“Some people say that they’ll go to Heaven after they die. People who haven’t practiced cultivation are, in the words of your Western culture, called “spirits” after they die. These spirits are actually ghosts. Think about it, everyone: What are they? People in the East have a clear and definite concept of human body cultivation: One develops a Buddha-body through cultivation, that is, a divine body. If a person doesn’t have this Buddha-body—in other words, if a person doesn’t have the body of a heavenly paradise’s god—his spirit fears light after coming forth [from his body]. It disintegrates in sunlight, and can’t even reincarnate.
That’s why people are covered with a cloth after they die—it prevents exposure to sunlight—and buried in the earth so that their spirits won’t disintegrate. Buddhas and gods are infinitely brilliant, even brighter than sunlight. Wouldn’t a person’s spirit dissolve were he to see a god? How could it go to Heaven? It thus needs to have the body of a god and, at the same time, change the compositional elements of its intelligent beings through cultivation to make them comprised of high-energy matter.
Only with a Buddha-body or a god-body can it go. Can a spirit come to the human world? No, it can’t. So before it can stay in this world, it needs to have a human body to reincarnate with and needs to be born through the bodies of parents. Some people mistakenly think that they’ll go to Heaven if they just have faith. How could that be? It sounds ridiculous to those of us in cultivation circles. You have to truly practice cultivation before you can go to Heaven.
So in Western religions, in the process of having faith in God, a person’s heart nature and his realm of mind continually elevate, and he becomes a better and better person. Then wouldn’t you say he’s practicing cultivation? Form is unimportant in cultivation; there are all kinds of cultivation methods. It’s a difference in cultivation forms between Western and Eastern religions. Why don’t they mention cultivation in the West, like they do in the East? Both are in fact cultivation. It’s simply that Eastern culture is very specific with regard to this, while Western culture doesn’t talk about these things.
That’s because when gods come down to save people and to impart their Law, they need to adopt a cultural form that’s intelligible to people. Only then can you understand—only [when they] use the human languages of those times can you understand. What I’ve said is also to tell you that practicing ordinary qigong can’t enable people to reach a very high, profound realm. It’s impossible. Only real cultivation can do so.
Qigong is only something at the lowest level in cultivation, so it’s limited to healing illness and maintaining health. Even when it comes to healing illness and maintaining health there are some requirements for people, because after all, it’s a form of cultivation and is different from any kind of medical treatment that exists among everyday people. If you want to learn qigong to heal your illness, you have to meet the requirements of qigong’s principles.
What does it mean to meet the requirements of qigong’s principles? Because it’s beyond the ordinary—if you want to use extraordinary means to treat illness without resorting to medication, shots, or surgery, and be cured, isn’t it supernormal?—human beings have to conform to its principles before their illnesses can be truly healed.
This is the fundamental reason why many people fail to get rid of their health problems even though they practice qigong. Since you want to use this supernormal method to eliminate your illness, you have to conform to the supernormal principles. So you have to follow qigong’s requirements, be a good person, and break your tendency to do bad or immoral things—only then will your illness be truly cured. This is the real reason behind recovery from illness.
This doesn’t apply should you opt for everyday people’s medical treatments. You will then have to undergo surgery, get shots, or take medication in order to recover. Yet there’s a principle in the universe, called, “no loss, no gain.” To gain, you must lose; when you lose, you will gain. This is an absolute truth. Do you know why your illness improves in the hospital? Some people say that it’s healed through the technological means of modern science.
I say that’s just modern people playing out a way, or a form, of manifestation in modern society. The true reason behind your recovery isn’t limited to that. Things have to conform to the principles of the universe in this dimension. You know that when you’re sick you have to spend a lot of money seeing doctors. Of course, some countries have good social welfare programs, and people in those societies have health insurance that can resolve this problem.
But you still suffer—don’t you suffer when you’re sick? You are afflicted when you’re suffering, and suffering is itself a way of paying off karma. In addition, you need to spend money, have injections, take medication, and you might even be cut open in surgery. Haven’t you endured suffering before your condition starts to improve? But let me tell you that this recovery hasn’t corrected the illness at its root: it has pushed the illness karma to somewhere else or postponed it to the future.
This is because the illness doesn’t originate from the outermost surface of an ordinary human’s physical body; rather, it comes from the plane of microscopic particles beneath the body made of the largest molecules. The human body is composed of molecules that have particles at different microscopic planes, and each plane of particles is a dimension. Of course, the dimensions aren’t stacked up together. They are in the form of smaller particles comprising larger particles. Yet the realm of each plane of small particles is a dimension. There are many dimensions like these, and it’s actually there that the causes of many illnesses reside. Illnesses don’t come from the surface. What appears on the surface of a person’s flesh or tissues is only the superficial manifestation of an illness.
After you have surgery, you think that your tumor has been removed. Actually, what’s been removed is the flesh tissue that’s made up of the plane of the largest molecules. It is removed, as its cells are no longer present in this dimension. Yet you can’t remove the more microscopic particles that comprise the cells. But since you no longer see those cells at the body’s surface after they are removed, it appears as if you’re healed. Later on, the illness might transform, and some illnesses might relapse. Since the illness wasn’t truly eliminated, it might move to somewhere else and another tumor might reemerge there. Or maybe it will be transformed into some other illness or some misfortune.
This is the real underlying reason that we’ve observed. When supernormal abilities are used to treat an illness, however, surgery isn’t necessary. Why can a supernormal ability remove a person’s tumor? It’s because it removes the illness from another dimension, a dimension that’s invisible to the human eye. Let’s use a simple illustration. You see that this cloth has a lump protruding up here. Why? It’s because there’s a cause behind it—my hand is behind it. If you take the cloth away but you don’t remove the hand, it will come over to this side. This means that if you don’t resolve the cause behind it, you can’t eliminate the problem at its root. In other words, human medical treatments can’t solve the fundamental problem, for they only resolve problems on the surface and can’t eliminate karma.
In this world, whether a person loses or gains, whether he’s happy, whether he’s totally content with how things are going, whether he has good fortune, and the extent of his misfortune—all of these are determined by two substances carried on his body. One is called virtue (de), and the other, karma (yeli). It’s just these two substances taking effect. We accumulate virtue when we do good things. In the old days people talked about accumulating virtue. People now consider it something conceptual or in the realm of mind. Actually, it’s a type of matter, a truly tangible substance. The karma that people speak about has been clearly explained in Eastern religions.
What is karma? It’s a black substance. A person generates this material when he does wrong. When too much of this thing is accumulated, he will have unpleasant things happen to him, such as getting sick, having misfortune, or going through hard times. I’ve found that everything that happens to humans is the result of what humans themselves have done. In this human world, whether you are happy and whether you are doing well are the result of your own doing. These things often manifest in your present life, while some of these things will manifest in your next life; most of them manifest in the next life. What’s meant by “manifest in the next life”? It means that it won’t occur in this lifetime but will appear in your following lifetime.
The part that manifests in this life is called “retribution in the same life” by cultivation circles in the East. [That is,] after doing something wrong, you will meet with immediate retribution. Some people fall on their face when they step out the door after doing something bad. They don’t see it as retribution for doing wrong, but think it’s coincidental or natural.
I hold that there’s no such thing as “natural phenomena,” as all things are ordered—coincidence doesn’t exist. In this dimension there are many, many things that people aren’t able to see. Of course, modern science knows that there is air, oxygen, hydrogen, and other trace elements that are composed of molecules, but that’s all it knows. Yet your eyes can’t even see those things.
Actually, I can tell you that in this dimension, at the extremely microscopic level, they are—including the enormous, pervasive matter—all gods. They know clearly every move and every action made by humans and the things they’ve done. When people do bad things they always think that nobody can see what they’ve done. They know that what they did was wrong but still try to find a self-deceptive excuse that will allow them to feel justified and at ease. They don’t believe in gods whatsoever. Here’s an offhand example.
It doesn’t involve any matters of religion or race, I’m just talking about people doing wrong. You probably know that a few days ago a certain country conducted nuclear tests, exploding five atomic bombs in succession. Many countries were shocked! That’s because people the world over all long for peace.
What were their atomic explosions for? I’m not invested in any notions. I’m only talking about people doing the wrong thing, I’m not commenting on whether that nation was right or wrong. Let’s think about it. Although the nuclear bombs were detonated underground, gods won’t tolerate the damage they do to the earth, to the human environment, and to the material world that’s composed of different [sized] molecules! When Heaven punishes humans they think it’s a natural phenomenon.
The temperature in that country immediately shot up to the highest in the world. It stayed at over 122°F (50°C), and a lot of people died from the heat. And a windstorm came along later and caused many deaths. People don’t realize these phenomena are the warning of gods: “You cannot do that.” People just take them to be natural phenomena. Nothing that happens in this world is coincidental. Just take a look: If any nation, region, or individual does something bad, some special phenomena will immediately follow. Disasters and everything that befalls humans are the result of their own conduct. Just now I briefly discussed some things at an elementary level.”
