I just talk about my own understandings on this website and that’s as far it goes for this position. If you want to know what Falun Dafa is about, read the books and lectures and you’ll come to your own understandings too.

The 2020 pandemic produced a phenomenon of people wearing masks for self-comforting reasons. In recent years the mask started to take on other purposes besides protection against illness, resembling how many people in Japan have long worn it to give themselves a feeling of personal privacy. In relation to the practice of Falun Dafa, you can say that when employees feel more comfortable wearing masks while working at retail stores, this indicates a notion developed in their thinking. The mask doesn’t do anything except cover up the face, so why do they want to cover up their face? They are afraid of catching illness from the patrons when there is no pandemic? They “just feel better”? When people want to wear a mask to feel more comfortable in their work environment for vague and self-absorbed reasons, this is a product of abnormal thinking or abnormal notions having taken root in their minds. After all, when you are moving around and doing retail shop labor it reduces your breathing. If it makes the employee feel like it provides some kind of social protection, they would, in previous years, be said to have a disorder of mind related to socializing. They have become controlled by a warped notion related to retreating into one’s own thinking. Notions can be transmitted, hence the term “mind virus,” and when they form they can influence people’s feelings. The notion can be taken up on a mass scale and become a trend. So the person feels more comfortable wearing the mask after following others who do it, but it doesn’t offer any benefit and the feeling that it does is an irregular cluster of thoughts in the person’s mind. This is just like the example in Zhuan Falun where it talks about people feeling refreshed after smoking a cigarette while taking a break when in reality the person just took a break. These notions aren’t limited to just self-created illusions. They can shape social trends and discussions. As time passes in this period of degenerating morals, they start to warp and become complicated and new phenomena arise that are dangerous to the survival of mankind. It becomes impossible to reason with people who have acquired these post-natally formed notions, who perhaps have picked them up from their peers or the news. You can pick up notions while taking courses in college, from your professor who thinks a certain way, and only when you come into contact with “real life” that provides sharp counterexamples is that notion challenged. This is the other issue which is that when people’s notions are challenged they will often get upset, especially if a large number of them are being affected by the implications of the situation. Some people will relinquish them and acquire wisdom while others won’t let go even when the evidence is physical. The notions shape people’s perception of evidence as well, and what they believe constitutes evidence for a position may not actually because it has become warped by their thinking. Modern notions are considered the most dangerous because they include acceptance of social phenomena and personal conduct that runs against basic moral values. When you have grown up in modernity, you cannot detect that this is the case and when you read some books of Falun Dafa with a left-leaning mindset you might think that something is conservative, but it isn’t actually like that.