Falun Gong - The spiritual movement China wants haltedLife Positive: Fluid motions. Seeping deep within the body. Embracing the mind. Rising with the
spirit. Sowing seeds of truth (
Zhen),
compassion (
Shan) and forbearance (
Ren). Moving as one towards wisdom and enlightenment. Therein lies the essence of
Falun Gong, an advanced system of 'cultivation' and practice designed to improve a practitioner's life, physically, mentally and spiritually.
However, this essentially peaceful spiritual exercise has been mired in controversy almost from the very beginning.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, grew out of Chinese
Qigong practices with a history stretching back thousands of years. Its new avatar was first introduced by Master Li Hongzhi in 1992 in China to make it more accessible to the public, and was registered with the
Qigong Research Association there. However, the two systems did not always see eye to eye. Unlike Qigong, Falun Gong's
focus was not on
healing or displaying supernatural powers. Instead, it concentrated on creating a complete body-mind-spirit harmony to help its students get in sync with the
evolution principle of the universe. But when, in 1996, Master Li withdrew from that society, it was the beginning of a long and arduous journey that was to lead to the banning of Falun Gong in China and to test the faith of every practitioner of this system.
But first things first.
For most people, Falun Gong
is still a comparatively new system and, on the face of it, not much different from various other
healing and relaxation exercises. The difference lies, primarily, in its philosophy depicted through its emblem, the Falun, representing the wheel of dharma. The Taoist yin-yang and the Buddha's dharma-chakra are both reflected in the
Falun emblem.
"This sign does not connote any concept of classes. It was 2,500 years ago in Sakyamuni's time that the human society came to widely recognize this sign. Later, Hitler usurped it," explains Hongzhi. "The configuration of Falun is a miniature of the universe and has its own form of existence and process of
evolution in each of the other spaces. Therefore, I call it a world."
According to Master Li, the Falun is an intelligent spinning body of high-energy substance from another dimension, located at the dan-tian (lower abdomen), which absorbs energy from the universe and relieves the body of bad elements. The rotation of Falun synchronizes with the rotation of the universe. This energy substance is constantly rotating, putting the practitioner in the state of cultivation for 24 hours a day...
Though Falun Gong is beneficial for health, these are only side effects. The focus, throughout, is on cleansing the body and preparing it for higher states of awareness.
Check the Falun Gong website
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