Reborn’s Class I (睿朋心靈基因改造班)

The main force that drove me to make this Taiwan trip was Reborn’s Class I (睿朋心靈基因改造班).

During my last Taiwan trip, I purchased one of Teacher Lin’s (林顯宗) books — “與靈溝通“. I was impressed by its content but had a hard time grasping some of its concepts. For example, Time is not liner but the past, the present, and the future coexist at the same time? You are I, I am you, and we are all “One”? However, once finishing it, I placed it in my bookshelves and didn’t touch it again. 3 months later as I was answering a Christian friend’s email about God, I actually came to the same conclusion as Teacher Lin. That was a big shock to me! Although it had been mentioned many, many times in various Buddhist Sutra and I had never doubted that Buddha would lie, I just couldn’t quite understand it and had to treat it as “The Truth” and leave it like that. So when I did come up with the same answer on my own, it totally blew me away! This finding made me pull out Teacher Lin’s book and reread it. A little voice in my head told me that I needed find out more about his teaching.

But I didn’t know anything about him other than this book and, Gosh, his Reborn classes were awfully expensive! (The 3-day-long Class I is US$2,200 and the 6-day-long Class II is US$4,400. They cost even more than high tech conferences in the States!) Being cautious, I asked Teacher Chen (陳老師) if the whole thing was just a money trap. She replied that I could attend those classes to see things from a different angle and have a better understanding on how to practice Buddhism. In short, I could benefit from these classes. So, I thought, OK, I would just enroll Class I to see if I could really get anything out of it.

So I spent 3 days (12/06 – 12/08) in Taichung (台中) for Class I. Reborn employees did take great care of me, especially Ivy (怡潓). she was very patient with my endless questions and worked hard to make it possible for me to take the class. At first I thought that of course the employees had to be friendly, because we paid them a bundle. (I know, I know, the Chinese me put a price tag on everything…) However, after 3 days of chatting and hanging out with them, I realized that their friendliness was downright sincere. Every one of them was a student like us before, and they themselves came to Reborn with their own hard stories (I was probably one of the very few students that didn’t come here at the lowest point of my life). They found what they learned greatly helped them go through the tough time and even gain a bright outlook of their lives. They wanted to share this great find, so they quit their original jobs and started working here ever since. They had been there, done that, so they could understand students’ needs and sorrow and treated everyone with kindness.

So how did the class go? Well, Class I was structured to have both lectures and 10-hour “communication sessions” (專業溝通). The lectures were taught by both Teacher Lin and Teacher Chen (陳嘉堡). Even though the material could be found at their books, it was definitely more clear to see them explain it on the white board. Personally, I found the most interesting part was the communication sessions, which applied the techniques from Vijñānavāda.

Vijñānavāda, or Consciousness-only (唯識學), is the Buddhist branch that interests me the most. It’s called the psychology of Buddhism, but it discusses much deeper and broader than the Western psychology can ever cover. And because it talks about so much phenomenon, it’s also very complicated and difficult to learn, let alone applying the theory to one’s everyday life and benefiting from it. The techniques they applied during those sessions were pretty simple and in some ways similar to psychologists’, but they had different goals and the results were drastically different. Also, those communication professionals didn’t apply hypothesis. What they did was guiding us to face our problematic “seeds” (bīja, 種子) , or the “cause” (因), and removing them in the process to change the outcomes, or the “effect” (果).

Frankly, I didn’t think that their techniques would work, because they sounded too intuitive and too simple. Also, I was in general pretty happy with my life; I couldn’t figure out if there was anything nagging me (other than finding a job next year) that needed their help. I had dumped all my past burden on various good friends, so it was not like that I had any secrets that burned inside of me. Well…

I was very surprised by my reaction. Lots of things that I thought that I already forgot the pain or they were nothing to me all surfaced. My communication person, a beautiful lady named Michelle, forced to me repeat the same painful situation over and over and over again, until I calm down and in peace with that situation. Then she guided me to imagine a bright light on me and on the person/people in that particular situation and then let the person/people go.

When I read about the techniques, I thought that everything was just my imagination and doubted how this could help at all. But, boy, telling a stranger all my past painful stories, facing the same painful situation over and over again, and eventually “communicating” with the person/people to let them know how much I was hurt or truly apologizing to them for what I’d done… Not only that it took a lot of guts to do so, but my body was literally aching in a way that I didn’t know that it would. During the first day’s 2 sessions, my left chest and shoulder blade hurt so much that I even thought that my gallbladder was inflaming again. (But that was impossible; I already had it removed years ago.) The physical pain subsided shortly after we finished our 2nd session, but it revealed to me how close our mind and our body related to each other.

The very next morning I noticed that a dark red, hard,  palm-sized rash at the bottom of my left shoulder blade. Also my left elbow showed a couple of nickle-sized skin problem. Tiny red hard dots covered my upper body dispersedly. My first reaction was that Harbor Hotel was not clean, but the location of the giant rash made me wonder if it was related to yesterday’s sessions. When I arrived at Reborn and asked Michelle about it, she told me not to worry. And sure enough, all the rash was gone when I got back to my hotel room that evening. Now I had to believe that our mind was way more powerful than we could ever imagine, just as what Buddha had said 2,600 years ago! Actually Buddha said that everything was created by our mind. I still couldn’t grasp his words from the bottom of my heart, but at least I knew that my mind can influence my body in a way that I had never knew that it could.

At the end of third day, everyone got on the stage to talk about what one had learned and felt about this past 3 days. I reported that I proved that the power of my mind and how closely related it was to my body. And because “seeing” my past lives and knowing why I reincarnated again, I decided to really fulfill my “homework” and I knew how to go about it this time. I definitely felt the joy of knowing the purpose of my life.

And just as what I had thought, I was one of the few students who didn’t come to this class at the lowest point of my life. I didn’t want to talk about other students’ situations (and I shouldn’t anyway), but after listening to their stories, I had to say that I had a lot of respect for them. If I were them, I had no idea if I would have the guts to reveal my deepest and darkest secrets to a group of strangers. It was obvious that they had a different outlook on life now, and they felt that they had the courage to face the obstacles in their lives. I couldn’t tell how many people got saved from this class… The effect on everyone was truly amazing, just amazing!

So what to do next? Taking Class II, of course! Teacher Lin revealed at the end of the 3 day class that what we’d learned was less than 10% of what he had. The rest of the 90+% material would be taught in Class II. So, get ready for Class II!

P.S. The class was from 12/06/2008 to 12/08/2008.

[12/16/2008 UPDATE] Although Teacher Chen had encouraged me to take Class I, she thought that it would be better for me to take the advanced 7 Day Meditation Retreat (默照禪七) at Dharma Drum Mountain (法鼓山) now and then take Reborn’s Class II later. She explained her reasons to me, and we had several lengthy discussions about it. So this morning I contacted both organizations and rearranged my plans.