Clarifying the Truth to Members of the Czech Parliament

Greetings Master, greetings fellow practitioners,

I´d like to share my experience of clarifying the truth to members of the Czech Parliament. About 7 years ago, Czech practitioners decided to ask our senators, who are members of the upper chamber of the Czech Parliament, to pass a resolution that would express moral support to persecuted Falun Gong practitioners and condemn the persecution. The main purpose of that was to clarify the truth to the senators so that they could be saved and because they represent the whole nation, we believed that the resolution could play a certain role in saving all people of the Czech republic.

At that time when I was asking senators for an appointment I wouldn´t dare to mention the word “resolution” in my e-mails because they probably wouldn´t want to meet us at all. At least that was my impression of the situation. This has changed a lot since then.

In 2012, we arranged a meeting with a senator, the chairman of the petition and human rights committee, who was establishing the Tibet Friends Club in the Senate. We clarified the truth to him and everything went very smoothly. We wrote up a draft of the resolution, which he accepted without modifications. Then we were invited to a meeting of a committee where senators were supposed to vote on the resolution.

We asked one Chinese practitioner living in Finland to come to Prague to attend this meeting. Her mother had been imprisoned in China for a very long time. When she told the story of her mother at the meeting in the Senate, it seemed that a very pure, humble and compassionate energy filled the meeting room. I felt that all senators present, including the leftists and one communist, were moved by this energy and it cleared away all their previous concerns about the possible consequences of the resolution, at least for that moment. So the resolution was passed unanimously to the big surprise of all other senators who were not members of that committee.

It started very easily and smoothly but later things got complicated. The Senate committee was supposed to pass the resolution on to a higher level so that it would be discussed during a Senate plenary session. This never happened and the senators backed out of it telling us they wouldn‘t have any more time for that. They then stopped communicating with us. Now I can see that we probably failed to raise our cultivation levels so the resolution could not be raised to a higher level. I fell into the trap of looking outside instead of searching inside to find a key to the problem we were facing. The process was stopped but we didn´t give up and wrote a petition to involve the wider public to ask senators to pass the resolution.

When we had collected about 37,000 signatures on the petition we handed it to a petition committee of the Senate. At this time most of the senators had been replaced but the pressure on senators which came from the evil spectre of communism still persisted. The Senate committee organized a couple of meetings where we, with the help of a foreign investigator of organ harvesting and Chinese foreign practitioners and survivors of the persecution, clarified the facts about the persecution. Throughout this process I often had a feeling that the senator who happened to be in charge of our petition, was not quite honest with us. He said one thing and thought another, and sometimes we were not sure on which side he was standing. Once, for example, he cancelled a round table discussion only one week before the date. Since it was planned a long time in advance we had invited a couple of people from abroad to attend the discussion. So the air tickets and hotel room had been paid for.

The reason for cancelling the round table was that the Chinese embassy and other people who were supposed to be an opposition party didn´t confirm participation of the discussion. My first thought on hearing this rather shocking news was that I didn´t accept the arrangement of the old forces and accepted only our Master´s arrangement in this matter. When we calmed down and started thinking about why it happened, we realised that the Senate might not have cooperated well with us because our body of Czech practitioners didn’t cooperate well together at that time.

There had been one isolated group of practitioners in the Czech capital for a long time. The thing that happened in the Senate took me and other practitioners to an understanding that it was high time we abandoned all thoughts about the past and started to cooperate better with this group of practitioners. Perhaps because of the change in our minds and the body of Czech practitioners, a little miracle happened. The round table discussion, which took a few months to organise for the Senate and was suddenly cancelled, was arranged in two hours in the Chamber of Deputies, which is the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament. The visit of our foreign guests was successful and they didn´t come in vain in the end.

The next surprise that the senator in charge of our petition prepared for us was his draft of the resolution. We had been invited to a meeting where he read the draft of the resolution he had written. Upon hearing it, I felt that all the energy we had been putting in this matter was suddenly in vain. The drafted resolution was at least from my point of view very brief, diplomatic and empty. It didn´t express any stance or attitude and only shifted the responsibility to other authorities. Later we asked the committee chairman to rewrite the draft, but we were told that they wouldn´t change anything, and if we wanted we could propose an amendment during our speech at the plenary session before the vote on the resolution.

It was clear that senators were fearful of criticising the Chinese regime or even giving moral support to Falun Gong practitioners. At that time we were also discussing who would speak on behalf of the Falun Dafa Association during the plenary session. We were three practitioners who could do it. I hoped it wouldn‘t be me and we agreed that another practitioner would make a speech if he could. Later I talked with another practitioner about what should be said in the speech and the practitioner then said that she felt I should be the person to make the speech. This idea alone stirred up fear in me that almost paralyzed me.

I couldn´t fall asleep that night and when I did I had a nightmare. I understood that if I had such a great fear, how could senators not fear to stand up against the Chinese regime. So the next day I started to eliminate this fear, and refused in my mind the arrangement of the old forces, which implanted this fear of public speaking in me a long time ago. To my surprise, most of this fear quickly disappeared. It turned out soon that it was me who would have to make a speech at the plenary session since the other two practitioners either couldn´t or didn´t want to do it.

I prepared my speech. I wanted the senators to listen to me and believe that if I spoke by heart to them instead of reading a speech they would pay more attention to my speech. So I decided to memorize the speech. It surprised me that it went very easily with minimum effort. I felt it was so easy to memorize it because I try to memorize and recite the Fa by heart every day.

At the same time, we tried to call all senators one by one and ask them to propose an amendment to the draft resolution so that the resolution would at least express moral support to Falun Gong practitioners. Finally, we found two senators who had the courage to do it and at short notice wrote up an amendment just one day before the vote.

The day came where the Senate was to hold talks and vote on the resolution. On my way to work that morning, one lady gave me a ceramic four-leaf clover and said that it was the International Day of Happiness (and perhaps also of good luck). I told myself that we would definitely need good luck and that it was a good omen. We spent almost 6 hours in the Senate waiting for our turn because other items on the agenda dragged on for hours. It was a good thing because a group of about 15 practitioners who were sitting in the conference room could all this time send forth righteous thoughts to clear the field.

Finally the chairman invited us and the Senate started to discuss our petition. I tried to speak from my heart clearly, to appeal to the conscience of the attending senators and clarify the facts about the persecution and Falun Gong. Thanks to the righteous field that practitioners formed there it was much easier that I expected in the end. One practitioner told me when I was sitting down on the bench after my speech, that it was the best speech he had ever heard. Then 5 senators, one after another, made a speech in which they further clarified the facts about the persecution of Falun Gong and organ harvesting and repeatedly pleaded with their colleagues to support the resolution. Righteous energy once again filled the room and influenced the senators. Almost all of them voted for the resolution. After the vote, a couple of senators came to us to congratulate us and thank us from the bottom of their hearts. We felt that it was an important day for the Czech Republic.

Nowadays, we are urging the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament to pass a similar resolution. We go to see members of Parliament and tell them the facts about the persecution. If we keep strong righteous thoughts and determination, it is usually quite easy to arrange an appointment with them.

When I went to one of these meetings I felt a bit nervous. I realised that it´s probably because I am concerned with myself too much, whether "I“ could manage the meeting well, so I tried to think more of the person I was going to meet, to focus on the wish he could be saved, instead of worrying about my ego. At that moment, I managed to transform nervousness into compassion.

We keep going, more and more MPs learn the facts about Falun Gong and the persecution, and when the story we are telling them touches their heart, they want to help us by spreading the information or give us a piece of good advice. This journey is getting smoother and smoother but we still have to overcome smaller or bigger, inner or external kinds of interference.

During this process of clarifying the truth to Parliament members I have been learning to actively deny the arrangements of the old forces, keep calm and not fight against people when interference happens, let go of layers of my ego, work persistently, not give up and trust myself.

Thank you Master for arranging this journey for us and helping us walk on it.