Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai
Santimen International Seven-Day Retreat, Pingtung
Formosa, December 23, 1992 (Originally in Chinese)

 

You have to be cautious and self-confident. Listen to your inner intuition. Today, that attendant said that he had been amazed by an inner feeling telling him that he should rush over and light the way for me. I was then walking on a dark, rocky path. That was his immediate feeling and reaction, yet he and the other one were standing there like a couple of rocks. This is how we often make mistakes. We don't listen to our inner intuition. I have already told you: Eat when you are hungry and sleep when you are tired. By reacting naturally, you can not go wrong. Do not be veiled by preconceived ideas, or deceived by the thought "because people say this or that".

Sometimes, after you hear what I say, you start to act recklessly with the excuse that I have taught you to be natural. That is not being natural; that is scheming. Therefore, I give up; I am at my wit's end. I don't know what to say; I dare not speak any more. You are so good at "interpreting" my words to suit yourself. Suppose I were to say that there is no need to separate from your two wives, if you already have them. Then most probably someone would wait until he had two wives before he came for initiation. (Laughter) He would say that it did not matter because that was before he was initiated. (Master laughs) Sometimes, people deliberately create trouble. Why do you deceive yourselves? You should listen to your real Self! Natural responses can not be wrong.

I long so much to meet a truly natural person. I yearn for that more than you yearn for an Enlightened Master, but I cannot find a "human". This is incredible! Why would a human behave like that? What do we have to fear in doing the right thing? What could be wrong in lighting the way for someone without a light on a dark, rocky road? If I had scolded you for doing that, it would have been all right for you to scold me. If I had been so bad, you could have scolded me and enlightened me a bit.

That was a very simple thing. You knew within, but you took no action on the outside. At that moment, you failed to listen to your own Self. This kind of situation occurs daily. Every day the inner Master Power is trying to function and help us, but we stop It. That is why we are agonized. We have to do it sooner or later, but we are a bit slow and suffer a little, because destiny cannot be changed. Sometimes, it is very obvious to us that we should do certain things. If we are held back by preconceived ideas, fear, or some other reasons, then we feel very vexed and depressed. It is because we do not listen to God's will and our own Self. Most people in the world suffer very much because of that. They contaminate each other, telling each other what is bad about this and wrong about that. But then they still do it, and with guilty feelings. They cannot enjoy fully, nor are they able to say no. At the end, they are trapped in misery, living a very painful life, with no freedom at all.

We live on the great earth beneath the vast sky, without any barriers or obstructions. However, each of us is carrying a portable prison on our body all the time, ever ready to confine ourselves in it, lock ourselves in, and be tortured. Then all we get is pain, suppression, boredom, stress, and tension. Therefore, we must not wait until we die to get liberation; it should be achieved now, in this lifetime. Just demolish your own prison and then you will become an absolutely free, natural, and peaceful person. The more tense and stressed we are, and the more we confine ourselves, the worse we become. Normally, I enjoy seeing you very much. It is only because you are scared of me that you imagine a lot of things to separate us. As a result, I feel uncomfortable seeing you; the more nervous you are, the more uncomfortable I feel.

The more nervous and ill at ease you are, the more likely you are to make mistakes. And the more mistakes you make, the more I scold you. The more I do that, the more nervous you become. And the more nervous you are, the more I scold you. It goes on in a circle and we drift further and further apart. Isn't that too bad?

Therefore, vexations are created by ourselves only, nothing else! There are no obstacles, nothing. Really, there is nothing happening in the world. This is how most of you create trouble for yourselves, by hindering yourselves from developing, and depriving yourselves of relaxation. When you are not relaxed, your mind is blocked and, of course, you cannot act rightly. It is our destiny that we ought to do such and such things, but the happiness or pain in doing them is generated by ourselves. When we are too uptight, our mind is blocked and we act in an unhappy way. There should perhaps be just a little pain, but we multiply it several hundred times, just because we are too uptight. Sigh! Sometimes, I feel that you are so pitiable that I don't know what to say! You really don't have to live in such misery!

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