Why would a new practitioner who has just begun studying the practice, or a veteran practitioner whose body has been adjusted, experience physical discomfort in his cultivation practice as though he were seriously ill? Also, why does this happen once in a while? In teaching the Fa, I told you that this is to eliminate your karma and to improve your enlightenment quality while eliminating the karma from your different previous lives. Besides, this is also to test whether you are determined in following Dafa; this will continue until your cultivation reaches beyond Shi-Jian-Fa. This is putting it in general terms.

As a matter of fact, a person does not know how many lifetimes—in each of which he has accrued a great deal of karma—he has gone through. When a person is reincarnated after death, some of his sickness-karma is pressed into his body at the microscopic level. When he is reincarnated, the new physical body’s matter has no sickness-karma on the surface (but there are exceptions for those with too much karma). What was pressed into the body in the previous life then comes out, and when it returns to the surface of this physical body, the person will become ill. Yet the sickness will usually appear to be triggered by an external condition in the physical world. This way it will conform on the surface to the objective laws of our physical world. That is, it will comply with this human world’s principles. As a result, everyday people have no way of knowing the actual truth about the cause of the sickness, and they are thus lost in delusion without being enlightened. Upon becoming ill, the person will take medicine or seek various kinds of treatments that in effect press the sickness back into the body again. Consequently, instead of paying for the sickness-karma from his wrongdoing in the previous life, he will do some additional bad things in this life to hurt others; this will bring about new sickness-karma and lead to different kinds of sicknesses. Nevertheless, one will again take medicine or use various treatments to press the sickness back into the body. Surgery can only remove flesh in the superficial physical dimension, while the sickness-karma in another dimension has not been touched at all—it is simply beyond the reach of modern medical technology. When the sickness recurs, the person will again seek treatment. When a person is reincarnated after death, any sickness-karma that has accrued will again be pressed back into his body. This cycle goes on one lifetime after another; it is unknown how much sickness-karma accumulates in a person’s body. This is why I said that all of today’s mankind has come to this point with karma built upon karma; besides sickness-karma, a person has other kinds of karma as well. Therefore, people have hardships, tribulations, and conflicts in their lives. How can they only pursue happiness without paying for karma? People nowadays have so much karma that they are soaked in it, and they will encounter unpleasant things at any time and in any situation. Whenever a person leaves his home, there will be something bad awaiting him. When there are conflicts, however, people do not endure them and do not realize that they are paying off their karma from the past. If a person is not treated well by others, he will treat others even worse, thereby producing new karma before paying for the old. This makes society’s moral values decline daily, and everyone becomes enemies among one another. Many people cannot think through this: What’s happened to people today? What’s going on with today’s society? If mankind continues like this, it will be extremely dangerous!

As a cultivator, in addition to the karma eliminated by Master, you have to pay for a portion yourself. You will thus feel physically uncomfortable, as though you were suffering from a sickness. Cultivation practice is to clean you up from the origin of your life. The human body is like the annual rings of a tree, whereby each ring contains sickness-karma. So your body must be cleaned up from the very center. Were karma to be pushed out all at once, however, you would not be able to take it, for it would endanger your life. Only a piece or two can be pushed out every once in a while, allowing you to overcome it, and through the suffering pay off your karma. But this is only that little bit left for you, yourself to endure after I have eliminated karma for you. This will continue until your cultivation reaches the highest form of Shi-Jian-Fa (i.e., the pure-white body), when all of your karma will have been pushed out. Yet there are also some people with very little sickness-karma, and there are other special cases. Cultivation practice in Beyond Shi-Jian-Fa is that of the purest Arhat body—a body that does not have any sickness-karma. But as for a person that has not yet achieved completion of cultivation and who is still practicing cultivation towards higher levels beyond Shi-Jian-Fa, he will still suffer and have tribulations and trials to advance his level. These will only involve interpersonal conflicts or those involving other things in the area of xinxing and the further abandonment of his attachments; he will no longer have physical sickness-karma.

Eliminating sickness-karma is a matter that cannot be casually done for an everyday person, and this is absolutely impossible for a non-practitioner that must only rely on medical treatment. Doing this at will for an everyday person is actually undermining the principles of heaven, for it means that a person can do bad things without having to pay for the karma. It absolutely will not do if a person does not repay his debts—the principles of heaven won’t permit it! Even the treatments of ordinary qigong also are to push the karma inside a person’s body. When a person has too much karma and is still doing bad things, he will face destruction—the complete destruction of both body and soul—at his death, which is total extinction. When treating a sickness for a human being, a great enlightened being can completely eliminate the karmic cause of that sickness, but this is done mainly with the purpose of saving people.