(Clearwisdom.net) For the last several years, while imprisoned in Section Eight of the Heilongjiang Provincial Women's Prison, Falun Dafa practitioners have been validating the Fa, saving sentient beings amidst the persecution, studying the Fa and doing the exercises in an upright manner. This is a manifestation of our firm belief in both Teacher and Falun Dafa. Using the Fa to guide our hearts, we have learned how to cultivate toward our common goal of validating the Fa through righteous thoughts and actions. In the beginning, we didn't know how to cultivate, and knew only how to validate the Fa with ordinary human mindsets.
I was imprisoned in the Heilongjiang Women's Prison in Harbin City in 2001. During the years since then, six hundred other Falun Dafa practitioners have also been imprisoned in Section Eight. Of all of these good people, the oldest was seventy years old; the youngest only twenty. The most severe sentence was a suspended death sentence for a fabricated murder charge; the lightest was two years in prison. There have been practitioners there from all walks of life, including college professors and students. Both the severity and the range of this persecution are unprecedented. This place is being used as an evil den to imprison Falun Dafa practitioners.
There are no safeguards for human life in the Harbin Women's Prison. People's dignity is routinely trampled upon, and their fundamental human rights are treated with utter contempt. Falun Dafa practitioners are forced to wear prison uniforms, to memorize prison rules, to shout loudly when entering or leaving a room to announce themselves, and to wear nametags identifying them as prisoners. They are forced to work seventeen to eighteen hours of hard labor each day, and the food served to them is not fit even for animals. Criminal prison inmates abuse them with filthy language, and sexual abuse is rampant. Prison officials use these criminal prison inmates to monitor Falun Gong practitioners twenty-four hours a day. The prison has set up a system of monitoring practitioners in groups of five, with four criminal inmates to monitor each Falun Dafa practitioner. Practitioners are not permitted to speak to each other. If the rules aren't strictly enforced, eight criminal inmates stand to lose from one to three months credit towards their own early release each time they are caught allowing any leniency whatsoever to practitioners. These criminals consider the early-release credit to be very important, and this system has caused Falun Dafa practitioners to be frequently and zealously abused and beaten.
In 2002, prison officials sent a group of guards to other facilities to learn how to implement the brainwashing of Falun Dafa practitioners. When they returned, the prison started an all-out effort to carry out its brainwashing work. All of a sudden, evil beings filled the women's section. They blamed the self-immolation in Tiananmen Square on Falun Gong practitioners; they hung up more than one hundred and fifty calligraphy notices and paintings in the training center and then forced everyone to read them. There were people there to read out loud the materials, play the videos and distribute books. Prison guards took turns preaching against Falun Gong and then forced everyone to write articles criticizing it as well. When several of us tried to get rid of the calligraphy and paintings, Ms. Zhang Shuqin, a Dafa practitioner, was caught. As punishment she was handcuffed and locked in shackles from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. each day for over two months. She was tortured to such an extent that all her hair turned white and she looked a decade older. Later, when Ms. Zhang was assigned to Section Eight, she was so severely tortured that her front teeth were broken and her fingernails fell out. Two of the criminal prisoners, Zhang Mingmei and Li Guihong, tied her to a board, which they then raised up and dropped to the ground. She told us later that it felt like her organs were being torn apart. She was also tied up and hung on the side of her bed for more than ten days. Afterwards, she couldn't control her arms for six months. Such torture happened everywhere.
After reading the 2003 "Teaching and Explaining the Fa at the Metropolitan New York Fa Conference," we all decided not to cooperate with the evil forces. We refused to do hard labor. We remained unmoved in our minds even as the criminal prisoners slashed our flesh and tore our clothes. We refused to shout slogans. We did not react when they refused to let us see our families. We refused to wear prisoners' uniforms even when they hung us up for so long that we lost consciousness. Prison guards stripped us of all but our shorts, handcuffed us, and then kept us in isolation for several months at a time. We weren't even afraid of being injected for nine consecutive days with mind control drugs. We continued doing the group exercises and sending forth righteous thoughts while suffering these abominable tortures.
Why did we suffer such heavy persecution despite not wearing prison clothing, doing the exercises and sending forth righteous thoughts? It is because we didn't achieve the goal of having righteous minds. When everyone was called upon to do things, some practitioners still had mindsets of things like rushing things, competitiveness, hate, resentment, fear of being left behind and thinking they had to pay for their past wrongdoings. All these mindsets are the result of self-validation, not validation of the Fa. These are things of a selfish mind, not the mind of one validating the Fa and saving sentient beings. As we improve in our understanding of the Fa, we increase the number of things we do with righteous thinking. Let us cooperate with each other and negate the persecution against us!
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