Philadelphia Falun Gong Practitioner Sharing During World Falun Dafa Day Gathering

Thank you, Alex. Wishing everyone a happy World Falun Dafa Day. Good afternoon. My name is Santosh Krishnamurthy and I'm a resident of Chester Springs. I'm here today to speak about my personal experience with Falun Dafa and how it was being brutally persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. I was born in South India with a humble background and immigrated to this great country in 2005. Like every immigrant who made it to the country, my wife and I built our step-by-step. I was very blessed with a successful career and personal life. While I stayed very fit and was making healthy choices with my food, back in 2015, I developed a serious health issue that no doctors could help explain the cause or the cure. I was disappointed, angry, frustrated, and suddenly felt hopeless. Even though I was blessed with everything, I felt empty inside. While discussing with one of my colleagues at work, he spoke about a great spiritual cultivation practice of mind and body called Falun Dafa. I had no idea what it was, but I knew that there was something special and it was something that I was always looking for. The core teachings of this practice are truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. I became very much drawn and very curious to learn more about this practice. I started reading and gathering a lot of information and also started to practice the exercises in addition to reading the core book teachings which is Yon Falun. The more I learned and did the exercises, the more I felt de-stressed and wonderful. After just a few weeks of practicing, my health condition started improving and to my surprise, I was completely cured. I felt full of positive energy and was always in high spirits. My family members and coworkers started to see a dramatic positive change in my overall behavior. Just by aligning my everyday life with truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, I started to experience a tremendous positive improvement of my mind which in turn started having a positive impact on my health too. It is truly a wonderful experience to practice Falun Dafa. I started to have a lot more empathy towards others, having a compassionate heart in everything that I do, and most importantly, maintaining a calm and serene attitude even during challenging situations in life. Looking at all of my positive changes due to this practice, my whole family including my mom, aunts, and my grandmother started practicing almost five years ago. The evil Chinese Communist Party has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners since 1999 and it is still ongoing to this day. This persecution is one of the largest campaigns of religious persecution happening in the world for the past 25 plus years. Millions of innocent people are detained, imprisoned, and forced into labor camps or prisons. Others are held in makeshift detention centers also known as black jails. According to one of the websites called Faluninfo.net, this widespread detention and imprisonment of Falun Gong practitioners have been reported by the United Nations, the U.S. Department of State, Amnesty International, and many Western media outlets. Moreover, since the year of 2000, there has been documented evidences of extreme torture published by major media outlets, human rights organizations, and the United Nations. A famous website mingwei.org has more than 100,000 cases of torture against Falun Gong practitioners documented and the true number is many times higher than that. If the above isn't enough to show the evil nature of the Chinese Communist Party, the most heinous crime against humanity is forced organ harvesting. This forced organ harvesting is state-sanctioned and has been carried out by the Chinese Communist Party since the early 2000s against Falun Gong practitioners. According to the data published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the average waiting period for organs in the U.S. is two years for a liver and three years for a kidney. In China, the waiting period for these organs at some hospitals is calculated in weeks. Arthur Kaplan, who is the director of medical ethics in NYU, says, quote, if you're going to go to China and you're going to get a liver transplant during the three weeks you're there, then that means someone is going to schedule an execution. Think about that. Innocent people are killed for organs, and if you're forced to transplant for three weeks, then a second, and more people are killed. What seems to be unbelievable, unthinkable, is actually happening in China under the oversight of the Chinese Communist Party today. Today I stand here at the most important historic place in the whole world, the Liberty Bell, that stands as a symbol of freedom in this great country of the United States of America. I sincerely urge everyone to stop by for a few minutes to learn more about this wonderful practice and take a stand against the ongoing persecution and completely reject the evil Chinese Communist Party. Finally, I would like to leave you all with these words to remember and cherish. Follow Tafas good, truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance is good. Thank you everyone.