Patricia Damler, a great-grandmother from Indiana, said reading Falun Gong founder Mr. Li Hongzhi’s article “How Humankind Came To Be” opened up new levels of thought. She explained how each time she read the article, a different aspect of it held her attention.
“This is the kind of reading that you can’t do once or twice,” Damler said. “So I’ve read it probably a dozen times. And it seems like almost every time I read it, something else will be more in my forethought after I finish reading it.”
“Each time I read it, I pick up a little something more—like the idea of suffering being more not just for yourself, but for basically everyone in the world.”
“But this is so much more than that—when you’re reading this,” she said. “This is not just offering it up for the poor souls in purgatory. It just explodes exponentially beyond that. And I can wrap my head around that. I can see how that is applicable because sin is not personal either. And sin is universal. My sin is not just my sin. It affects the world in one way or another.”
“It’s a ripple effect. It’s the same ripple effect that doing good has.”
“I think it is something that has always been hard to understand. When you hear someone say, ‘Why does bad things have to happen to good people?’ There is no answer for that. ‘Why shouldn’t bad things happen to good people?’ is maybe a better question. And there’s really no answer for that either.”
“But the good and the bad, when you’re reading this article, it makes sense that these good things, these bad things are happening to your own person based on something from a prior life. And it opens up a whole different level of thought.”
“Humankind, it seems, was always trying to figure out that there had to be a reason for everything, rather than it just being a more supernatural reason. And never going so far as to think that it had something more long-term, like going back 1,000 years to when that actual soul was in a different body and did terrible things. And now that terrible thing that they did, that soul did 1,000 years ago, is now in a new body and bad things happen to that person as a result of that. It’s like it was carried forward. And the only way to get rid of that terrible thing that was done 1,000 years ago is to do so much good, and so much good, and so much good, that it chips away at that 1,000-year-ago error of badness that happened in that soul’s being.
“I kept trying to balance it with 12 years of Catholic education and my own personal philosophy on life. Is this just a different plane of thought? But it is a plausible plane of thought, and bits and pieces of it, I can correlate to my own religious upbringing and my own personal way of life, or way of being,” she said.
“I think it’s a powerful document. And like I said, it isn’t something you can just glance and—one time and put it away. I think it has to be digested.”