【Introduction】Aunt Ping was the one that I helped when I served as a volunteer deprogrammer in the community. She was a laid-off worker in a mining factory in the mountain area of northern Guangdong Province at the end of 1990s. After being told by her son that he wouldn’t come back home for the Chinese New Year festival this year (2022), she got quite upset so that she called me the other day about it. I comforted her and encouraged her to give both her child and herself more time to heal, and then everything would eventually get better. I could tell by her voice that she was still a little disappointed. With her consent, I put her story on record as a case to wake cult fowllowers up and get them back to normal life. . Here is aunt Ping’s dictation.

Near the Spring Festival, my son called me to say that he wouldn’t come back home to celebrate the Lunar New Year together, and he didn’t go into details about the reason. I haven’t seen my grandson for over 2 years and I miss him very much. But I’m in no place to ask my son to do things the way I wish as a result of my mistakes. The gap between my son and I is quite wide. Even if he wouldn’t forgive me, I will never blame him for the pain that I have to live with the rest of my life. The pain was caused by my mistake lasting for 23 years, for which I owe my son too much.

I once had a complete family of three, but it broke up after I started practicing “Falun Gong”.

In 1996, I heard by chance a friend talk about how good it was to practice “Falun Gong”. At that time, I was on the verge of divorce with my husband, so I was quite downcast and in poor health. Out of curiosity, I went to the venue where they practice “Falun Gong” together. In the park, an enthusiastic practitioner introduced “Falun Gong” to me. I was interested in Buddhism when I was young, so I asked him if it was Buddhism. He answered that Buddhism was just a branch of “Falun Gong”, and advised me to buy books and video tapes and to learn them at home. I bought the book Zhuan Falun (Turn the Dharma wheel) and other audio and video tapes. Because I was not allowed to read irrelevant books at work, so I just listened to audio tapes, in which Li Hongzhi preached that “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance” was the great fundamental Dafa (great law) of the universe, and that people who practiced it wouldn’t be plagued by diseases, and that nothing bad would happen to fellow practitioners because he had countless Dharma bodies to protect them, etc. His words really got my heart pumping as I thought I had found the correct Dharma. I always strongly advised my relatives and friends to try “Falun Gong”, but they all gave it up after trying because they all felt it was of no use. In contrast, I felt a clear advancement on my part which made me convinced that I had more attachment to this “Dafa” than most of the others and that I was bound to be a “cultivator” while others had “too much emotion to cultivate away”.

Ever since I believed in “Falun Gong”, I had gradually become indifferent to my family. And my relationship with my husband totally broke up from the formerly precarious status. Li Hongzhi said that followers should cultivate away “fame, material interest, and emotion” then I started with emotion cultivation first by signing on our divorce agreement. After divorce, I devoted all my time and efforts to practicing “Falun Gong”. Thus, I became more and more indifferent to my son by not caring for his life and study to an extent that I didn’t even know which grade he was in or which school he was attending. Anyway, my “Master” said that one person in a family practicing Falun Gong would bring benefits to the whole family, therefore I believed that I didn’t have to take care of him then, and that everything would be fine for him later as long as I could “reach Consummation”, then he could “ascend to heaven” as well to leave the earth which had already become a big junkyard.

In July 1999, the state banned the “Falun Gong” cult organization in accordance to national laws, and “Falun Gong” organizations instigated followers to make trouble in Beijing. In order to “clarify the truth”, I secretly handed out propaganda leaflets and worked for “Falun Gong” by paying out of my own pocket. My “Master” Li Hongzhi was worshipped by me as the “master Buddha of the universe”. As a divorced and an unemployed woman, I kept practicing “Falun Gong” while doing odd jobs, and I would make contribution to “Falun Gong” in my spare time, hoping I could be blessed with good fortune for my diligence and advancement.

I was in a mess like this for 23 years, during which I was all alone and faced financial difficulties all the time. Sometimes I went back to my hometown to see my son, but he would either hide from me or refuse to call me “Mom”. As time went by, I got used to his behavior, but I never doubted my faith in “Falun Gong” or reflected on reasons why I lived such a hard life and why my son acted like a stranger to me.

Three years ago, when I was sick and poor, I met Xiao Lan (community volunteer). At that time, I was suffering from an acute enterogastritis. She took me to a hospital for medical treatment and paid for my medicines. With sincerity and warmth, she opened my heart which was possessed by bigotry and indifference. I still wondered why I suffered from the disease as a practitioner, and why I wasn’t protected by the “Dharma bodies” of my “Master”, and why over twenty years of cultivation failed to prevent me from suffering diseases, and why I wasn’t advanced enough after I devoted everything I had to “Falun Gong”.

Xiao Lan was so kind and patient to me. She gave me a systematic guidance on my past experience of practicing “Falun Gong”, cited cases of those “Falun Gong” practitioners who refused medical treatments after being ill, exposed the real danger and evil nature of “Falun Gong”, and analyzed reasons why I was so addicted to it. Actually, I knew those people in cases cited by Xiao Lan. Some of them died of diseases and others were suffering from diseases even though they kept practicing “Falun Gong”. As the old saying goes, “those closely involved cannot see as clearly as those outside”. I never doubted whether their tragedies and suffering had anything to do with “Falun Gong”, or never thought about what benefits it brought about to me with my efforts of over 20 years.

In the face of the irrefutable truth, I could gradually come back to sense to realize that it was a nightmare of over 20 years to me, during which I fell into clutches of the “Falun Gong” cult organizations and wasted all my efforts and time in my prime of life. It was no better than any other cult in the world, and it was an evil cult out and out. It had misappropriated terms of Buddhism, distorted teachings of Buddhism, deceived the world and poisoned people’s minds under the guise of Buddhism. However, I was mistakenly convinced that it was Buddhism.

When the truth came out in the wash, there was no word that could described my pain and suffering in my heart. The world view I used to firmly believe in collapsed, leaving my heart riddled with wounds that was impossible to heal in a short time.

I was on the verge of breakdown, because the thing that I spent half my life firmly believing in turned out to be a trap that only ensures my doom instead of a lifesaving way on which I could pin my hope.

I felt so unfamiliar when looking at my nearly 30-year-old son. Perhaps in his mind, I was even more unfamiliar and distant to him. Ever since being obsessed with “Falun Gong”, I had been absent from every stage of his life. I had no idea how he got into high school or university, how he faced the judgment of those around him about having “a cult-worshiping mom”, what difficulties he once had, what confusion and pain he went through, and what kind of image “his mother” was in his heart.

I remembered that he once wrote me a mail asking me why people accused his mother of being a bad person and whether “Falun Gong” was more important than both him and his father. He also asked me in that mail when I would go back home. Although I was touched by his words and had my confusion back then, I was so obsessed with “Falun Gong” that I totally believed in its fallacies. When I recalled it now, he must’ve gone though many unknown disappointments and pains in his childhood, which were imposed by me as a mother. The so-called “Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance” turned out to be nothing but “pure cruelty”. What an awful mother I was to abandon my family, son, relatives, friends, and to violate laws for the faith in a cult! As a result, I ended up suffering poverty and illness in my old age. What a deep sadness and helplessness it is for me now!

I am alone and struggling with my sick body in this world. My heart is riddled with guilt and remorse, and I couldn’t face my son. It is too heavy a burden for me to find a way to make it up to my son for the past over 20 years. After breaking away from the cult, I tried to communicate with him, trying to heal the rifts between us. As the old saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, I understand it. And I still have a long way to go. It seems that my son has been used to a life without a mother and that there is a huge wall between us that we don’t know how to make it tumble down.

I hate “Falun Gong” to the bone. I didn’t expect that my fate would change so dramatically simply because the incident back in 1996. “Falun Gong” enticed me to abandon my family, cut off from society and escape from reality. The so-called “cultivating away fame, material interest, and emotion” is nothing but a trick of the cult to make followers isolate themselves from the reality so that they would be easily mind-controlled by Li Hongzhi. In the meantime, these followers were also brainwashed and deprived of normal thinking so that they embark on a road of self-destruction. Cults poison people’s minds on the psychological and cognitive levels to distort your normal understanding of the world, entice you into cutting others out of your life, and make you too confused to see clearly evil natures of cult.

I’m glad to run into Xiao Lan. She and her colleagues helped me, saved me and pulled me back from the edge of the abyss. For the rest of my life, I will cherish my days and try to make up for the damage I caused to my child by learning to be a good mother and grandmother again. I believe that a prodigal who returns is more precious than gold. In time, my son will witness my efforts and sincerity.

Hereby, I strongly appeal to people to be on the alert against any cult. And I also sincerely hope that those who are still obsessed with any cult could soon stop falling deeper and deeper down the traps of cults, otherwise, what awaits you would be nothing but an abyss with no turning back.