it’d really save them loads of trouble, and people would just do work and not need to eat, right? How could that work? Would that be a human world? It definitely wouldn’t work. That kind of thing isn’t allowed to upset the way of things in the ordinary world on a large scale.

When some qigong masters spread bigu a lot of people are put in danger. Some people just obsessively go after bigu, but they haven’t gotten rid of their attachments, there are loads of ordinary people’s attachments still there, so when they see delicious food that they can’t eat, their mouths start to water, their attachments well up, and they just can’t handle it. Then they get anxious, they want to eat something, and when that craving surges you’ve just got to eat or you’ll start to feel like you’re starving. But if they eat they throw up, nothing will stay down, and then they start to get nervous, and they get scared out of their wits. A lot of people have been hospitalized, and there really have been a lot of folks who were in danger. And then there are people who come to me and ask me to fix this mess. I don’t want to get involved in that. Some qigong masters are just plain reckless—who’d want to clean up their mess after them?

Besides, when you run into problems doing bigu, isn’t that the result of what you sought? We say that it does exist, but it’s not some kind of state that comes about at high levels, and it’s not some kind of special sign. It’s just a cultivation method that’s used in special situations. And it can’t be practiced widely. A lot of people seek bigu, and they even divide it into bigu and semi-bigu, they even rank it. Some people say they drink water, some say they eat fruit. That’s all fake bigu. I guarantee it won’t work after some time goes by. A person who truly cultivates with it goes and stays in a cave and won’t eat or drink anything. Now that’s real bigu.

Stealing Qi

When stealing qi is mentioned some people turn pale with fear, and they’re too scared to give qigong a try. There’s talk in the cultivation world about things like qigong psychosis, stealing qi, and whatnot, and this has scared a lot of people out of doing qigong and they won’t dare have anything to do with it. If it weren’t for all that talk maybe there’d be more people doing qigong. And then there are qigong masters who have poor character and who make a career teaching that stuff, and they’ve made an awful mess in the cultivation world. It’s actually not as scary as people have made it out to be. The way we see it, qi is just qi, even though you call it "a blend of primordial qi," or such-and-such qi. As long as there’s still qi in the body that person is at the level of healing and fitness, so he’s not a cultivator yet. As long as somebody has qi it means his body hasn’t been purified to a high degree, and it still has pathogenic qi. That’s guaranteed. People who steal qi are at the level of qi. What cultivator would want that dirty qi? The qi in the body of a non-practitioner is dirty. Maybe it’ll become clear after he practices qigong. At the spots where he has health problems clumps of high-density black matter will appear. As he goes further with his practice, when he gets to the point where he’s really getting healthy and fit, his qi slowly starts to turn a bit yellowish. And as he keeps on practicing further his health problems are really solved, and he doesn’t have qi then, and he’ll have entered the Milk-White Body state.

So to put it another way, if you’ve got qi, you’ve got health problems. We’re cultivators, and what would a cultivator want qi for? Our bodies need to be purified—how could you want that dirty qi?! We definitely don’t want it. Those people who want qi are at the level of qi, and at that level they can’t tell which is good qi and which is bad qi. They don’t have the ability. And as for that True Qi in your body’s elixir field, they can’t touch it, because somebody has got to have great mastery to touch that primordial qi. So that filthy qi in your body, let him steal it, what’s the big deal. When I’m doing the exercises, if I want to fill myself with qi I only have to give it a thought and my belly will bulge in just a moment or two.

Daoists practice the Tianzi standing exercise, while Buddhists practice holding qi with the hands and pouring it into the top of the head, there’s plenty of qi in the universe, and you can pour it in all day long. You open up the Laogong acupoint, open up the Baihui acupoint at the crown of your head, and then you can pour it in, you focus your mind on your elixir field and pour it in with your hands, and you’ll fill up in no time. So you’ve filled up like that, but so what! When some people have worked on qi a lot the fleshy tips of their fingers feel swollen, and their bodies get a bloated feeling. When people are next to somebody like that they’ll sense a field around him—"Wow, you’ve done so well in your qigong." I’d say that’s nothing. Where’s the gong? They’ve only been working on qi. It doesn’t matter how much qi is in there, it’s no substitute for gong. The point of working on qi is to replace the qi in your body with good qi from outside the body, and it’s to purify your body. What’s the point of storing qi? When you’re at that level, when you haven’t gone through fundamental changes, it’s not gong. You can steal all you want of it—you’re just a big bag of qi. And what good does that do?! It hasn’t been transformed into high-energy matter. So what’s there to be afraid of, then? Let them steal qi if that’s what they really want.

So let’s think about it, if your body has qi then it has sickness in it. So when somebody steals your qi, won’t he steal your pathogenic qi along with it? He really can’t tell them apart, since people who want qi are at the level of qi and they don’t have the ability to do that at all. People who have gong don’t want qi, that’s for sure. If you don’t believe me, let’s do an experiment. Suppose someone really wants to steal your qi. Then stand there and let him steal it. You focus your mind on filling yourself with qi from the universe, while he’s behind you stealing it from you. Check it out, it’s great—he’s helping you purify your body more quickly, and he’s saving you the trouble of doing all the filling and draining. And since his aim is bad and he’s stealing things from someone, even though he’s stealing bad things, he’s still doing something that costs him virtue and he has to give you virtue all the same. A two-way current is formed—he takes your qi here while he gives you virtue there. That guy who’s stealing qi doesn’t know this, though. If he did he wouldn’t dare to do that!

Everyone who steals qi has a sickly yellow face, they’re all like that. A lot of people who go to the park to do qigong are there to heal themselves, and they have all kinds of health problems. When other people try to get well they expel it, but somebody who steals qi doesn’t even try to expel it, instead, he gets it all over his body, all kinds of pathogenic qi, and even the inside of his body gets pitch black. He’s always losing virtue, and the outside of his body is dark, too. When his karma field gets big and he loses a lot of virtue, both the inside and outside of his body get dark. Now if the people who steal qi knew these kinds of changes were happening to them, or that they’re giving people virtue and doing something so dumb, they would’ve quit a long time ago!

Some people really sensationalize qi. "When I send out qi you can receive it over in the United States." "Wait on the other side of the wall and you’ll be able to receive the qi I send." Some people are pretty sensitive and do receive qi when it’s sent. But qi doesn’t travel in this dimension. It travels in another dimension, and in that dimension there’s no wall there. Now why don’t you feel anything when some qigong masters send out qi in a setting that’s unobstructed? Because in the other dimension there’s something that blocks it there. So qi doesn’t have all that great penetrative ability people say it does.

What really has an effect is gong. When a cultivator is able to send out gong, he doesn’t have qi anymore—what he’s sending out is a kind of high-energy matter. When you look at it with the Third Eye it’s a type of light. When it’s projected onto somebody he’ll feel heat, and it can directly restrain an ordinary person. But it can’t totally heal a person. It can only have the effect of suppressing the problem. To really heal somebody a person has got to have abilities. Each type of ailment is dealt with by a different type of ability. In the extreme microcosm, every microcosmic particle of your gong has the same image as you. It recognizes people, it’s a living entity, and it is high-energy matter. So if somebody went and stole it, could it stay with that person? It wouldn’t stay there, and he wouldn’t be able to put it there—it doesn’t belong to him. Everyone who truly cultivates has a master looking after him once he develops gong. That master is over there watching what he does. So if somebody takes his things his master won’t let that go.

Gathering Qi

Stealing qi and gathering qi aren’t things we need to straighten out for you while we transmit the practice at a high level. I’m talking about them because I want to restore cultivation’s name, do a little good for the world, and expose those unhealthy things. Nobody has explained them before. I want you all to know about them because I think it’ll help some folks stop doing bad things all the time, and it will help some people who don’t know the truth about qigong to stop getting scared stiff by it.

The universe is full of qi, and you have people who talk about the qi of celestial yang, or the qi of earthly yin. You’re a part of the universe, so feel free to gather it. But some people don’t gather qi from the universe. They make a full-time job of teaching people to gather qi from plants, and they’ve even gone and compiled their so-called findings, "The poplar tree’s qi is white, the pine tree’s qi is yellow, here’s how you gather it, here’s when to gather it, blah blah blah..." And then some people say things like, "There was a tree in front of my house, I took qi from it and made it die." What kind of ability is that?! Aren’t they doing something bad? You know, when we truly cultivate we want benign messages and we want to assimilate to the nature of the universe. Shouldn’t you care about Goodness? Assimilating with True, Good, Endure, to the nature of the universe—you’ve got to live by Good. If you’re always doing bad things, can your gong grow? And can you get healthy? Aren’t you doing the opposite of us cultivators? Doing that counts as killing, it’s doing something awful! Now maybe some people will say, "You’re getting more and more far out—you called killing animals killing, and now you’re saying killing plants is killing, too." But that’s the truth. In Buddhism they talk about the cycle of rebirth, and about how you could turn into a plant when you reincarnate. That’s what’s said in Buddhism, at least. We don’t put it that way, but I will tell you that trees are alive too, and they’re not just alive, they have sophisticated thinking.

I’ll give you an example. There’s someone in the United States who specializes in electronics research, and he teaches people how to use polygraphs. One day he was struck by a sudden inspiration and connected the two electrodes of a polygraph to a dragon plant. Then he watered its roots. After doing that he discovered that the needle of the polygraph quickly drew a type of curve, the same type of curve, it turns out, that’s generated by a human brain when it has an impulse stimulus. He was stunned, how could plants have emotions! He almost wanted to go out and shout in the streets, "Plants have emotions!" With the inspiration he got from all this, he soon opened up this field of research and did lots and lots of experiments.

There was one time when he put two plants together and asked one of his students to stomp one plant to death in front of the other one. Then he moved the other plant into a room, hooked it up to a polygraph, and asked five of his students to come in one at a time. When the first four students came in there wasn’t any response. But when the fifth student came in, the one who had stomped on the other plant, before he even got close, the needle right away started to quickly draw the kind of curves you see when a person is scared. He was amazed! It tells us something big: we’ve always thought that human beings are higher creatures, that they have sensory abilities, that they’re able to tell things apart, and that they can analyze things because they have a brain—so how come plants can tell things apart? Wouldn’t that mean they’ve got sensory organs? Before, if somebody said that plants had sensory organs, the ability to think, and emotions, or could recognize people, folks would have said he was full of blind belief. And it’s not just limited to this, in some ways it seems like plants surpass us people today.

One day he hooked a plant up to a polygraph and thought to himself, "What experiment should I do? I’ll burn off its leaves and see what reaction it has." With just that thought—before he even did it—the needle quickly drew the type of curve you see only when somebody is crying for help and his life’s in danger. That supersensory ability, which has been called telepathy, is a human being’s innate ability, it’s an instinct. But today’s human race is degenerating. So you have to cultivate them from scratch, return to your original, true self, and return to your original nature—that’s the only way you can have them. Yet plants have them, they know what you’re thinking. It sounds far-fetched, but those were real, concrete scientific experiments. He did all kinds of experiments, including ones involving the ability of Remote Influencing. When his paper was published it caused a pretty big stir all over the world.

Botanists around the world have taken up research in this area. Our country is doing this, too. It’s not considered blind belief anymore. The other day I said something like this: what today’s human race has witnessed, and what’s been invented and discovered, is more than enough to change our current textbooks. But old concepts still have a big influence on people, so they aren’t up for acknowledging them, and nobody is systematically organizing these things.

When I was in a park up in the Northeast I saw a grove of pine trees that had died. Some people were there practicing who-knows-what stuff. They were rolling all over the ground, and after they rolled all over the place they used their feet to gather qi one way and their hands to gather it another. It didn’t take long before the pine trees turned yellow and died. So are you doing a good thing or a bad thing, then? The way we practitioners look at it, that’s killing. You’re a practitioner, so you have to be a good person, gradually assimilate to the universe’s nature, and do away with those bad things of yours. Even if we look at it as an ordinary person would, you’re still not doing something good—you’re damaging public property, ruining our landscape, and hurting the ecological balance. No matter how you look at it you’re not doing something good. There’s plenty of qi in the universe, so go ahead and gather that. Some people have a large amount of energy, and after they hit a certain level in their practice they can really gather up with just one swoop of the hands a whole garden’s worth of qi. But that’s nothing more than qi—pull in loads more of it, and so what? When some people go to the park they do nothing but that, and they say, "I don’t need to do qigong exercises, I just need to swing my arms around while I walk and I’m set, I’m done with my exercises." He gets some qi and he’s all set. He wrongly thinks that qi is gong. When other people go near someone like that they might feel a chill coming from his body. Isn’t plant qi of yin nature? Cultivators try to balance yin and yang, but this guy has a pine oil smell all over his body and he actually thinks he’s doing well.

The One Who Practices Gets the Gong

This is a really critical principle: the one who practices gets the gong. Other people ask me what advantages Falun Dafa has. I tell them that Falun Dafa is able to have "gong refine the person," which cuts down on how long you have to do exercises for, and it can solve the problem of not having enough time for doing exercises, since it allows you to be refined by gong around the clock. And at the same time, our practice truly cultivates both nature and longevity, so this physical body we have will go through big changes. Then there’s Falun Dafa’s greatest advantage, and it’s one I haven’t talked about before. Only now am I going to explain it, because it’s rooted deep in history, and it has quite a big impact on the cultivation world. Nobody in history has ever dared to reveal it. They weren’t allowed to. But it wouldn’t do if I didn’t tell you.

Some disciples have said, "Everything Great Master Li Hongzhi says are Heaven’s secrets—it’s leaking Heaven’s secrets." But we are truly guiding people up to high levels, we’re saving people. We have to be responsible to you, and we are able to shoulder that responsibility, so we’re not leaking Heaven’s secrets. Now if somebody just goes and carelessly talks about them, that’s leaking Heaven’s secrets. Today we’ll bring this principle out into the open, I mean the principle of the one who practices gets the gong. From what I can see, all practices out there today—and this includes all the Buddhist and Daoist ones in history, along with the Qimen practices—they’ve all cultivated people’s subordinate souls (the subordinate consciousness), it’s the subordinate soul that has gotten the gong. The "master soul" we talk about here refers to a human being’s own mind, you need to know what you’re thinking about and what you’re doing, and that is your real self. Now as for what your subordinate soul does, you really have no clue. He was born at the same time as you, has the same name, controls the same body, and looks the same as you, but strictly speaking, though, he’s not you.

There’s a law in the universe: the one who loses, gains—the one who cultivates gets the gong. All the practices in history have taught people that when they do their exercises they should be in a hypnotic state, not think about anything, and then enter into deep concentration—such concentration that they’re oblivious to everything. Some people meditate for three hours and it feels like just a brief moment to them, and other people might even admire their power of concentration. But did they actually practice? They’re totally in the dark about it. And this is especially true in the Daoist practices, where they talk about how "the conscious soul dies, true soul is born." What they call the conscious soul we refer to as the master soul, and what they call the true soul we refer to as the subordinate soul. If your conscious soul really dies, you’re really dead, and your master soul is really gone. Somebody who does a different practice once said to me, "Teacher, when I’m practicing, my family members just look like strangers to me." And somebody else told me, "I don’t need to get up early or stay up late to practice like other people do. I just go home and plop down on the couch, and then my self goes out to practice. I just lie there and watch him practice." I think that’s really sad, but then again, well, it’s not so sad!

Why do they save the subordinate soul? The well-known Immortal, Lu Dongbin, once said, "I’d rather save an animal than a human being." It’s so hard for human beings to awaken, and that’s because ordinary people are lost in the delusions of the ordinary world, and they can’t let go of their attachments in the face of practical gains. If you don’t believe it, just look at how when some people go out of this auditorium after our class, they turn back into ordinary people, and if anybody upsets them or steps on their toes they won’t put up with it. After some time goes by they really won’t consider themselves practitioners. In history there have been a lot of cultivators who saw something: people are hard to save. That’s because their master souls are really just too lost in delusion. Some people have good comprehension. Give them a hint and they’ll catch right on. But there are other people who don’t believe you no matter how much you say, and they think you’re full of hot air. We’ve really stressed to him cultivating character, but as soon as he’s back in the thick of ordinary people he goes back to his old ways. He thinks that the little bit of real, tangible gain you can lay your hands on out in the ordinary world is up for grabs, and that he still just has to have it. The Law that his teacher has taught makes some sense, but he doesn’t think he’s up for it. A person’s master soul is the hardest to save, while his subordinate soul can see things in other dimensions. That’s why they think, "Why should I save your master soul? The subordinate soul is you, too. If I save him isn’t it the same? He is you, too. So it doesn’t matter who gets it, it’ll be the same as you getting it, right? Either way you’re the one who gets it."

Let’s talk about just what exactly their cultivation methods involve. If you have the ability of Remote Viewing it’s possible you’ll see something like the following. Whenever you meditate you see that as soon as you enter into a state of concentration, "Whoosh!"—a you who looks just like you shoots out of your body. But if you try to tell them apart, which is the real you? He’s sitting right there. Then you see that after that one goes out, his master will guide him to cultivate in a dimension that’s created by the master, and maybe it’s in the form of a past society, or in the form of today’s society, or maybe the form of a society in another dimension. The master teaches him how to practice, and he bears lots of hardships, and this happens for an hour or two every day. When that other guy is done practicing he’ll come back, and that’s when you come out of concentration. Now, this is when you can see it.

If you can’t see it it’s even sadder. This guy has no idea. He sits there for a couple hours deep in a foggy-headed state and then comes out of it. And then there are some people who go to sleep, they’ll sleep for two or three hours and then they think they’re done with their exercises, but they’ve completely given themselves away to others. These are cases where the practice is done in intervals, and they meditate for that amount of time each day. There are also people who finish it in one shot. Maybe you’ve heard about Bodhidharma sitting for nine years facing a wall. Back in the past there were a lot of monks who would sit for decades on end, and the longest recorded in history is over 90 years. And there were others who sat even longer. They’d have a thick layer of dust on their eyelids and they’d even have grass growing on their bodies, but they’d still sit there. They have this in the Daoist system, too, especially in some Qimen practices, where they have people go to sleep, they doze for decades without coming out of concentration, and they don’t wake up. But who practiced? His subordinate soul went out and practiced. If he could see it he’d see that the master is tutoring his subordinate soul. The subordinate soul can owe a lot of karmic debts, too, and his master isn’t able to eliminate all of it. So his master says to him, "Do a good job of practicing here. I need to step out now, and I’ll be back in a little while. Wait for me."

The master is fully aware of what’s going to happen, but he still has to do it that way. Demons then come along to scare him, or they’ll change into beautiful women to seduce him. All kinds of things can happen. Once they take a look, they’ll know he’s really not affected. That’s because it’s a bit easier for the subordinate soul to cultivate since it can know the truth of things. So those demons get desperate and want to kill him to vent their hatred and get revenge. And they do really kill him. So in one shot his debts are all paid. After he’s killed, his subordinate soul emerges, and it floats about like a waft of smoke. Then he reincarnates again, and this time he’s born into a poor family. Right from his youth his life is really tough. When he grows up and is able to understand things his master comes, but of course he doesn’t recognize him. His master uses his abilities to unlock his retained memory, and instantly he remembers—"This is my master, isn’t it?" His master tells him, "The time is ripe now, you can practice." So in that way his master passes things down to him over the many years that follow.

After the master is done transmitting things to him he’ll tell him, "You have a lot of attachments that have to go. You’d better go off for a period of wandering." Wandering about is pretty hard—he goes from place to place, begging for food and running into all kinds of people who laugh at him, and insult him, or take advantage of him. He runs into all kinds of things. He goes about everything as a practitioner, he keeps his interactions with people in the proper perspective, he guards his character well, constantly improves his character, and he doesn’t get affected by all the different kinds of ordinary people’s material temptations. After years of wandering he returns. His master tells him, "You’ve attained the Dao now and achieved Perfection. If you’re all set, you can go back and pack up to leave. If you have anything left to do, then finish up those ordinary people’s things." So the subordinate soul comes back after all those years. As soon as he gets back, his master soul over on this side comes out of concentration, and his master consciousness wakes up.

But the truth is he didn’t do the cultivating, his subordinate soul cultivated, so it’s his subordinate soul that got the gong. But his master soul suffered, I mean really—he spent his best years sitting there, and he lost all those years he would have had as an ordinary person. So what happens, then? After he comes out of concentration he gets the sense he’s developed gong, and that he’s got abilities now. When he wants to heal someone or do whatever, now he’s able to—his subordinate soul satisfies him. That’s because he’s the master soul after all, and the master soul controls the body and calls the shots. And on top of that, he sat there for all those years, and just about his whole lifetime went by. When his life comes to a close his subordinate soul leaves and they go their separate ways. Now if you go by what’s said in Buddhism, he still has to go through the cycle of rebirth. But a Great Enlightened Being was cultivated in his body, so he’s built up a lot of virtue. So how’s it handled? Maybe when he’s reborn he’ll be a high-ranking official or make a big pile of money. But nothing more than that. Wasn’t his cultivation a waste, then?

We had to go through a lot of twists and turns to get approval to reveal this. I’ve unveiled a mystery of the ages, the secret of secrets that absolutely couldn’t be told, I’ve revealed the inside story of all the different cultivation ways in history. Didn’t I say that this really hits on some things that have been going on for ages? That’s exactly why. Just think about it: what discipline hasn’t cultivated like that? You cultivate and cultivate but you don’t end up with any gong—what a shame! Who else can you blame but yourself? People are just so lost in delusion, and they don’t catch on no matter how you hint at it to them. If you talk a little higher they’ll think it’s way out there, speak a little lower down and they won’t figure out anything beyond that. And even after I’ve explained things this clearly some people still ask me to go and heal them. I really don’t know what to say then. We’re talking about cultivation here, and we can only help you if you’re cultivating up toward high levels.

In our discipline it’s your master consciousness that gets gong. "So is it just like, I say the master consciousness gets the gong and presto, it’s my master consciousness that gets it?" Who would allow that! That’s not how it works. There are preconditions that have to be met. Now, you know that in our discipline we don’t avoid the ordinary world when we cultivate, and we don’t shy away from or try to escape from conflicts. Right in the thick of this complicated ordinary people’s environment you’re clearheaded, you get shortchanged while you know full well what’s happening, and when other folks compromise your best interests you don’t fight tooth and nail like they do, and you’re taken advantage of while all kinds of things try to drag your character down. In a grueling environment like this you temper your will, you improve your character, and here, with all kinds of bad thoughts from ordinary people preying on you, you manage to come out of it detached.

So think about it, isn’t it you who knowing-full-well bears the hardship? Isn’t it your master soul who makes the sacrifices? And when you lose out around ordinary people, aren’t you losing out knowing full well what’s happening? So the gong should go to you—the one who loses, gains. That’s why our discipline doesn’t cut itself off from this complicated environment of ordinary people to go about cultivating. And why do we choose to cultivate in an environment that’s so full of challenges? Because we ourselves will get the gong. In the future the specialized disciples who cultivate in monasteries will have to go out to wander in the ordinary world.

There are some people who say, "But nowadays other practices cultivate among ordinary people, too, don’t they?" Sure, but those are just for the masses to get healthy and fit. The only ones who are teaching true cultivation that leads to high levels are the people who take just one disciple. Nobody’s spreading it publicly. The ones who are truly guiding disciples have taken their disciples off to teach them privately. Over all these years has anybody else taught something like this openly in public? Nobody has. We teach this discipline of ours this way because that’s how we cultivate, and that’s how we get gong. At the same time, our discipline places tens of thousands of things inside you, and they’re all given to your master soul, which makes it possible for the real you to get gong. I’d say that I’ve done something nobody has ever done before, and I’ve opened the gate the widest ever. Some people have grasped what I just said—it really wasn’t far-fetched. I have a habit, you know: if I have a foot, I’ll only say an inch. And it’s even fine if you say I’m bragging. So actually, this means that I’ve only told a little bit here. I really can’t tell you even a little bit more of the even more profound Great Law, since there’s just a huge gap in levels.

So that’s how we cultivate in our discipline, and it allows you to truly get gong. That’s a first since the beginning of time—you can dig through history if you want. What’s good about this is that the real you can get gong, but at the same time, it’s really hard. In the complicated environment of ordinary people, in the thick of those frictions that test your character, you have to manage to rise above it. That’s just the hardest. What’s hard about it is that when you get shortchanged and know it, or when something critical is at stake, are you affected inside? When you’re in the middle of people’s scheming and fighting, are you affected inside? When your family or friends are suffering, are you affected inside? And are you able to keep these things in perspective? Being a cultivator is that hard! Somebody once said to me, "Teacher, it’s good enough to just be a good ordinary person. Who could get that far in cultivation?" I was so sad to hear that! I didn’t say anything to him. There are all types of character out there. There’s only so much he can comprehend, and nobody can do anything about it—it’s the person who comprehends it who gains.

Lao-zi said, "You can call the Dao I teach a Dao, but it is not an ordinary Dao." If it were something strewn all over the ground, and somebody could just go and pick it up and cultivate it successfully, then it wouldn’t be precious. Our discipline right in this tense environment has the real you get gong, and that’s why we need to conform to how ordinary people are as much as possible. We don’t have you really lose any material things. But right here in this material environment you have to improve your character. That’s what’s convenient about it. Our discipline is the most convenient, you can cultivate among ordinary people and you don’t need to become a monk or nun. But that’s also what’s hard about it—you cultivate among ordinary people, the most complicated environment. It turns out, though, that’s also what’s good about it, because it allows the real you to get gong. That’s what’s key in our discipline, and today I’ve spelled it out for you. Of course, when your master soul gets gong your subordinate soul gets it, too. Why? Because all the messages, all the living entities in your body, or all of your cells are developing gong, so of course his gong grows, too. But at no time will he be as high as you are—you’re the one in charge, and he guards the Law.

So now that we’ve said this much, I want to add something. In the cultivation world there are a lot of folks who’ve always wanted to cultivate up to high levels. And they’ve gone all over the place looking for the Law, they’ve spent loads of money and traveled far and wide, but they still couldn’t find a good teacher. Someone’s being well-known doesn’t guarantee that he really knows things well. When all’s said and done their travels were futile, and they tired people and wasted resources. Today we’ve taken such a grand practice and made it available to you. I’ve already entrusted it to you, I’ve put it right in your lap. So from this point on you’re the one who decides whether you can cultivate, or make it. And if you can, then go for it. If you can’t, if you can’t cultivate, then you’ll have to forget about cultivation. Other than demons who might deceive you, nobody will teach you again, and you can forget about cultivating. If I can’t save you nobody can. The truth is, these days, if you want to find a real master of a true teaching to instruct you, it’s even harder than reaching out and touching the stars. There’s just nobody taking care of these things now. In the Age of the Law’s End even very high levels are at the kalpa’s end, and even less could they take care of ordinary people. This is the most convenient discipline, and on top of that, the practice is based directly on the universe’s nature, so our cultivation is the fastest, the biggest shortcut. It focuses directly on your mind.

The Cosmic Orbit

In the Daoist system they talk about the Macro- and Micro-Cosmic Orbits, so let’s talk a little about what the Cosmic Orbit is. The Cosmic Orbit that people usually talk about is the one you form by connecting the Conception Vessel and Governing Vessel. That Cosmic Orbit doesn’t even scratch the surface, it’s nothing. It’s just for healing and fitness, and it’s called the Micro-Cosmic Orbit. Now, there’s another type of Cosmic Orbit. It’s not called the Micro-Cosmic Orbit or the Macro-Cosmic Orbit. It’s a form of Cosmic Orbit that’s cultivated in deep meditation. It moves around inside the body, starting by circling the Niwan, then it moves downward inside the body, it reaches the elixir field and circles around it, and then it moves up. It circles internally. That’s a true Cosmic Orbit that’s cultivated in deep meditation. After that Cosmic Orbit forms, it creates a strong energy flow, and then that one energy channel drives a hundred energy channels to move, which helps to drive all the other energy channels. Daoists talk about the Cosmic Orbit, but Buddhism doesn’t. Then what does Buddhism talk about? When Shakyamuni was transmitting his system of Law he didn’t talk about gong. He didn’t mention gong, but his practice did have his way of evolving things in cultivation. How does the energy channel go in Buddhism? It starts at the Baihui acupoint, and after that’s completely unblocked it spirals down from the top of the head and goes to the lower parts of the body, and eventually all the energy channels are activated this way.

The central energy channel in Tantrism has the same purpose. Some people say that there is no central energy channel. Then tell me, why can they cultivate a central channel in Tantrism? The fact is, when you add up all the energy channels in a person’s body there are over 10,000 of them. They crisscross vertically and horizontally just like blood vessels do, and there’s even more of them than blood vessels. There aren’t any blood vessels in the spaces between your organs, but there are energy channels there. So, starting from the top of the head, energy channels crisscross vertically and horizontally in all parts of your body, and in Tantric cultivation they connect them. Maybe they’re not straight at first, so they open them, and then they gradually widen them, and that slowly forms a straight energy channel. That energy channel serves as an axle and spins, driving the wheels that spin horizontally with thought. The purpose there, too, is to activate all of the body’s energy channels.

Our Falun Dafa cultivation has stayed away from using one energy channel to drive hundreds of other ones. Right from the get-go we make all the energy channels move simultaneously and all energy channels operate in sync. We’re immediately placed at a high level to do our cultivating, and we steer clear of those lower things. One energy channel driving them all—if you want to completely drive them open you could put in a whole lifetime and maybe it still wouldn’t be long enough. Some people have to cultivate for decades. It’s really hard. In a lot of different practices there’s a saying, "In one lifetime you can’t finish cultivation." There are a lot of people who cultivate in profound Great Law practices, and those are able to extend their lives. Don’t they cultivate longevity? They can extend their lives to cultivate, and they cultivate for a long time.

The Micro-Cosmic Orbit is pretty much for healing and fitness, while the Macro-Cosmic Orbit is for cultivating gong. That’s when you’re really cultivating. The Macro-Cosmic Orbit that Daoists talk about doesn’t come as intensely as ours does, where you have all the energy channels get opened. They have a number of energy channels that circulate through the three yin and three yang points on the hands, the soles of the feet, the legs, and then all the way up to the hair, so they go through the whole body. That’s considered to be the circulation of the Macro-Cosmic Orbit. As soon as the Macro-Cosmic Orbit starts circulating, that’s true cultivation. That’s why some qigong masters stop teaching when it gets to the Macro-Cosmic Orbit—they just teach things for healing and fitness. And then there are people who talk about the Macro-Cosmic Orbit but they haven’t placed anything in you, and you can’t open it on your own. If they don’t give you anything and you have to bank on your own thoughts to open it up, good luck! It’s about the same as doing aerobics… Could that ever open it up? "Cultivation is up to you, gong is up to the master"—all the internal mechanisms have to be placed in you, and only then can it start working.

Daoists have always thought of the human body as a small universe. They believe that however large the universe outside is, that’s how large it is inside, and that however things are outside of it, that’s how things are inside of it. Now when you say that, it sounds a bit mystical, and it’s hard to make sense of it. "This universe is so huge, how could you go and compare it to a person’s body?" Here’s what we’re getting at. In physics they’re now researching the components of matter, going from molecules to atoms, to electrons, to protons, to quarks, and all the way down to neutrinos. If you go further down what’s the size? At that point a microscope can’t see any further. So what are those extremely microcosmic particles that are further on down? They don’t know. The truth is, the small amount that our physics now knows about this is just so far away when you hold it up against the most microcosmic particles that are in this universe. When a person doesn’t have this mortal body his eyes can magnify things, and he can see the microcosm. The higher your level the more you can see in the microcosm.

From the level that he was at, Shakyamuni talked about the theory of 3,000 boundless universes. What he meant was that in this Milky Way there are people like us who have carnal bodies. He also said that in a grain of sand there are 3,000 boundless universes. And that’s consistent with how our modern physics sees things. Is there any difference between how electrons orbit around a nucleus and how the Earth orbits around the sun? So Shakyamuni said that in the microcosm there are 3,000 boundless universes in a grain of sand, and it’s just like a universe, with life and matter in it. Now if that’s true, let’s think about it, don’t the universes in that sand have sand in them, too? And, aren’t there another 3,000 boundless universes within each of the grains of the sand that are in that sand? Then don’t the 3,000 universes in each of the grains of the sand that’s within the other sand have sand in them, too? It’s endless if you keep tracing it downward. That’s why even when Shakyamuni had reached the Tathagata level he said, "It is so large that it has no exterior, and so small that it has no interior." Large—large to the point that he couldn’t see the edge of the universe. And small—small to the point that he couldn’t see what’s the most microcosmic thing in the original matter.

Some qigong masters have said, "There are cities in your pores, and trains and cars are moving in them." It sounds pretty hard to believe, but when we really try to understand it or study it from the angle of science it turns out it’s not that far-fetched. When I talked about opening the Third Eye the other day, a lot of people saw something like this when their Third Eye opened: they found that they were running through a tunnel in their foreheads toward the outside, and it seemed like they’d never reach the end of it. Or each day when they do the exercises they’re running outward on this wide road, there are mountains and bodies of water along both sides, and they run through cities and see tons of people. They think it’s a hallucination. So what’s it all about, then? They see things really clearly, so they aren’t hallucinating. I’d say that if the human body really is so immense in the microcosm, then it’s not a hallucination. Daoist practices have always thought of the human body as a universe, so if it really is a universe, then the distance from your forehead to the pineal gland is going to be thousands of miles. Go ahead and sprint out, it’s far.

When the Macro-Cosmic Orbit is opened up all the way while a person is cultivating, it gives him a type of ability. And which ability is that? You know, the Macro-Cosmic Orbit is also called the Meridian Cosmic Orbit, or Heaven and Earth Revolving, or, River Vessel Turning. At a very shallow level the turning of the Macro-Cosmic Orbit creates an energy flow. It gradually increases in its density and progresses toward higher levels in its form, and it turns into a belt of high-density energy. And the energy belt goes around and around. As it’s in the process of going around, if you use your Third Eye to look at it at a really low level you’ll discover that it can make the qi inside the body change positions—the heart qi goes over to the intestines, the liver qi goes to the stomach, and so on. And in the microcosm, you can see that what it moves are large things. If the energy belt is thrust outside the body, it’s the ability of telekinesis. People with powerful gong can move big things, and that’s Greater Telekinesis. People with weaker gong can move small things, and that’s Lesser Telekinesis. That’s what the ability of telekinesis is like and how it’s formed.

Once the Macro-Cosmic Orbit starts revolving you’re doing cultivation. And it can bring about different cultivation states and different forms of gong. It can bring us a unique cultivation state, too. And what’s the state? Maybe you’ve read in some of the ancient books, like Legends of Immortals, The Book of Elixir, Daoist Canon, or Guide to Nature and Longevity, where they talk about something called "levitating in broad daylight." It’s about a person flying up into the air in broad daylight. I can tell you that a person can actually levitate as soon as his Macro-Cosmic Orbit is opened. It’s that simple. Maybe some folks are thinking, "People have been cultivating for so many years, you’d think there’d be tons of people who had opened their Macro-Cosmic Orbits by now." I’d say it’s not unrealistic to say tens of thousands of people can reach that stage. That’s because the Macro-Cosmic Orbit is really just the very first step of cultivation.

Then why aren’t we seeing all those people taking off, right? "I don’t see them flying off!" The way of things in the ordinary world can’t just be upset—you can’t just go and damage the form of the ordinary world or change it. How could having everyone fly in the air work? Would that be a world of ordinary people? That’s the main reason. Another part of it is that the people living among ordinary human beings aren’t here to be human. They’re here to return to their original, true selves. So it involves a question of awakening. If somebody sees a whole bunch of people really, truly flying around, he’ll go cultivate too, and there’s no more question of awakening. So if you’ve succeeded in cultivation you still can’t just freely let people see it, or go around showing them. They still have to cultivate. So after your Macro-Cosmic Orbit is opened, as long as we lock your fingertip, toe tip, or whatever body part you won’t be able to levitate.

When our Macro-Cosmic Orbits are about to open we often see a cultivation state appear. When some people are meditating their bodies always lean forward a little. That’s because their backs are opened a little better and so their backs are really light and their fronts feel heavy. Then there are some people who lean back a little, and that means their backs feel heavy and their fronts are light. If your whole body is opened up well you’ll spring up and feel like you’re being lifted and levitating up off the ground. But when you can really levitate you won’t be allowed to, although that’s not absolute. The people who have abilities come out are at the two ends: they’re children, who don’t have attachments, and older folks, who don’t have attachments, especially older women. It’s more likely their abilities will come out, and it’s more likely they’ll be able to keep them. But once men, and this is especially so for young guys, once they have their abilities come out they just can’t hold back the urge to show off, and maybe they’ll even use them to compete with ordinary people. So they aren’t allowed to have them. And even if they’ve formed those abilities by cultivating they’ll have to be locked. If one spot is locked he won’t be able to levitate. But I’m not saying you absolutely won’t ever get to have that state. Maybe you’ll be allowed to give it a little try. And there are some people who can keep it.

This happens wherever I go to give classes. When I held a class in Shandong Province we had students from Jinan City and Beijing who’d experienced this. Someone said to me, "Teacher, what’s going on with me? When I walk it seems like I’m always off the ground. When I’m asleep in bed at home I’m always floating up. If I have a quilt over me even the quilt floats up. I’m always floating up like a balloon." When I held a class in Guiyang City, there was this veteran practitioner from Guizhou Province, an older woman. She had two beds in her room which were opposite each other, against the walls. She meditated on her bed and had a feeling she was levitating. She opened her eyes and discovered that she’d floated over onto the other bed. She thought, "I’ve gotta go back," and she was back.

There was a student in Qingdao City who meditated on a bed during his lunch break when nobody else was in the room. As soon as he started meditating he levitated up, he sprang up forcefully over a yard high, and then he came back down. He kept springing up and down, "Thud! Thud!" and even the bedspread was bounced off onto the floor. He was a bit excited and also a little scared. He kept springing up and down the whole lunch break. Eventually the work bell sounded, and he thought, "I can’t let other people see this. They’ll wonder what’s going on. I’d better stop." Then it stopped. That’s why older folks are able to handle themselves well. If this had happened to a young person, when the bell rang for work he’d think, "Everybody come look, I’m flying up." That’s what’s hard about holding off that urge to show off. "Take a look, I’m doing great in my practice—I can fly up." As soon as he shows off like that it’ll be gone. That’s not allowed. There’s a lot of this, and this has happened to students in all regions.

We want all the energy channels to be opened right from the get-go. As of today, 80–90% of our students have reached a state where the body feels energized and is free of health problems. And at the same time, like we’ve said, in this class we push you up to this state and we purify your body completely. On top of that we also place a lot of things in your body and make it possible for you to have gong emerge during the class. I’m almost pulling you up and then pushing you forward. I’ve been teaching you the Law in this class, and your character has been changing. When you leave the auditorium a lot of you will feel like you’re a different person. And I guarantee even your view of the world will change. You’ll know how to handle yourself after this, and you’ll know that you can’t be in a fog like you were before. I guarantee it. So your character has already caught up.

Now that we’re talking about the Macro-Cosmic Orbit, you know that you won’t be allowed to levitate, but you will feel like your whole body is energized, and when you walk it’ll be like treading on air. Before, maybe you’d get tired after just a short stroll, but now it’s a breeze no matter how far you go. When you’re riding your bike it feels like somebody is giving you a push, and you don’t get tired no matter how many stairs you climb. I’ll guarantee it. If you learn to cultivate on your own by reading the book you can achieve whatever cultivation state you’re supposed to just the same. I don’t say things I don’t want to say, but what I say has to be true—that’s how I am. And that’s doubly so when I’m teaching the Law—if I didn’t speak truthfully, or if I said wild things or talked carelessly about things that I can’t back up, I’d be teaching a crooked Law. It’s not easy for me to carry this out. The whole universe is watching. It wouldn’t work if you went off course.

Your typical person thinks that you’re all set once you have a Cosmic Orbit like this. But actually, that’s not good enough. If you want your body to be replaced, or transformed, by high-energy matter as fast as possible, there has to be a directional force in the form of a Cosmic Orbit that steers the direction all your body’s energy channels circulate in. It’s called the Maoyou Cosmic Orbit, and hardly anyone knows about it. Well, the term is mentioned in books once in a while, but nobody has explained it, they don’t tell you about it. Instead, they all just beat around the bush since it’s the secret of secrets, after all. Here we’ll spell it out for you. It can start from the Baihui acupoint (and it can begin at the Huiyin acupoint, too), it comes out and goes along the line that separates the yin side and the yang side of the body, and it comes down on the side of the ear. Then it comes down along the shoulder and traces along each of your fingers one by one. Then it moves along the side of the body, goes under the foot, comes up along the inner thigh, goes down along the other inner thigh, goes under the other foot, comes up along the side of the body, traces along the fingers one by one, and completes a full circle by getting to the top of the head. That’s the Maoyou Cosmic Orbit. Someone could write a whole book about it, and I’ve told it to you in just a few sentences. I don’t think it counts as Heaven’s secret, but other people think it’s precious, and they won’t say anything about it. They only talk about the Maoyou Cosmic Orbit when they’re truly passing things on to a disciple. I’ve told you about it, but none of you should go and direct it or control it with your mind when you practice. If you do that what you’re practicing isn’t our Falun Dafa. True cultivation up to high levels is done with nonaction, and you don’t add in any thoughts—everything is placed in you, ready-made. All of these things form automatically, the internal mechanisms are cultivating you and evolving you, and when the time comes they’ll turn by themselves. One day while you’re doing the practice your head will sway from side to side. When your head sways to this side, they’re turning in this direction, and when your head sways to the other side, they’re turning in that direction. They’ll turn in both directions.

After a person’s Macro- and Micro-Cosmic Orbits are unblocked, his head might nod when he meditates, and that has to do with energy passing through. The same goes for the Falun Cosmic Orbit exercise that we do. Although we do the exercise like that, the fact is, when we aren’t doing it they turn by themselves, and they keep turning constantly, forever. When you do the exercise you’re reinforcing the mechanisms. Don’t we say that the Law refines the practitioner? You’ll find that your Cosmic Orbits are always cycling, even though you might not be doing the exercise right then. The layer of qi mechanisms placed outside your body is a layer of external, great energy channels that are driving your body and cultivating you. It’s all automatic. They can turn in the opposite direction, too. They turn in both directions, and they’re constantly opening your energy channels.

So what’s the purpose of opening up the Cosmic Orbits? Opening up the Cosmic Orbits isn’t the point of cultivating per se. Even if a person’s Cosmic Orbits are opened, I’d say that’s nothing. Because then, when he cultivates further, the goal is to use the means of the Cosmic Orbit to have one energy channel drive all the energy channels, to open up all the energy channels in the body. But we’re already doing this. When you go on practicing maybe some of you will discover that when your Macro-Cosmic Orbits are circulating, your energy channels become wide, like fingers, and they’re broad inside. The reason is, your energy has grown strong, and after the energy flow has formed your channels will become broad and bright. But that’s still nothing. How far do you have to cultivate to, then? You need to make all the energy channels in your body get wider and wider, make the energy stronger and stronger and brighter and brighter, and finally, at some point, have tens of thousands of energy channels merge together, achieving a state of no energy channels and no acupuncture points, with your entire body connected into a whole. That’s the ultimate goal of opening the energy channels. The goal is to completely transform your body with high-energy matter.

When you cultivate to this stage, your body has pretty much been transformed by high-energy matter, or to put it another way, you’ve reached the highest level of Triple-World-Law cultivation, and your mortal body has been cultivated to its peak. When you get to this stage another cultivation state comes about. And which state is that? The gong you’ve brought out is quite rich and plentiful, and all the supernatural abilities (innate abilities) a human being has during cultivation of the human body, or, during Triple-World-Law cultivation, they all come out, but most people who do their cultivation in the setting of ordinary people are locked. Also, your gong pillar has grown pretty high, and all forms of gong have been strengthened by your powerful gong and become quite powerful. But they can only have an effect in this dimension of ours, they actually can’t affect things in other dimensions, and that’s because they’re just abilities that come out from cultivating our mortal human bodies. All the same, they’re pretty rich and plentiful, they’re found in every dimension, and the different forms a body takes on in different dimensions have gone through fairly big changes. The things that the body has, what the body in each dimension has, those things are rich and plentiful, and they look scary—some people have eyes all over their bodies, and even all the pores in their bodies are eyes, they have eyes all throughout their whole dimensional field. Ours is Buddhist qigong, so some people have images of a Bodhisattva or a Buddha all over their bodies. Your gong’s different forms are by this time incredibly rich and plentiful, and lots and lots of living entities are showing themselves.

At this stage, another cultivation state comes about, and it’s called "Three Flowers Atop the Head." It’s a really noticeable state, and it’s just striking. Even folks whose Third Eyes aren’t that high can see it. There are three flowers on top of the head. One of them is a lotus flower, but it’s not the lotus flower of our material dimension. The other two are also from other dimensions, and they’re really beautiful and wonderful. The three flowers circle atop the head, going clockwise, then counterclockwise, and the three flowers rotate on their own, too. Each flower has a big pillar, and the diameter of them is as wide as the flower. The three big pillars go all the way up to the heavens. But they’re not gong pillars, they just take on this form, and they’re really amazing. If you see them you’re sure to be stunned. When you cultivate to this stage your body is pure and white, and your skin is smooth and delicate. When you get to this stage you’ve reached the highest form of Triple-World-Law cultivation. But it’s still not the peak—you still have to cultivate on further, you still have to go forward.

When you go further you’ll enter the transitional level between Triple-World-Law and Beyond-Triple-World-Law, which is called Pure-White Body (and it’s also called Crystal-White Body). When a person’s body has been cultivated to the highest form in Triple-World-Law, it’s still just about his mortal body being changed to its highest state. When you really enter that state your whole body will be totally made of high-energy matter. And why is it called a Pure-White Body? Because you’ve purified your body to an absolutely high degree. If somebody looks at it with his Third Eye, your whole body is transparent, it’s just like transparent glass, and there’s nothing there. This kind of state will show up. To tell you the truth, your body is a Buddha-body at that point. The reason is, a body that’s made of high-energy matter is different from the body we start with. So when you get to this stage all the abilities and technique-type things that have shown up in your body have to be chucked out, and you unload them into a very deep dimension. They aren’t useful anymore. From that point on they won’t be useful again, with the exception being that off in the future, on the day your cultivation’s a success and you attain the Dao, you’ll look back at your cultivation, and maybe then you’ll take them out for a look. So at this point there are only two things still left: your gong pillar is still there, and the Cultivated Infant you’ve cultivated has now grown big. But both of these are in a very deep dimension. People with a Third Eye that’s not at a high level can’t see them, they can only see that your body is transparent.

The Pure-White Body state is a transitional level, so when you keep cultivating you truly enter Beyond-Triple-World-Law cultivation, which is also called Buddha-body cultivation. Your whole body is made of gong, and at that point your character is stable. You start cultivation all over again and you see your abilities start to come out again, but those aren’t called abilities anymore—they’re called Buddha Law Divine Powers, and they control things in every dimension. They’re unimaginably powerful. Later on as you keep on cultivating you’ll know for yourself how to cultivate things at higher levels, just as you’ll know the forms cultivation has at higher levels.

Being Too Engrossed

Let’s talk about a problem. It has to do with being too engrossed. A lot of people have practiced qigong for a long time, and there are some other folks who haven’t practiced qigong but who’ve been searching for the Truth their whole lives and trying to figure out the true meaning of life. When they learn our Falun Dafa they immediately resolve lots and lots of questions they had and that they couldn’t find answers to. And as their thinking climbs a little higher they might get really excited. That’s pretty much a given. I know, true cultivators realize the Law’s significance, and they know you should cherish it. But there’s a problem that comes up a lot: because of his happiness the person gets too engrossed, which just doesn’t have to be, and it leads him to not act normal in the way he does things, or when he interacts with other people out in the ordinary world, or just when he’s out and about. I’d say that’s just no good.

For the most part, our practice does its cultivation right in the thick of the ordinary world. You can’t disengage yourself from the ordinary world, and you have to cultivate with full awareness. You should still have normal relationships with other people. Of course your character is high, your attitude is proper, you are improving your character, you’re raising your level, and you don’t do bad things, you do good things—that’s how you should be. But then there are people who come across as if there’s something not right with them, it looks like they’ve had it with this secular world, and other people can’t understand the things they say. So people say, "What did Falun Dafa do to him to make him like that? Looks like he’s lost a few marbles." But actually, that’s not what’s going on. He’s just too excited, he’s not rational, and he’s not acting normal. So think about it, acting like that isn’t right, you’ve gone to the opposite extreme, and that’s another attachment. You should get rid of it and just live and cultivate normally among ordinary people like everybody else. If when you’re around ordinary people they see you as obsessed, and if nobody sees you as one of their own, then they’ll all stay away from you, and nobody is going to give you a chance to improve your character. Nobody will think you’re normal. How awful! So you’ve got to make sure you’re aware of this. You’ve really got to handle yourself well.

Our practice isn’t like the typical qigong practice, where people get all in a daze, they’re all foggy, and they get obsessed. In our practice you have to know full well that you’re cultivating yourself. Some people keep telling me, "Teacher, as soon as I close my eyes I start to sway." I’d say it doesn’t have to be that way: you’ve gotten in the habit of giving up your master consciousness, and as soon as you close your eyes you lose your master consciousness, it vanishes. You’ve formed that kind of habit. How come you don’t sway when you’re sitting here? If you keep the state you have when your eyes are open, and just close your eyes lightly, will you sway? Definitely not. You think that’s how qigong is done, you’ve formed a concept, and as soon as you close your eyes you’re gone, and you have no idea where you went. We have a rule that your master consciousness has to be aware, and that’s because this practice cultivates the real you. So you have to improve yourself while you’re fully aware of it. Now, we have a meditation. And how do we do our meditation? As a rule, we say that no matter how deep your concentration gets, you have to know that you’re practicing here, and you just absolutely can’t get into that kind of state where you’re totally oblivious. So what exactly will you experience? What will happen is that when you go sit there you’ll feel wonderful, like you’re sitting in an eggshell, and you’ll feel really good, you’ll know that you are cultivating, but you’ll feel like your whole body can’t move. These are things that have to happen in our practice. There’s another cultivation state: you sit and sit, and then you discover that your legs are gone, you can’t figure out where they went, and your body is gone, too, your arms are gone too, your hands are also gone, and only your head is left. As you keep meditating, you discover that your head is gone, too, and only your mind is left—there’s just a little bit of awareness left knowing that you’re cultivating here. If you can reach that point it will be more than good enough. And why is that? When a person does the exercises in that state his body is being evolved to its fullest extent. It’s the best state. So that’s why we have you enter into stillness in that kind of state. But don’t go to sleep or get all foggy-headed. Somebody else might practice and get the good things then.

All of our practitioners really have to make sure they don’t act out of the norm while they’re part of the ordinary world. You wouldn’t have a positive effect around ordinary people. They’d say stuff like, "How come they all get like that after they learn Falun Dafa?" It’d be as good as hurting Falun Dafa’s name. So make sure you’re really careful about all this. In the process of cultivating in other settings, too, you have to be careful that you don’t get too engrossed. Demons will probably manipulate that kind of attachment.

Minding Your Speech

Minding your speech is something that religions used to teach. But when they taught minding speech it mainly had to do with some specialized cultivators, like Buddhist monks and Daoist priests, who would keep their lips sealed and not say anything. They’d do nothing but cultivate, so the goal was to get rid of their human attachments just as much as possible. They believed that as soon as you have a thought, that’s karma. In some religions they categorize karma into good karma and bad karma. But either way, good karma or bad karma, if you go by the Buddhist "Emptiness" or the Daoist "Nothingness," you don’t want to generate it. So they’d say, "I won’t do anything, then." That’s because they couldn’t see the underlying causes behind things, they just couldn’t tell whether such-and-such was really something good or bad, or what underlying causes were involved. Your average cultivator isn’t at a very high level, and he can’t see those things, so he’ll be afraid that something that looks good on the surface might turn out to be bad when he does it. So they’d do their best to practice nonaction, they wouldn’t do anything at all, and that way they’d avoid making more karma. And the reason is, when you’ve made karma you have to eliminate it, you have to suffer. Now for our cultivators, it’s already set at what point you’ll be Unlocked, and if you let something in that probably shouldn’t be let in, it’ll bring trouble to your whole cultivation. That’s why they practiced nonaction.

When Buddhists teach minding speech, it means that a person’s speech is directed by his thoughts, so his thought is about something. When a person’s mind generates a thought, or it leads him to say something or do something, or when it directs his sensory organs or his four limbs, that in itself could be the kind of attachment ordinary people have. For example, the different ideas people have, "You’re good," "He’s not good," "You’ve cultivated well," "He hasn’t cultivated well," and so on, all of these in and of themselves cause tension between people. Even in everyday scenarios, like "I want to do such and such," or "It should be done in such-and-such a way," even there maybe you’ve hurt someone without realizing it. Since the tensions people have are so complicated it’s possible you’ve unknowingly made karma. So, since that’s how it is, they keep their lips sealed completely and don’t say a word. Religions used to always take minding speech very seriously, and it was done this way in religious practices.

Most of our Falun Dafa cultivators do their cultivating in the setting of ordinary people (the exception is those specialized disciples), so it’s inevitable we live the normal life of an ordinary person in the ordinary world, and have that interaction with the world. All of us have jobs, and we should do our jobs well. Some people have to talk to do their jobs, so isn’t there a conflict? No, there’s no conflict. And why isn’t there? The minding speech that we have to practice is totally different from theirs. Our cultivation discipline is different, so what’s required of you is different. When we open our mouths to speak we should speak in line with a practitioner’s character, we don’t gossip, and we don’t say negative things. You’re a cultivator, so to decide whether or not you should say something you should see how you measure up to the standards of the Law. If it’s something you should say, it’s no problem as long as you’re in line with a practitioner’s character standard as measured by the Law. And besides, we have to talk about the Law and spread the Law, so not speaking wouldn’t work. When we talk about minding speech, it’s about the ordinary things like reputation and profit that you can’t let go of and that aren’t related to a cultivator’s actual work in the world; it’s about disciples in the same practice talking about pointless things with each other; it’s about stuff that’s done to show off because of attachments; about spreading rumors heard through the grapevine; and talking about other things in the world with a lot of excitement and interest. I think these are all attachments an ordinary person has, and we should mind our speech when it comes to these things. That’s what we mean by minding speech. At one time monks took these things very seriously, and that’s because they knew they’d make karma with one move of thought. That’s why they taught about "body, mouth, mind." They talked about minding the body, which meant that a person shouldn’t do bad things; by minding the mouth, they meant that you should be silent; and by minding the mind, they meant that you shouldn’t even think about something. The specialized cultivators in monasteries used to be really strict about these rules. What we hold ourselves to are the requirements for a practitioner’s character, and it’ll be fine as long as you handle well what you should and shouldn’t say.

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