Sun Myung Moon
December 27, 2002
Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace - Conference for Clergy
Sheraton National Hotel, Arlington, Virginia, USA
Photo date and location unknown
Honorable current and former heads of state from around the world, eminent religious leaders, peace ambassadors from various nations, representatives of all areas of society, respected ladies and gentlemen:
I would like to thank you for participating in this profoundly significant conference, where we will explore fundamental issues regarding the realization of a world of peace, which is a common ideal shared by all humanity.
At this time, when the need for peace and security is more acute and critical than ever before, we who are leaders in our various fields share a grave responsibility to resolve issues related to discord, war, and the evil and unhappiness rooted in the world’s behavior of keeping God at a distance.
God is the Parent of true love
In accordance with Heaven’s Will, I have offered my life to investigate the difficult issues facing humanity, and I am offering a plan to implement fundamental solutions. Today I would like to speak about a portion of this plan. I have not derived these words from theological research or any books. Rather, I am articulating some fundamental principles I have learned through experience, as I overcame all forms of difficulties and communed directly with God and the spirit world.
The path of following Heaven’s Will in a state of empathy with God is not one that many people can find through common sense. I would like to tell you, however, that a person who opens his or her original mind and exercises keen insight can discover a new consciousness by which to perceive the spirit world and the Will of God, who is alive and carries out His work in the world of reality.
This conference will not analyze humanity’s afflictions and areas of despair, nor the symptoms of crisis in the modern age. Rather, it will investigate the foundation for the ideal of peace. We need to identify and treat the root of the disease. For this purpose, we have to understand the original relationship between God and ourselves, a relationship that lies at the foundation of the universe, and enlighten ourselves regarding the Will of God, who lives and carries out His providence in history.
God is the original entity of true love. True love has the attributes of unconditional giving and giving again; investing, not remembering the investment and then investing again; and living for the sake of others time and time again. The reason righteous people and evil people alike are allowed to breathe the same air in the atmosphere God created is that God, though He is all-powerful, is the original entity of true love. This is also the reason good people and sinners alike are able to carry on their lives by tilling the fields and enjoying the blessings of nature.
Exercising His almighty and absolute power, God could pass summary judgment on sinful humanity at any time. However, He has embraced the world of sin with true love throughout these long years, enduring the pain and waiting for us to repent. God, our Creator and Parent, has been subjected to all types of insults from those who refuse Him, betray Him, and go so far as to claim that He does not exist or is dead. In spite of all this, He has endured with an unchanging heart. Since God knew that love is perfected only with a partner, He has been working to build a world of love through His love partner.
Respected leaders, have you ever heard God complain? Have you ever met a God who gave excuses? In the beginning, God established true love as the absolute standard, and He took the lead in demonstrating absolute obedience to that ideal as He manifested His creation and carried out His providence. Just as the ocean takes in sewage and garbage and then cleanses itself, God, as the original entity of absolute true love, cleanses the human world that deviated from the principles of His creation and works to bring this world to complete goodness.
God is the absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher and absolute True Owner, with His focus on true love. Therefore, God needed an object partner to whom He could give His true love. This was His motivation for creating. God’s creation was a necessary act. The creative ideal of true love cannot be realized by a being that exists in isolation. This ideal exists so that God can share with human beings the joy of His exalted and righteous Will. When we have a correct understanding of the God of true love, it becomes self-evident that this unhappy world of sin and strife was not His original plan.
God carried out His creative act with the utmost sincerity, dedication and investment. He established the standards of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and then invested absolutely. All created beings are the object partners of love that God produced by investing with greatest sincerity.
God created human beings, the most precious of all beings, to have the closest relationship with Him, the relationship of child and parent. God is our incorporeal True Parent and we are His sons and daughters, or His substantial object partners.
In the world of true love, there is no difference in value between large and small or high and low. To be united in true love is to form a single harmonious entity marked by generosity, with no bad feelings about the distinctions between upper and lower or different strata. The unity produced between true subject and object partners will exist forever without interruption. So in true love, subject and object partners share a common value, with joint participation and a common residence, and they share the right of inheritance. Thus human beings achieve completion within God’s love and inherit His position as true parents, true teachers and true owners.
In this way, God’s plan is to have His children, human beings, perfect the true love ideal and become one with Him, residing with Him and inheriting all that is His. True freedom and equality, true peace and unity, and true ideals and happiness can exist eternally only within true love. So true love is the fountainhead from which springs the power and life of all beings in creation, and it is the fountainhead of joy and happiness. True love is the absolute element that brings happiness, hope and peace.
People often view the relationship between God and humanity from the perspective of God’s majesty and holiness, and we usually conclude that God and humanity will exist in dramatically different dimensions for all time. Certainly, the Creator occupies a level that differs from that of His creation. Yet, the original relationship that is most central and meaningful is the true love relationship between parent and child. True love makes it possible to achieve unity in the relationship between internal character and external form, and between male and female.
The ideal family and the Fall
God created us to become one in heart with Him, to share His value in true love, and to experience an inseparable parent-child bond with Him, enabling us to relate with Him through our strongest emotions in daily life. God’s ideal of creation, which entails this perfection comes with the perfection of human beings, who would be His partners in love as sons and daughters. This elevation is the accomplishment of the ideal of true love.
To summarize, God’s purpose in creating the first human ancestors Adam and Eve was for them to establish a family of goodness that would fully ripen the fruit of God’s true love, true life and true lineage. On the foundation of their family, Adam and Eve were to nurture the heart of children, heart of siblings, heart of husband and wife and heart of parents. In this process, as discrete manifestations of God’s dual characteristics of masculinity and femininity, they were to proceed step by step to master the ability to express God’s love, bringing it to perfection at a place of safe settlement.
If Adam’s family had fulfilled the true love ideal in this manner, with God in the central position, it would have been the first family of the kingdom of heaven. Starting from this ideal family, with Adam and Eve as True Parents, the kingdom of heaven would have naturally expanded in scope to produce tribes, peoples, nations and the world. The tradition of the family of true love would have become the tradition of the world.
In this ideal world, the incarnate True Parents would be at the single central position. They would resemble and inherit all the attributes of God, the spiritual absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher and absolute True Owner. In the kingdom of heaven of true love, the incarnate True Parents, who are united with God, would create the vertical axis. Keeping this axis at the center, all relationships between created entities, occupying positions such as upper and lower, left and right, front and back, and internal and external, would be in harmony. Thus, all of creation would dwell in freedom, peace, unity and happiness.
When our life on earth in our physical body comes to an end, our spirit self transitions into the spirit world, which is the ultimate world. It is an extension of our life on earth and also a place where we are to perfect the ideal of the kingdom of heaven. If this ideal had been fulfilled in the beginning, there would have been no need for God’s salvation providence through religions or the advent of the Messiah.
Unfortunately, as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, God’s intended ideal of the kingdom of heaven in Adam’s family was not realized. This was because Adam and Eve became false parents when they indulged in false love with Satan in the central position. Without receiving God’s Blessing of marriage, they formed a false husband-wife partnership and a false family, and they bequeathed false life and false lineage to their descendants. They left God in grief, because the enemy, Satan, had altered their original lineage.
In this way, they lost God and did not establish their bodies as temples by which they were to have lived in attendance to God. In fact, their bodies became the den of Satan’s devils, and their spiritual desire to seek absolute values was shut down, rendering them incapable of knowing about the spirit world, the ultimate world. Because the first human ancestors deformed themselves, their descendants and all people never came to know that God is our True Parent. We inherited Satan’s selfish desires and lived unrighteous, self-centered lives, parading our fallen nature. Unaware that God created us as brothers and sisters who would live in attendance to Him, we lived in sin, strife and dispute. We do not even know that to kill another is to kill oneself, and so we live in unhappiness.
The world has inherited the tradition of Adam’s family, in which Cain killed his own brother, Abel. The outcome for us, the descendants of false love, is the unhappiness, sin and ruin manifested in family breakdown, the moral degradation of youth, and diseases such as AIDS. Consider the world’s situation. The acute crises of the modern age are manifested in struggles between our mind and body, the confusion of values, criminal activities, drug abuse, the breakdown of the family that holds humanity’s future in the balance, destruction of the environment, conflict and hatred, terror and war, and even conflict among religions and civilizations. With each passing day, these crises turn more serious, more complex and more pervasive. We can no longer stand by and do nothing as the world careens along this course. There is no time left. Who can take responsibility for this world? Where is the leader who will present a fundamental plan to solve the world’s problems?
At the same time that we lost God, we also lost true love, peace and happiness. Throughout history, we have tried to liberate ourselves from unhappiness and achieve peace on our own, excluding God from the process. Such efforts have been fundamentally flawed. We cannot defuse the crises by human effort alone. True peace and happiness have their origin in God’s true love, true life and true lineage.
God is absolute, so His Will for the creation is also absolute. This means that God is working to reverse what went wrong as a result of the Fall and return us to the original state. Thus, God’s providence of salvation is a providence of restoration. Its purpose is to recover the original world that existed prior to the Fall. In other words, God’s intention is to establish a couple in the position of restored Adam and Eve, or True Parents, practicing true love. God wants to give them the marriage Blessing and have them form a true family, which will be the point of origin of true tribes, peoples, nations and world.
Peace movement carried out amid misunderstanding
Respected leaders, going through indescribable hardship to follow God’s call, I have established the foundation for peace to settle in various fields of life. More than thirty years ago, I founded the Unification Thought Institute and began to guide the field of philosophy. Since 1972, I have sponsored nearly thirty global meetings of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, for the purpose of exploring absolute values and creating harmony and unity among the various fields of learning. I have founded and continuously supported a movement for peace transcending individual nations. This movement for peace includes the work of the Professors World Peace Academy, the Summit Council for World Peace, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, CAUSA, the Federation for World Peace, the Federation of Island Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Continental Nations for World Peace, and the Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland.
I have also promoted culture and the arts, fostered peace through sports, and developed elementary, middle school, high school and university level educational institutions. I founded and supported the Women’s Federation for World Peace, various media organizations for the purpose of bringing about responsible and ethical journalism, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, the Youth Federation for World Peace, the Pure Love
Alliance, international conferences on the environment, the International Relief and Friendship Foundation, Service for Peace, the Religious Youth Service, the voluntary service organization Aewon, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Holy Marriage Blessing and true family movement. In addition, I have supported efforts to renew the United Nations for the sake of achieving God’s desire for peace.
These are some of the initiatives for national and worldwide salvation that I have instituted around the globe. I have pursued these efforts continuously, without funding from any government or corporation, even in the midst of unsympathetic public opinion and outright persecution. As I worked to lay the foundation for the establishment of the ideal world, all I had was my determination to fulfill the mission of humankind’s True Parent that God entrusted to me, and to accomplish God’s Will.
In bringing about the ideal of peace implicit in God’s true love, it is most important for the various religions to achieve harmony with one another and provide a model for the world. Withstanding the coldhearted attitudes and persecution by narrow-minded religious bodies in various countries, I have placed my greatest emphasis on creating a movement for unity and cooperation among religions, nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I have offered all kinds of sacrifices in doing everything I could to build one world in this area. For example, I founded an inter-denominational seminary, the New Ecumenical Research Association, the Council for the World’s Religions, the Youth Seminar on World Religions, and the Assembly of the World’s Religions. Besides supporting conferences promoting harmony among the world’s religions, I commissioned the publication of World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, and I founded the Interreligious Federation for World Peace.
Taking these efforts a step further, I founded the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), to serve as an overarching structure for unity and world peace. This organization is intended to go beyond the goal of harmony among the world’s religions to embrace leaders in the fields of academia, politics, journalism, finance and NGOs, which are areas where I have already laid the necessary foundations.
Since the founding of IIFWP in February 1999, we have appointed tens of thousands of leaders in a wide variety of fields from one hundred and eighty-nine countries as ambassadors for peace. In line with my philosophy of peace, these ambassadors are practicing true love by living for the sake of others and engaging in activities that help break down barriers between nations, races and religions. Their practical activities range from AIDS prevention and service projects to the development of true family values, the education of youth and leadership, and the improvement of the environment.
My philosophy is known as head-wing thought, which is based on Godism. This thought places God, the standard of absolute values and our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, in the absolute center. We can therefore call it the “three subject partner’s principle.” During our life on earth and in the spirit world, we have to live in accordance with this thought, being God’s object partners and attending Him as our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner. We will then be creating the kingdom of heaven, the place where true love is practiced.
We have to surpass atheistic and communist philosophies that deny God and the spirit world, as well as the secular humanism and moral relativism that ignore the importance of absolute values and the vertical standard. It is also time to rise above the hypocritical faith that uses God’s name and lacks true love, and abandon all selfish works that violate original human rights and result in injustice. The head-wing thought that I propose transcends right-wing and left-wing philosophies, resolves the conflicts between countries, races and religions, and brings about wide-ranging harmony and unity, with the absolute God at the center. This task will be carried out with the help of both heaven and earth. We are in a period of great transition, and during this time the United Nations and the nations of the world need to unite and cooperate with one another.
Modern society lacks an understanding or philosophical system based on absolute values. There are no absolute values that we can consistently apply to individuals, families, societies, nations, the world and the cosmos. This is the reason our thinking is confused, human relationships are disordered, and human society is chaotic. In the face of unreflective pluralism and modernization, and in the absence of a fundamental guiding axis in their hearts and daily lives, people in the modern age suffer due to an everworsening confusion of values. We are endlessly tempted and live enslaved by our physical appetites, drifting aimlessly through life.
I need to tell you that we must never turn away from a life based on values.
Absolute values form our vertical axis. At the center of absolute values is God’s true love, expressed in living for the sake of others.
Substantial ways of realizing a peaceful world
Respected leaders, peace is not something that is realized only in the external world. It is realized initially within each individual. First of all, it requires individuals to achieve harmonious unity within themselves. As a result of the Fall, conflict arose between our mind and body. To control us, Satan uses our body as his stronghold. He has turned us away from our original nature and spiritual nature and toward the attempts to satisfy our selfish and individualistic desires. The only path to escape from Satan’s dominion lies within God’s lineage of true love.
If you live unselfishly for the sake of others and work for the sake of others, Satan will not be able to follow you. This is because Satan is essentially selfish. This is why fallen human beings can transform their character and recover their spiritual nature through the practice of God’s true love. Our faith cannot be in a conceptual God; we need a true faith that connects us to the living God.
Because God originally created us as the object partners of His true love, we can practice this true love naturally. Values such as truth, goodness and beauty appear in the practice of true love. People whose minds and bodies have united based on God’s true love are individual embodiments of truth, happiness and tranquility, satisfaction and peace. Such people become subject partners of character; they serve as prerequisites for a world of peace.
Second, no institutions of power, materials or knowledge, nor any other external factors, will bring about a world of peace. Only true love, involving living for the sake of others, will accomplish it. True peace, unity and happiness cannot be found apart from a loving relationship of living for the sake of others. This is the basic principle of God’s creation. Unconditional giving, investing and living for the sake of an object partner, is both the cause and purpose of God’s creation.
God created us in His image, as beings whose purpose is to live for the sake of others. It is only by living for the sake of others that we become central beings, subject partners of peace and unity, and the eternal owners of love and ideals. Only through a life of true love, or living for the sake of others, can we find the path to meet God, our absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, receive His inheritance, and then ourselves become true parents, true teachers and true owners. On the path of true love, different parties overcome conflict and division naturally. True love harmonizes and unites us with one another and our environment. This is not conquest through struggle. Instead, it is a path of natural subjugation leading to eternal unity.
Third, the basic unit of the world of peace is not the nation; it is the peaceful family. The basic unit is the family formed by a man and a woman who have the character to attend God, a man and woman who have each accomplished harmonious mind-body unity and are joined by God through His holy marriage Blessing. These are the first blessed families in history, established through the True Parents. These are peaceful and happy families. True love joins their members in harmonious unity. When these families multiply, they will bring about a world of peaceful tribes, peoples and nations.
In God’s original ideal, humankind is one family under one God and the cosmos is one family, with true love in the central position. The place where the problems of the family can be resolved, with True Parents at the center, is the foundation for the world of peace. In the ideal world of blessed families based on true love, there can be no barriers of nationality, race or religion.
Respected leaders, we have to find God and cast away our ignorance concerning our spiritual True Parent. Living within the eternal and profound order of this universe, which manifests His omniscience and omnipotence, we shall never again make the mistake of being ungrateful to our Creator for His magnificent accomplishments. Fallen humanity is to rid itself of the arrogance that makes us think we are the owners of our own life. Instead, we will nurture an enlightened spirituality in the presence of the absolute nature of God’s true love.
Let us follow the tradition of the Parents of Heaven and Earth
God is our True Parent. It is time to discover the living God, whose heart to invest greater true love is unchanging, absolute and eternal. We need to know the Heart of God, who created us as object partners, completely inheriting His absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal true love, true life and true lineage.
In this way we will establish God—the absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner—as the axis of absolute values for our individual self, our family, nation, world and cosmos. This will form the basis for our life as individuals, families, nations and the world. We will have the unchanging desire to follow eternally the path of tradition set by the Parents of Heaven and Earth, the path of living in true love, which is for the sake of others.
If we do that, we can resolve all problems, whether of the family, society, race or religion. We will arrive at an age in which God and humankind live together as one in the original ideal world, the world of heart. We will arrive at an age in which we realize that living for the sake of others holds greater eternal value than living for ourselves. The blind age of self-centered life will pass away, as we build an other-centered world of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values.
For this purpose, let us attain accurate knowledge about God and the spirit world; let us lead humanity on the right path by testifying to the world about God’s true love, true life and true lineage; and let us build the universal family of heaven and earth in God’s homeland on earth. Let us completely establish the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven through absolute love, unique love, unchanging love and eternal love and seek to live for the sake of others, and offer heavenly kingship to God.
May God bless you, your family and your country. Thank you.