God's Love --
Another Form of Love

Spoken by Supreme Master Ching Hai
Sydney, Australia May 10, 1997
(Originally in English)

Q: Most people say that God is omnipresent, God is everywhere, and God reaches from the highest heaven down to the deepest hell. God is present in all the beauty of life when miracles happen; God is also present when everything is dark in our lives, when nothing is going right. Since God is omnipresent, the qualities of God must also be omnipresent, such as the quality of love. What's happening with the quality of love when God is in the deepest hell, when everything is going wrong in life?

M: That is another form of love to remind us to go back to the more noble side of the scale. It's like a staircase: if we go up a little bit, then we can see more sunlight; it's higher. If we stay down, it's darker down in the cellar. It is like that, but it still belongs to the house. The darker side of God is hell; it's our own conscience. When we deny God, then we don't see Hirm. It's not that God doesn't exist at that time, but just that we have turned our face away because we did something ungodly. So, hell is our own creation. Hell is just a place where our conscience faces its own retribution, its own judgment. There's no God who created it.

We've chosen many ways to exercise our power, even the power to be dark, to be negative, to be wicked, to be very ungodly. We chose to play around and to explore the universe. We chose to learn, to know what else we could do, except just to be God as Hes is. We chose to do many things, to explore many corners for ourselves.

When we chose to do something ungodly, then we had to face the so-called hell. That is when we denied the noble quality of God. We chose to turn our back away, just to see what it felt like. This is at the soul level; the mind is not conscious of it. If the mind were conscious of what it was doing, it wouldn't do it. The mind is just an instrument of the soul. The soul wants to experience something new, to explore its own power, to go into the deeper corners of the universe and back, to go to the farther side of the cosmos to see what's there, wants to do something terribly wicked to see what it feels like, and then relearn to be God and be noble again.

It's just another form of love. Hell is there to remind you not to be like that, not to be wicked, not to be negative, not to be dark. Return! Return! Return! That's it. When you feel terrible, already you are facing a corner of hell; you are facing the wall. You face corners and a dark and terrifying atmosphere, and then sooner or later you will have to return. So that's another form of love; God is there in that darkness to remind you to go back to the Light.