ANGELA: What we have to do every day is the exercises. There are four standing ones. It includes a lot of, like, stretches, moving our arms about, keeping our arms up or down, kind of like Tai Chi, very slow movements, very boring. And one meditation exercise where we would sit down, and we would meditate for about an hour. And we had to read Master Li's teachings every day. Some people read one lecture a day, and some people would read the whole book. In the beginning, it was pretty normal, aside from this thing called “Sending Righteous Thoughts”, where we sit down for 15 minutes four times a day, including at midnight, which my family and I decided to skip. But a lot of practitioners actually get up in the middle of the night and “Sending Righteous Thoughts” for 15 minutes. But there were certain rules that my mom was willing to break for the comfort of our home. Other than that, she was very devoted. Like, we weren't allowed to have pets because we believe that having pets within a very spiritual home would cause the pet to become demonic and try to ruin our lives. Because all living things want to reach Enlightenment, and if the dog found out about cultivating, it would want to reach Enlightenment and accidentally become a demon.

LIZ: Oh. Well, that makes no sense at all.

TYLER: Right. Because being a demon is much more likely to come from a cat. You know what I'm talking about, cat owners.

LIZ: They do have those demon eyes.

ANGELA: And the last thing that we had to do, at least weekly, was to do some kind of volunteering for Falun Gong. We did a lot of advertisement at parades. There was always a Falun Gong float, like 4th of July parades, Thanksgiving parades. We would hand out brochures to people who watched. We would go to parks and do the meditation practices, and people would be interested and be like, “who are these people? They look so peaceful and happy. I want to try.” And that would get a lot of people to sign up as well.

TYLER: And like every cult, there is an US versus THEM.

ANGELA: We thought non-practitioners were people to be saved. We pitied them a little bit because they didn't know the “Truth”, and we wanted to save them by any means possible. So saving would mean either you become a Falun Gong practitioner and you become one of us “gods”, and you can have your own little universe once you become enlightened, or you can interact with Falun Gong-related contact and be saved and become a citizen in one of our universes. You can still go to heaven, but I will be the King of that Heaven, and you will be one of my little civilians if I save you, that is.

LIZ: Hold on. I thought I was just doing some breath work, working on cultivating more “Tolerance” and “Compassion”, and now you're saying that I can only go to Heaven if you save me?

TYLER: You, Liz, did not read the Fine Print.

LIZ: You've got to read the Fine Print of these cults, man!

ANGELA: Falun Gong members of themselves do not consider it a religion. It says explicitly in the teachings that “we're not a religion”. We believe in a God, and we follow the teachings of that God very closely. So the fun thing about Falun Gong is that you can practice it from the comfort of your own home. At first, there was no community that we went to in the beginning. We would do the exercises and read the book together.

 

LIZ: But Angela's mom,...

ANGELA: Eventually she read the lecture that says you should go to a community. So we found the community and we went to this little office warehouse in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And that's where we would read the book and do group sharing. The group sessions were once a week, every Saturday in the evening, about three hours long. They described it as what you wanted to achieve was basically sitting in an eggshell. You want to get rid of all your thoughts, all your feelings in that moment. Enlightenment comes from getting rid of your Attachments or worldly desires, your emotions, all likes and dislikes, a robot of a person, essentially. The exercises were two hours long, and of course, that was really boring. I didn't want to do them anymore because I was in the little warehouse playing with my friends who were also kids of the cult members. We were just climbing on the warehouse walls, no adult supervision, stealing coffee from the lounge.