Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai, Malaysia,
February 24, 1992 (Originally in English)
Videotape No. 216

Q. Master, you have said that we punish ourselves. (M. Yes, we punish ourselves.) But still in this world, we never see that when children do something wrong, they punish themselves. It's the mother or father who punishes the child. And also when we break traffic laws, we do not ourselves go to the police station and say, "Oh! I was speeding." But it's the police who catch us and punish us. So it feels like there's a higher witness who witnesses our good and bad karma and who gives us rewards and punishments according to our actions. It's hard to think that we ourselves are providing the reward and punishment.

M. The laws of this world and the inner laws are different. We ourselves are consciousness; whatever we do in this world is physical. We need physical eyes to watch, physical hands to catch us, and physical laws to govern us in the things we do physically. But there are things that are deeper than the physical level: when we hurt people intentionally, or rob people's things and know that we should not. The police may not even catch us, but we ourselves are the witness - all the time, 24 hours a day. We cannot run away from our conscience.

Therefore, sometimes we commit wrong actions in this world and the police do not catch us. But we always know we have done wrong. And the wrongdoing feeling will continue to follow us. Whatever we do and whatever we think creates a kind of energy form, surrounding us and sticking to our psychic body. And that's what we have to bear after we leave this world of material things and material existence, because some crimes are beyond retribution. For example, if we kill someone, the policemen catch us and bring us to prison. We serve a prison term of maybe ten or twenty years or maybe our whole life. But that doesn't erase our conscience. Because life has not been restored to the person we killed during our prison term, not at all. We know he is dead. And his children, his wife and his beloved wail for him, miss him and suffer. And their hatred and suffering also create a kind of energy that is directed toward us, and we cannot escape it. Thoughts have form and energy; that's why people can perform hypnotism. Therefore, the thoughts and hatred of the dead person and the hatred of his loved ones will continue to harm you and follow you. And your own conscience will continue to create this kind of repenting energy and make you feel troubled. Even a prison term cannot erase that.

That's how we - as God, as energy, as wisdom and spirit, as power - cannot tolerate the wrongdoing of our mistakes. So we have to find a way to level them out, in order to ease our conscience. That's how we fall into a level of consciousness that is very dark, has no light in it and has suffering. And that is called hell. Actually, hell doesn't otherwise exist. Apart from our own conscience, apart from the consciousness of wrongdoing people, there is no hell. It is different on the physical level than on the spiritual level; psychically we know what we are doing wrong, even though other people don't know.

There are many things people don't know. For example, there are many people who are so wicked that they can curse people and make them sick. Physically, there is no proof that the police can use to catch them, but psychically or mentally that wicked person knows all the time.

We are the best witness of any crime or any virtuous behavior that we act out. That's why I said we punish ourselves, or we award ourselves Heaven. You can say that this is the higher order. That's our higher Self, our higher consciousness or our Justice that writes down this sentence for us. But it is our Self, our true Self.

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