At first, Zeng Changmei fell for Falun Gong cult in a daze. May 22 of the Lunar calendar in 1998 is a day that she still deeply bears in mind till now for it was the day when great pains overwhelmed her. The “Almighty Master” made her family fall so quickly that her house was even unable to shelter the family anymore. Not only did the family almost shatter, but also she nearly died. Moreover, her youngest daughter has been suffering from serious stomach disease since then.
Zeng Changmei, born in 1961, is a villager of Wuxi village, Zhongfang County, Hunan Province. At first, she had a happy family where her husband was capable and diligent, her two daughters behaved lovely, and she was quite good at weaving bamboo hats. Therefore, their life was prosperous and admired by their neighbors.
She was a Buddhist and worshipped Buddhas at home all year round. One day, because she run out of incense paper, she went to the local grocery run by another villager Xiao Qiaosheng. After entering the grocery, she noticed that Xiao Qiaosheng was reading a book attentively. Out of curiosity, she asked him what the book was about, and Xiao Qiaosheng told her that it belonged to his daughter and it was quite a good book which could guide people to ascend to higher levels when cultivating the way of Buddha. But actually, it was nothing else but the notorious Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel), the evil bible of the Falun Gong cult. Unsurprisingly, Xiao Guiying, the daughter of Xiao Qiaosheng, was a Falun Gong practitioner. And she was also the head of the Falun Gong training station in Zhongfang County. At that time, Xiao Qiaosheng presented what was Falun Gong, then preached possible benefits from practicing Falun Gong, and offered her the cult book to take home when convinced that she was intrigued. Later, Zeng Changmei went to Xiao Qiaosheng’s place to watch “lectures on Dafa” given by “Master” Li Hongzhi, which instilled her mind with more “Fa-principles” and made her get drawn in deeper and deeper by the Falun Gong cult.
Subsequently, influenced by the lie that one family member practicing Falun Gong could benefit the whole family, Zeng Changmei was tempted to take another big step on the wrong path. Bewitched by fallacies of the Falun Gong cult, she tried to persuade her relatives to believe in Falun Gong together with her because she was convinced that it was for a good cause to “deliver all living creatures from torment” just as what her “Master” was doing. Under her endless preaching, her sister, her bother-in-law, and her cousin were all taken to Xiao Qiaosheng’s place to watch those Falun Gong propaganda videos, and then trapped in the Falun Gong cult.
Mistaking a fraud as a true God, Zeng Changmei was totally obsessed with Falun Gong in just a short while, but she was unaware of her confusion at all. In the second half of 1998, she was appointed as the vice chief of the Falun Gong training station in Zhongfang County.
The promotion in the local Falun Gong cult organization strengthened her faith in Li Hongzhi’s lie that he was truly taking people to ascend to higher levels, thus she was more committed to the heretical ideas and deceptions of Falun Gong cult than before. She brainwashed herself so much that there was no place for family ties in her mind except “Dafa” and her “Master”.
After she became the vice chief, Zeng Changmei always left home quite early in the morning and went back home late in the evening around 7 or 8 o’clock. She gave up helping her daughters with their homework, and she almost quitted cooking for the whole family. At that time, her elder daughter was 11 years old and the youngest daughter was just 9. Although she was opposed by the whole family, she chose to fight back by quarrelling with her husband. However, considering herself as a Falun Gong “disciple of true cultivation”, she despised her family’s objection because she merely regarded it as the interference from mundane worldlings.
During that time, she was very busy with the Dafa promotion. On one hand, she would organize the local followers to exercise and learn Dafa, on the other hand, she would collect Falun Gong propaganda materials from higher organizations and then asked her subordinate “students” to distribute those illegal materials. At the very beginning, she could still manage to spare some time to weave bamboo hats. But she would spend most of the money she made from it to fund the Falun Gong cult activities, leaving only a fraction of the money to maintain the minimum living standard. However, with the expanding of Li Hongzhi’s political ambition, the number of illegal activities organized by Falun Gong cult increased rapidly day by day, so Zeng Changmei had to leave her housework behind and borrowed money from her relatives and friends to satisfy the increasing financial demand for “promoting Dafa”.
At this point, not only her family members, but also her relatives and friends were all strongly opposed to her cultivation, urging her to break away from the Falun Gong cult so that she could return to normal life. Her uncle kept persuading her, and her brother-in-law even said to her, “Sister, you know, since you are always absent, your family doesn’t even look like one anymore.” Instead of taking any of these kind advices, Zeng Changmei totally ignored them and viewed them as words from “demons”.
In July 1999, Falun Gong was banned by the government in accordance with the law, which was a wake-up call to many previous Falun Gong practitioners who recognized its nature from then. As for Zeng Changmei, instead of coming to her senses, she was even more obsessed with the Falun Gong cult. She stubbornly believed that those practitioners who gave up their beliefs in Falun Gong was merely an indication that they were not cultivating hard enough and their minds were not strong enough either.
In order to do what they called “telling the truth”, she and other wrong-headed cult followers kept engaging in illegal propaganda activities. Feared of being spotted during the daytime, they always sneaked around to slip those propaganda materials into the crack of the door in the neighborhood. Sometimes, they had to transport large volume of Falun Gong propaganda materials to neighboring counties in obedience of organizational arrangements at their own expense.
Her husband had no choice but to threaten to get divorced, which didn’t seem to worry her at all. Furthermore, she sarcastically defined her husband as a mediocre man, a total stranger to extraordinary concepts such as ascending to upper levels and consummation. Officials from the village visited her repeatedly to persuade her, and unsurprisingly they were all ignored by her and viewed as “mundane human beings” who knew nothing about “Fa-principles”.
As her mind highly confined to fallacies of the Falun Gong cult, she became so isolated and eccentric that she could hardly bear any critical remarks on “Dafa” and would start a fight if someone dared to question the “legitimacy” of Falun Gong, while she used to be quite easygoing and nice. For some time, she even had an illusion that she was on the verge of “achieving Consummation to ascend to heaven”, and often heard a voice whispering in her ears, “Jump down! Jump down so that you can fly!”
Later, those lies carefully fabricated by her “Master” Li Hongzhi were completely exposed after Zeng Changmei “benefited” so much from them. Of course, she suffered a lot in the meantime. Realizing that his painstaking persuasion was in vain, her husband went out of the village to work with resentment, leaving her nowhere to live but to crash with neighbors for her house was too shabby to live in. Left unattended, her youngest daughter suffered from severe stomach problem. Soon afterwards, her physical condition, which she believed was cleaned up by her “Master” and under the 24/7 protection of her “Master’s Dharmakaya”, finally cracked up under the burden of “promoting Dafa” at all costs.
This time, it almost killed her! In 2003, Zeng Changmei, a self-described “Falun Gong disciple of true cultivation”, was seriously ill. At first, she just had a fever which she thought nothing worse would happen to her for her faith in her “Master”, so she refused to take any medicine or injection and kept promoting Dafa in despite of her illness. Half a month later, the situation got even worse. She started to stagger when she was walking while with her fever still running Her husband took her to the hospital ignoring her reluctance for medical treatment. However, due to her persistent fever and long held refusal of any medicine and medical treatment, her fever deteriorated into viral encephalitis and she passed out during the IV infusion. Her husband and relatives raced her to the 3rd hospital in Huaihua without any delay. Fortunately, after three days of intensive care, she slowly regained consciousness.
After getting rid of the mind-control of Falun Gong, Zeng Changmeng said, “If I weren’t lucky enough to be sent into the 3rd hospital in Huaihua in time, I would have died long time ago. ”The repeated visits by anti-cult volunteers saved her. Without their selfless help, she would have been a broken woman by now. That was how she gained rebirth in 2005.
But Xiao Qiaosheng, her guide to Falun Gong, wasn’t as lucky as her, and failed to wake up from heretical ideas and deceptions of Falun Gong. He died miserably from rejecting medical treatments eventually because he believed that he was under the protection of his “Master’s Dharmakaya”.
Both the party and the government didn’t forget Zeng Changmei, and anti-cult volunteers also kept providing her with warm help, which contributed to her finding enthusiasm for life once again. After several years of great efforts, she and her husband successfully built a brand new family. By 2008, they paid off all their debts and afforded a two-story house worth 240 thousand Yuan.
More encouragingly, now Zeng Changmei has become an anti-cult volunteer. She uses her own experience of suffering as a painful reminder to show people that we must be on alert to the infringement of any evil cults.
