News 89, Master Says

The Creative Source of our Real Being

Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai
Los Angeles, California, USA • September 13, 1997
(Originally in English)

I was mostly an introvert when I was young. I didn’t talk too much the way I do now — only rarely. I also didn’t know what to talk about. Remember I told you how my husband’s friends talked to each other about everything for so long and how I always wished I could talk about half that much to my husband? Things would have been more lively that way. But normally I didn’t talk. I didn’t know what to talk about. I’ve really changed. I’ve really changed into a different person. I don’t know how, but things have changed.

Even many people who knew me before, from the times when I ran around Indian ashrams, were surprised that I talk so much. When these people read my lectures that you print in the magazines, or when they got some tapes from someone, they were surprised. They said, “Oh, Jesus! This girl — she talks?” Because when I ran around the Himalayas or different ashrams in India or elsewhere, I rarely talked to people. I didn’t even have close friends. I was always very quiet, and very shy toward people, shy toward the public. God has changed me, really. Hes has changed me completely into a different person. I never talked like this before. I never knew how. I really couldn’t talk. I never did. I am surprised myself.

So this is how God can change us if we just let it be, just put complete trust in the name of Christ, the name of God, or the name of the Buddha. Then everything will be arranged the way it should be. We should just become like kids. Don’t forget the child inside you. It is always there, and whenever we call, he comes out. He peeps out. That is the God nature. That is the nature of purity. We shouldn’t worry so much. We shouldn’t calculate so much — “If we do this, what will we get in return?” A child doesn’t do that. A child never worries about tomorrow.

The Bible also says the same thing. Don’t worry about tomorrow. It is enough that you take care of today. Consider the lilies in the fields and how they grow! Even the little blades of grass, God takes care of. How would Hes not take care of you? But most of us cannot become childlike in this way. That’s why we have a lot of sorrows, a lot of problems. Even if we ourselves can be childlike, but our relatives, our close ones and our loved ones are not childlike, it also can cause us problems, pulling us back into the frigid kind of world in which we sometimes feel suffocated. It is difficult to live together when we are less than childlike.

Being childlike doesn’t mean that we don’t take responsibility or we don’t do what we have to do. It means that we just do it with a very pure joy and without expectations, because knowing God as God is, we should not really worry. Hes made the whole universe in seven days, but what a mess! (Master and all laugh.) Don’t tell Hirm, okay? This is just a bad joke between us. Perhaps Hes should have taken more time. Hes was like a child and too much in a hurry, creating things in a quick fashion. So now we have to fix it a little. It is okay, though.

Actually, Hes did that on purpose because suppose God had made everything too perfect, what would we have to do? We’d be even more bored, with no cinema to watch and no soup to drink. No one would ever be hungry or thirsty; we would have no need to amuse ourselves, no need to do any sculpture, painting or any artwork because everything would already be there, already perfect, and we wouldn’t have to do anything.

Yes, everything is already there in the universe. Everything is already perfect. But sometimes we choose to ignore that, we choose to close the curtain between us and the perfection so that we can see some flaws, some mistakes, something imperfect so that we can create something new, or make it into perfection, into the likeness of the original one from God. That is why we are here as humans, or else we don’t need to be here, really.

Many times when you enter samadhi, when you enter the childlike state that I have mentioned, the real childlike state when you are like an angel, like God, when you are in the pure joy of existence, when you just exist alone, at that time, we truly know everything is perfect. At that time, everything we wish for can be fulfilled but then we would never wish for anything in that state. You remember those times when you were in samadhi, and you really enjoyed it.

Do Without Doing

It is true that for people who have wisdom, who meditate, who become childlike, and entrust everything to God, things go just the way the wind blows, just the way the sun rises and sets. There is no need, really, for effort. I think of all the painters, for example, the professional ones, who take days or weeks to paint one painting, yet I do it in a few hours, sometimes half an hour, depending on the situation. And I have never learned any techniques. I have not even read books about painting, and other people still like them — outside people, that is, not only us.

I didn’t even make much effort. And those professional painters can mostly paint only in one style. Sometimes you see someone’s exhibition at a gallery, and you see almost the same style from the beginning to the end. It is just the angles that are different.

For example, a person specializes in painting forests with the sun rays penetrating through them, and there is a little pond underneath. Then he does that all the time, maybe from different angles. He cuts the pond into many pieces, and in one painting he puts in the picture of the pieces on the left side, and in another painting, he puts in the pieces from the right, and in yet another one, he puts in the middle part. When I look at one, I don’t even need to look at the signature. I know it is his, most of the time. I am not saying that every painter is like that. And it takes him a lot of time to learn to do that, and a lot of time to finish that picture. But most of the painters are like that.

I don’t need to do that. I could paint the same thing again but I’d never want to. It’s boring enough to paint one already. To repeat it again, I couldn’t do that. Imagine spending your whole life painting almost the same thing all the time, and even taking so long, with all your expertise and your experience in the field. That is something I worship. People are really patient; they really have endurance. I couldn’t do that. It would bore me to tears. And then these painters cannot get money too.

But this is all different. That is technique and know-how. And mine is just natural, childlike, and I do it for the pure joy of doing it. I don’t even think of making money or pleasing the public. I have no one else in mind at the time and I don’t have any idea what I’m going to paint next. I have no fixed idea or subject. I just do it the way I want, the way I feel at that time and it just feels good. Every time I finish one painting, lousy as it looks, I like to look at it for many days, until all the paint naturally dries. And sometimes I go away, but I still miss it. I want to come back and look at it.

Now I’ve grown up a little. I don’t miss little things anymore. But I used to miss my paintings. Can you believe it? I don’t know if all the other painters miss their paintings or not. It might not mean much to you, because you have different ideas about art. Everyone is different, of course. But when I first painted a picture, no matter how lousy it looked to you, it meant something to me because I was so happy when I did it. I did it just for the pure enjoyment of seeing how it came out. So I didn’t exert any effort, really.

Perhaps, sometimes I made an effort. I’ll tell you what gives me a headache — when I do some still like pictures, imitations, painting flowers, fruit or things like that, making a copy. At that time, I feel tired. I think, Jesus, no wonder the painters charge a lot of money for them.

Painting fruit is not so bad but flowers are difficult. I thought it was easy: Just put the flower here and it looks easy; I’m going to do that, just for fun. Oh, it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t as much fun as when I wanted to do my own creation. When I create something, I can do it more freely. I enjoy it more. But when I started on the flowers, I had to finish it. I had to project them, and oh, I couldn’t believe it.

I don’t know how other painters enjoy painting because if you have to copy something, the inspiration is no longer there. I had to pay attention to minute details of the flowers and still couldn’t make them look real. Mine look better, though, because I also put a little revolutionary touch in there somehow. I didn’t want to make the picture look exactly like the flowers but I wanted to express something through the flowers to at least find a little comfort in that inspiration, that motive.

Or else, I would say I could never paint like this again. Painting flowers is so difficult. I never knew it was that difficult. When you see Van Gogh or things with sunflowers, don’t think that it was an easy job. It looks easy, but it is not. Maybe it is easy for the painters; I don’t know, because they are used to copying things.

Now I know why things that are not original make us tired. That is why this world makes us tired, because it is not original. This is the shadow of the real thing and we have to do things according to rules and regulations. That is why it makes us tired. And that is why driving makes me tired, because it is just like copying. I cannot do what I want. I have to do exactly the way it should be done. It is okay now, but that’s why I am not talented.

Every time I give a lecture, I can just speak naturally the way I do to you now. That is okay. But if I have to think ahead of time and draft a speech, oh God — I never thought it could be so difficult. I wasn’t very bad at essay writing in school. I was always number one. I could write, but I never wanted to, except in school when I was young and was forced to do it. I can do it, very easily, and at any time.

If you have to describe something or describe an occasion, then it is okay. But when you have to describe God, and think ahead of time what God looks like, it is not natural anymore. When I was in Europe, how difficult it was for me when I had to draft a speech in German or in French! Especially when I have not spoken the language for a long time, it was like a headache. Even if I have to write in English, I feel so weird. I feel so fake, like it’s not real.

Express Our Creative Talents With A Childlike Heart

Because we were originally the creator, the spark of the creative energy and the divine, so anything that forces us to go by rules and regulations, to draw like some other person, to copy, we do not like it. That is like being a copy machine. So if we do not have the creative energy flowing out of us, which is more natural and lets us make use of our own creative talents, then we feel tired. That is why all the jobs in this world make us tired, no matter how much money you are offered. I just realized that it is not that you are lazy; it is not that you don’t want to work; it is not that you don’t want to contribute, but many jobs really drag you down and drain you because you have to do exactly what they say. Sometimes it is really tedious.

I feel very sorry for us sometimes, that we can’t be childlike, even though we want to. Sometimes the reality, the world, just wants to drag us back into this very heavy kind of material existence, and we feel very tired. Even though sometimes we work only four hours, part-time, we get tired. At the end of the day, we have kind of used up all our energy. We become more tense, more critical, more stressed. Of course, and then we cannot be so innocent anymore. We have a lot of preconceptions about a lot of things, which sometimes might not be true, and sometimes we know it, but at our cost later on.

Everything hits us in the face and tells us things are not good, things are so hard, money is difficult to earn, and you have to fight, you have to compete, and you have to do this, you have to do that, in order to get ahead. There are many schools that teach you how to be a billionaire in no time, how to earn money without working.

Actually, it is not like that. We don’t need to really exert so much effort with the mind; instead, we just try to remember the creative source of our real being, and then we can create anything. Actually, energy can create subjects and it can even make things materialize. In Tibet there are some kinds of traditions, some kinds of sects, where people teach you how to visualize things. You can visualize anyone you want. You can pick up a guy like that, imagine him, and then make another one. The cloning machine is not necessary. You can do that with your own imagination until that person becomes a reality, and you can even touch him. That’s the problem.

But that is not even the highest level yet. That is where all the magic comes from. You can imagine anything you want if you concentrate hard enough. This is just an example. A guru in India sometimes can materialize things and give it to you out of thin air. It is not that he tricks you; he really can do it, or at least produce some ash.

This is really not the super level of consciousness yet we can do that. What more can we do if we can go back to the real, the highest source of creation of all things in the universe — from the small worm to the big sun that warms the whole world, without the energy ever being used up?

So actually, all this know-how is very nice, but why we rely only on that, we’ll be in trouble. But some people are successful. They know how to talk and if they don’t know what else to rely on, and if they’ve forgotten God and wisdom, then maybe they should try that.

For us, we can try it if we want to; but we must remember the child inside is the real God. Unless you become pure as a child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. You remember? That is just a way of saying that we have to rely on God for everything. That is the only thing that can give us everything we want, really. We just naturally encounter something and it brings us joy and benefit. We don’t even have to do any kind of work or exert any kind of effort.

So this is the child that we should become — not the irresponsible one, but the wise child. When we become so wise, we become so pure, because when we know everything, then there is nothing that we should know, nothing we seek to know, and nothing that we want to know. That is why we become so contented — because we feel at least that we know whatever comes is fine, whatever arrives is okay. God will arrange everything. God is the master in us. God is ourselves, the creative energy that made us in the beginning, and that is part of us, that is us, and that forever will be. (Applause)

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