大海訪談｜SEA Talks｜第12期｜馬可在美國｜Marco in America

Hi Marco I'm glad you've given us this opportunity. To share your personal experiences and thoughts. So let's start by discussing your upbringing. For example, where were you born? And what is your educational and professional background Sure I was born in Italy I’m originally from Italy from Florence which is in central Italy and I spent there like twenty-five years pretty much I went to college there I studied economics and anthropology in Florence for four years and I had the opportunity through the studies to open a bit more of my mind especially when it comes to state affairs in the world like human rights issues different countries have different levels of developments different cultural aspects When I finished university college I have to be honest I didn't really know what to do with my life which seems as fairly common in Italy based on the people I know and so I decided to move to Australia mainly because I wanted to learn English I couldn't speak English properly In Italian unfortunately it seems Italian educational system at least at that time twenty years ago I couldn't really learn English and I thought yeah I’m missing out if I’m unable to speak the international language for a series of I say events I decided to go to Australia In Australia I've been working in different different fields and restaurants in farms I was traveling and trying to understand what I wanted to do with my life So now you can speak English and Italian right Are there any other languages you speak Yeah Italian is my native language English I'm I would say can't complain And I can understand Spanish as well which is very similar to Italian I also had an opportunity to stay in Mexico and in Spain for several months for work and for vacation and so I pick it up very easily So how did you come into contact with and start practicing Falun Gong I started in Australia as I told you I moved to Australia after college and I have to say that I I wasn't I was not really interested in spiritual disciplines or let's say Asian eastern practices like I had tried yoga I had tried Taichi briefly a couple of times maybe but I was not really interested so what happened is that I was in a city called Brisbane and I was walking outside and there were a couple of people with a little table on the street and they were asking people to sign a petition for the human rights abuses that unfortunately are still happening in China This was back in 2006 and so I saw the petition I said well I don't know anything about this how is it possible and because part of my studies were dedicated to human rights issues around the world so I talk to Chinese person asking to him How come I don't know anything about this How do I know this is true and this person said well you don't know anything because the Chinese Communist Party is um it's putting in a lot of effort and money to censor this information and to spread propaganda in the west so it's not a surprise that you Don't know about the persecution of Falun Gong in China so Yeah I signed the petition and then this person told me well do you know about Falun Gong it’s a meditation practice is very good for you it's easy to learn it's free of charge if you want to try we get together during the weekend this is the location and I said well Yeah Why not Let's give it a try and so I went there It was a very nice park and I went there like three four times and then I said yeah okay well well I'm not sure I'm that interested but then the last time I went there I had a very strong reaction I felt really sick felt my bones where they were aching in a weird way I felt really dizzy I wasn't feeling that well and I was thinking what's happening I felt kind of concerned but then one of the local practitioners of Falun Gong who um I can say this person was managing was assisting other practitioners and the practice site She told me well it seems you're having a good reaction this is considered a purification of your body and she asked me did you read the books and I said well no I didn't know there are books I had no idea and she said well it's actually a good thing that you having this reaction it means that the exercises are working and I was kind of concerned but I said okay let me let me read these books and let's see what is all about and so I went back home and I downloaded there is a book in Falun Gong called Falun-gong which is the book that it's considered like an introduction That's what usually new comers people who try to practice read there is a section where the founder of Falun Gong Master Li Hongzhi explains the principle of the exercises there is a Q & A section at the end From that moment I can say it took me a while it took me several months to to commit to myself to practice Falun Gong seriously and it's been a very interesting process those months I have to say so yeah there is the book Falun Gong but the main book of the practice of Falun Dafa is called Zhuan Falun When I read that I my first I can say understanding was that there are principles in this book asking people to be good people to be a good person and to me to put that into practice yeah it took me a while I think because of my materialistic notions from ah I mean from being a kid and a teenager in this modern society it was kind of a challenge to accept and to put into practice Certain requirements But when I did honestly for myself many things changed To give an example I had very bad knees I had problems with my knees and I couldn't really run or use a bicycle it was very painful to keep my knees in a certain position One of the exercises is the is considered a sitting meditation where you should put one leg on top of each other that was impossible for me impossible because of the pain and at the beginning I had to put pillows between my legs under my knees um I had some ropes I was tying up my my legs to keep them in position when I started to follow the principles in the book and to release I can say to let go of negative mindsets negative thoughts my body changed as well and this is I can say this is a principle that I would have to say nowadays many people I met accept which is that the mind and the body are the same thing so if there is a change in the mind if you improve how you think if you let go of negative thoughts the body changes as well So with my knees before I had to get injections because I couldn't it was hard to work for real and then little by little I have no pain anymore and I can place one leg on top of each other I can do the sitting meditation comfortably So you mentioned earlier that the principles of Falun Gong attracted you So I would like to ask that is what are the differences between Falun Gong and Western religions Western religions also teach people to be good Well when it comes to this I have to say that I didn't really I can say attempted to follow a religion in Italy My family when I was a kid decided and not to let me attend religious religious schools or whatever teachings I didn't go to church at all which was fairly unusual in Italy This is back in the eighties fairly unusual I would say it was me and another kid out of fifty kids that I can remember at least so I don't have those those life experience which means I mean you go to church on Sunday you attend their rituals and things like that My mind said at that time was kind of negative against religions Because I thought that they during the centuries um people in power they changed and they distorted, in this case Jesus’s teachings for their own benefits mainly because the idea that I have is to to see in this case for westerners to see Jesus with his disciples in the forest with nothing and when you think about the church what you see are big buildings gold very expensive clothes and a lot of rituals so you have to dress in a certain way you have to do burning candles you have to do certain things in the morning you cannot eat certain foods you have to go to a certain location All of this is not present in Falun Gong and this is something that I found really honest really true One of the things that really attracted me the most at the beginning is that there is not a structure there is not a hierarchy so there is there are not different levels within Falun Gong It doesn't matter if I started ten years ago or two months ago we consider ourselves practitioners There is not a a level of I don't know you're a manager or you're a an abbot or you're a priest there are no levels there are no roles there are no titles and I found this really really touching I have to say there is one master as I said before Master Li Hongzhi who made the practice public in China to the world but there is no this kind of structure that you can find in religions so it's mainly it's a personal it's a personal practice and of course one thing that it's really helpful at least for me that we get together among people who practice Falun Gong and we do what at least in English is translated as sharing one's own experiences during the part of cultivation and this is done again not to I can say gain credits so you can get to another level but it's for other people's benefits the mindset is if I share my own experience my own challenges it can help other people to improve and the reason is that the thing that it's important in Falun Gong is to get rid of what it's considered as attachment an emotional attachment to something that it's really keeping you from being I would say really free and this can be many things like for me at the very beginning was food coming from Italy food has a strong it is very important from a cultural perspective you think good food, or certain kind of food is considered a necessity almost I have to say that maybe because I was in Australia but I understood okay I have to let go of certain notions that I have in my mind about... okay I have to drink coffee this way I have to eat pasta this way I have to eat pizza this way I have to cook meat this way also okay let's not put so much importance on food there are many things that are more important As long as I can eat that I have food I’m okay This is just an example Yoga and practicing Falun Gong what are the differences between them in terms of physical changes? Are there any differences Well again I did yoga maybe twice three times maybe but I found it really complicated obviously complicated um too many things to do Hahaha I have to say and at least at the time really boring for me because consider that the time I was twenty-three maybe twenty-four and I had this materialistic mindset that boys at least in my area in the west have so to me meditation was a waste of time you know if you don't get stuff done something out of it what's the point the main difference is that in Falun Gong there are requirements for your character for your moral character that's the main thing The exercises are very easy are very simple there are five sets of exercises that are very easy to learn you don't have to remember too many things you don't have to pay attention to the way you breathe or you have to visualize quite the opposite should keep your mind empty I read in the books there are several books published um little by little I came to realize that actually being able to let’s say meditate is actually very relevant being able to keep your mind empty is really powerful I really changed my mind from before I considered it like you're sitting there eyes closed you're wasting time you're not doing much But actually the way I see it is like strengthening my abilities to stay focused to stay calm and the reason is that in modern society you will have to face stress you will have to face challenges something will happen the way I see it... there is not such thing as a happy life you will have to deal with some problems and by being able to keep your mind stable personally I’d say I'm able to deal with everyday life problems much much better and this is something that most of my friends in Italy when they learned that I started to do meditation they were kind of making fun of me they were asking yeah but what do you gain haha what do you get from doing those exercises and I think it's not much what you what you gain but what you let go off and I would say that at least for me or let go off many thoughts that were selfish the idea that it's about me I want to I want to make money or I want to travel around or yeah I want to eat that delicious food um once I've been able to release this kind of selfish thoughts actually becomes much easier to deal with everyday problems much much easier I have to say I heard that practicing Falun Gong can develop special abilities Many Falun Gong practitioners have extraordinary experiences Have you had any such experiences Yeah I would say I had a a certain experience that you might consider I can say super normal I would say the thing to say is that certain states or yeah experiences are considered as such supernormal I think because modern science cannot explain them and I have to say that before starting with Falun Gong I was getting interested in this phenomenon that modern science cannot explain that they don't know what to make of it one thing that happens to I would say to many people I do Falun Gong is that there is this feeling of having an energy circulation around the body something really warm and it's a very nice feeling you can feel the energy circulating because coming from let's say Chinese traditional understanding of how the body works Chinese medicine beliefs that there are energy channels within the body and when you don't feel well you're sick you have a disease the understanding is that there is something wrong within these energy channels something is blocked and so doing a practice like Falun Gong helps to unblock to fix these energy channels So not only you feel better and my example with the knees that's very real feel way more energetic you feel way stronger so to speak This is one thing Then another thing that I was interested um actually before doing Falun Gong something that is called super normal like super normal powers things like that it's the fact of the of the third eye which is something that is explained in the books of Falun Gong and I was really interested in that because there are plenty of stories from the past of people who could see things from far away like things that happen in another location or things that happen in the past things that happen in the future Is there such a belief in Italy as well? Well there are stories of especially monks who could I can say demonstrate special powers special abilities I don't know However you want to see it that they could again they could see things or they could levitate even nowadays there are like so called magicians who are performing they're doing performances like show It's okay yeah where's the trick here there's no trick I mean these people have they have special abilities there's no other explanation this is not normal normal stuff one thing yeah I can I can share that it's a it was really powerful when I started the first time to do the exercises to when I decided okay I wanna do Falun Gong seriously consistently and I wanna do my best follow the requirements that are in the books yeah it took me like at several months and one thing that happened is that um one day I was driving and I stopped and I thought okay I have to decide if I wanna keep doing Falun Gong or if I don't do it I cannot stay in the middle yes or not and I could feel from from within Yes yes I wanna do it and it was a really honest response to my question it was it was not I was not faking it it was from within and then after that what happened is that I I could see like this sky opening divine beings looking at me and they were and they were like clapping and being happy it's not a illusion is real Yeah Yeah Very real Very real I think it didn't last that long I would say maybe five seconds who knows but it was definitely real and I felt really happy really warm that's okay this is the right thing to do this is really the right thing to do and I'm saying this because not only me my many friends who do Falun Gong I think that what happened is that they had to to pick to choose a path you do Falun Gong or you stop or you do something else so what do you choose There is something that it's more I would say it's very rational it's something well thought it's not say blind faith it's something that comes from from one’s experience um and so for me in those months yeah I had I met different people who were doing different things they were doing other practices Every time it was kind of a test it was okay am I following this person? or I’m staying with Falun Gong? and it happened like a couple of times after that experience and again I don't know how to explain it clearly but think about this sky that opens like like a curtain like in theater it open slowly and then you can see this scene behind yeah that was really intense and so after that I decided to to do my best to follow Falun Gong let's say teachings requirements That's really interesting Hmm, have you ever been to China before No No I don't maybe one day May your wish come true one day Thank you for spending so much time with us today Sharing your personal experiences with us I have benefited a lot from it. Thank you very much Thank you Marco now lives in New York He has also learned Chinese dragon dance Additionally, he is a food enthusiast In his free time, he has his own food channel Interested friends can go to his channel to enjoy Italian cuisine I have included the link to his channel below