Sun Myung Moon
May 1, 2004
Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (and HSA-UWC)
Sun Moon University, Asan, Korea
Photo date and location unknown
Respected current and former heads of state, distinguished guests from around the world, leaders from all fields of Korean society: I am sincerely grateful that such a large number of you have taken time from your busy schedules to attend today’s event.
It seems only yesterday that, on May 1, 1954, in a humble dwelling known as the “three-door house” in Seoul’s Buk-hak Dong, a few disciples and I put up a signboard that read “Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity,” and offered a most serious prayer to Heaven. Today, this association has become the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which continues its steady development and has mission headquarters in 191 countries. How could anyone describe this as anything other than a miracle of Heaven?
I received God’s call when I was a vibrant, sixteen-year-old youth, and started out on this path of Heaven with unbending determination. It has been a path of indescribable pain and suffering. At the pinnacle of each indemnity offering I had to make sacrifices, for which I shed blood, sweat and tears. It was the path of a lonely man. I had to swallow my bloody tears of desperation and conceal them deep within me in order to comfort the heart of God, even as God was grieving over the tragic situation of the Son He had sent forth.
I have devoted my life of more than eighty years teaching the truth that I received from Heaven. To encapsulate what I have been teaching,
I would like to speak today on the topic “God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Complete Freedom.”
We should clearly know about God and the spirit world
Distinguished guests, everything I have taught can be summed up in one point above all else. It is that we must know God and the spirit world with certainty. It is not enough to have a vague concept of God in our heads, like the mathematical formulas that we once memorized. Rather, we need to carve His existence into our hearts, even into our bones. We have to know God’s attributes and His relationship with us. We need to know about the ideal world that He desired in the beginning, and when that world will be brought about. We need to have the same degree of knowledge about the spirit world. The world after death definitely exists, independent of our will, and we need to have accurate knowledge of it, if we are to use our time in this world to prepare thoroughly for the next.
Ladies and gentlemen, please quietly place your hand on your heart and think seriously. If everyone truly knew that God exists and always lived in attendance to Him, what would prevent us from solving the problems in today’s world? I now declare to you very bluntly: God exists and He is our Parent. He is alive and carries out His work in each person’s life.
He exists without form. If you think of Him in terms of magnitude, He is infinitely large, however if you think of Him in terms of precision, He is also infinitely small. Every person has a mind, yet can anyone locate the mind with confidence and certainty? Energy clearly exists and sustains life, although energy is invisible. Likewise, God absolutely exists and is eternal, unchanging and unique. However, He cannot be seen with the human eye, which is part of the human physical body. Because God is the original body of energy, we will not be able to see Him even in the spirit world.
This is why we say that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Because He has no form, nothing can prevent Him from going anywhere He pleases in the world of existence. He can pass right through your body without your feeling anything. He can step on you as He passes by while you doze off, and you would not know it.
Think of how convenient that is. What would you do if God were to appear and involve Himself in every little detail of your life? If you had to live with God visible to your eyes, what would you do? You probably would not last a single day before having a nervous breakdown. While you sit here, you cannot see the incredible amount of air that is passing through your body as you breathe in and out. So how could you possibly know how God, who is formless, passes through you as He carries out His work? Rather than foolishly saying, “Show me God and I will believe,” we need to be grateful that God is invisible to our eyes.
Leaders from around the world, do you have love? Do you have life? Do you have a lineage and a conscience? Have you ever seen love? Can you say that you have seen life, lineage or conscience? You clearly know that they exist, but you have to acknowledge that you cannot feel or see them. You know them only because you sense them with your mind. A similar logic applies to the question of whether God exists, or whether a person has or has not seen God. No one can say that because they have not seen God, He does not exist.
When God enters a person’s mind, the mind knows it. When the omniscient and omnipotent God is with you, if you call for saints who died thousands of years ago to come to you, you will be able to clearly see them, even if they are sitting behind a thick wall. When the eternal God enters your heart, such things are possible. Eternity cannot be grasped in the context of time, yet time exists within eternity.
God lost through the Fall
The universe in which we live is shrouded in mystery. The observable universe is estimated to be tens of billions of light-years across. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year at a speed so fast that it can go around the Earth about seven and a half times in a second. Then try to imagine the nature and personality of God, who created the universe and manages it. How large would He have to be, and how heavy? God is the great King of wisdom. By existing without form, He can go anywhere in the universe instantaneously, even entering the eye of a needle.
When we search within ourselves for the best place to receive God, our greatest treasure, the natural conclusion is that our heart is the only appropriate place. No other place can be safer or more comfortable for Him. Our heart can stand in the position of God’s object partner and exist for eternity by engaging in spherical give-and-take action. This is the reason why we can have eternal life.
If the first human ancestors had not committed the Fall, we would have been born from parents possessing an original nature of goodness. Then there would be no argument about whether or not God exists. We would know God’s existence naturally from the time we were born. An infant does not learn how to suckle its mother’s breast while it is in the womb, although it naturally knows how to do so as soon as it is born. Likewise, people born into a world where the human Fall had not occurred would naturally attend God as their Father throughout their lives.
When God created Adam and Eve as the first human ancestors, Fie wanted to establish them as substantial embodiments of Himself. So He placed His masculine nature in the mind of Adam and His feminine nature in the mind of Eve, intending to keep them there for eternity. This did not mean that God was divided into two. Instead, while residing in the minds of Adam and Eve, He would have existed as a harmonized being of dual characteristics and as a unified being whose love would be in the central position.
As a result of the human Fall, however, humanity lost everything. We fell into a false world. We appear to have sight, but in fact we are blind, not even knowing if God exists. What could be more tragic in the history of humankind? If Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, had grown to maturity without falling, achieved perfection, and acquired the position of the parents of humankind, all people would have been able to recognize the reality of God’s existence through Adam and Eve. It would have been impossible even to imagine people arguing with one another, saying, “God exists” or “No, He does not.” God would have lived with us and shared our emotions for eternity as the Parent of humankind. He would have been the center of our lives and the root of our existence.
We can truly know God only when we feel Him in our hearts and understand the reality of His existence in the course of our daily life. We can know God’s existence through experience. When we know the reality of God’s existence directly from experiencing Him in our daily lives, we will be able to sense Gods Will naturally from moment to moment. We will act in accordance with His Will without being told to do so. We will become people who cannot sin even if we wanted to.
God, who is formless, intended to take on substantial form through human beings. They would have the character and stature of owners who would exercise dominion over all of creation, both in this world, the world of forms, and in the spirit world. This is why our highest priority in life is to know God with certainty.
The world God desires to see
Ladies and gentlemen, let us think for a moment about human life. We spend the first phase of our lifetime in our mother’s womb. The time we spend there, as a fetus, is a period of waterborne life, bathed in amniotic fluid. Although we cannot speak or move about freely, it does not mean that our term in the womb is not part of our life. During this period, we clearly possess life given to us by Heaven, and we prepare for life on earth, which is the next phase. Even though we don’t breathe through our nose, it does not mean that we are not alive.
The human fetus in the womb cannot imagine what life will be like in the next phase, when it is on earth. It cannot imagine a world outside its mother’s womb. It cannot imagine not receiving all its nourishment from its mother through the umbilical cord. Yet when the time comes, our life in the womb comes to a close and we begin life on earth. Whether we like it or not, this happens in accordance with the laws of the universe. Then, a vast new world that we could never have imagined appears before us.
Once our waterborne life ends and our new life on earth begins, the months of life in the womb transition into an earthly life of about one hundred years. We then live in a wide variety of unique ways and prepare for the final phase of our existence, namely, in the spirit world, the world after death. A world that is eternal and endless awaits us; however we who live in a physical body are no more capable of imagining life in the spirit world than we were of imagining life on earth when we lived in the womb.
Prepare in advance for life in the spirit world
Our life of about one hundred years on earth will transition into an eternal world that transcends time and space. In the womb, we received nourishment from our mother through the umbilical cord, and during our time on earth we receive the basic nutrients of food, water, air and sunlight. Once we enter the spirit world, however, we will no longer need physical nourishment. Instead, we will breathe love as we live eternally.
So human beings, without exception, live through three stages: about ten months in the womb, about one hundred years on earth, and an eternity in the spirit world. This is not something we do by our own choice. It is a blessing and grace given by Heaven. What blessing and grace could be greater than this?
When I say you need to know the spirit world well, it is not enough to live with a vague faith in the existence of the spirit world. We have to know how to prepare for life in the spirit world, where we will live eternally, while we live on earth, and our preparation should be thorough. If a child develops a problem while in the womb, it may spend its entire life after birth in poor health. So too, if we do not recognize Heavens Will during our short life on earth, and commit sins or perform evil deeds, we will eventually pay the price in the spirit world according to the principle of cause and effect. It means in the spirit world that our spirit self will have to suffer indescribable pain and be subject to indemnity.
Once the physical body has been shed, it will be too late. When the physical body dies, it returns to earth as a handful of dirt. However do you think that our life, our mind, our heart, and our hopes are also buried? That is absolutely not the case. Our life of about a hundred years is recorded, photographed and automatically evaluated without fail in our God-given personal computer, called the spirit self. This is why all of us, during our life on earth, stop and check ourselves again and again, asking our unsettled mind and heart, “Where am I going?”
Saints, sages and spiritual masters spent their entire lives wrestling with such issues. None of them, however, were able to present clear answers. It is true that their teachings have remained with us, allowing religions to form and sacred texts to be published that guide the lives of masses of people. It is also true, though, that we still lack the ability to have dominion over our own mind.
I have revealed the truth about true love
I have toured the world hundreds of times to declare Heaven’s truth and educate people. No matter where I go in the world or what kind of audience I face, I always ask one question. I issue a challenge, saying, “If there is anyone here whose mind and body are not in discord, please raise your hand.” So far no one anywhere has dared to raise a hand.
What does this tell us? It means that we are still slaves to the fallen nature we inherited from our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. We have not yet escaped that yoke. This is evidenced by the confessions of saints and sages, who spent their lives in fasting, practiced abstinence, and persevered on their paths despite incredible suffering. Their confessions that they could not root out the desires of the flesh before they had to leave this world remain as pitiful cries to their disciples, who nonetheless insist on following in their footsteps. The saints and sages are now declaring with one voice that I have brought for the first time from Heaven the truth of true love that they could not grasp, and that their followers and descendants on earth need to follow my teachings absolutely and practice them.
We are receiving a flood of messages from people in the spirit world who regret that they could not meet me while they were on earth and attend me as the Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent during their lives. The resolutions they adopted in the spirit world now echo around the world. In the near future, all religious people will begin to receive revelations directly from the founders of their religions, and there will be a great migration of people who will be guided to attend me as the True Parent. They will gather as the clouds to learn from me the truth about true love that will enable them to unite their minds and bodies. Once they learn the way of the true family, they will with one accord sing praises of eternal happiness, parents and children together as one great family in heaven and on earth.
The world’s communists who insisted there is no God and passed away as sacrifices for the cause of materialism, the world’s intellectuals and journalists who commanded an entire generation, and even dictators and emperors, who brandished the sword of absolute power at the cost of countless lives, have shed tears of repentance before me. Through their messages and resolutions from the spirit world, they begged for forgiveness.
If you still cannot believe with certainty the reality of the spirit world, you may not be sure about whether to believe these messages. To you I say, “When you pass on to the spirit world you will see for yourself!” However, once you go down that path you can never return, no matter how much you may beat the ground in lamentation. Once in the spirit world, a person cannot do anything on his own about the sins he committed while on earth. So your ancestors are now observing your life in tears, waiting for opportunities to help you in ways that indemnify their sins. I am telling you clearly that thousands, even tens of thousands, of your ancestors’ eyes are watching your every step and action, sometimes with tears of heartbreak and at other times with joy. Is there anyone who still cannot believe in the reality of the spirit world?
Oneness with God in heart, body and mindset
Distinguished guests, once we come to know God with certainty and know spirit world not just in concept but also in reality, our life can move forward as smoothly as a car on an expressway. Just as the car will reach its destination safely if the driver follows the rules of the road, keeps his hands on the steering wheel and doesn’t fall asleep, so too we must align our life with the direction of our conscience, which is given by Heaven. This is how our mind and body can unite, and how our character can blossom to reach perfection and bear fruit. Going deep into the mountains will not perfect one’s character, and extensive reading of the sacred texts and philosophy books that line library shelves will not unite one’s mind and body.
God is the great King of Wisdom. He did not place the path to perfection in some far-off place. Rather, He placed it where it is closest to us, in the place that is most private and safe. He prepared and placed that path within our conscience.
Ladies and gentlemen, your conscience is your master. It is your teacher. It stands in the position of your parents. Your conscience is the first to know everything about you. Your conscience knows all your thoughts. It knows them before your teacher, your parents or even God knows them. Think about how much advice your conscience gives you throughout your lifetime. Day and night, every time you have an evil thought, it scolds you, saying, “That’s not right!” It never grows tired as it works constantly to lead you over rivers and mountains.
The conscience always stands as the true master, protecting you and trying to help you. Yet, how often have you gone against your own conscience? What will you do about your body, which thoroughly mistreats this precious, irreplaceable teacher that the universe bequeathed to you? Your conscience was given to represent the Parent who makes it possible for you to inherit original love. Do you intend to idle your life away, embracing only your physical body, enslaved by its desires, and allowing it to trample the conscience mercilessly?
That is why I, too, as I began to pioneer the way of truth, set as my slogan, “Before I seek to rule the universe, I must first rule myself” I discovered that there is only one way to resolve the conflict between mind and body, and that is the way of true love. Unity between mind and body can be achieved only when the body sacrifices itself for the sake of the mind time and again, by living for the sake of others with true love.
When you follow the path indicated by your conscience, your mind will come to embrace the universe. When this happens, you will be able to communicate with your heart. Whenever you start to do something, your conscience will immediately show you the effects of that action. This experience proves that God resides within your heart.
The person who achieves this enters the state of oneness with God in heart, body and mindset. He or she will live in a unified, harmonious world. This is the ideal world, the kingdom of heaven on earth that God desired in the beginning when He created Adam and Eve:
A life for the liberation God and humankind
Respected guests, it is now more than eighty years since I began my search for such incredible secrets of Heaven and began to walk the path to lead humanity. It has been a lonely and pitiful path, as I pushed my way through suffering and overcame unprecedented difficulties that no one will ever repeat in the future. That path taught me the reality of the omnipresent God.
All of the six billion people in the world are blind. Although they appear normal, they cannot see even an inch in front of themselves. Despite their blindness, philosophers and theologians have pretended as if they could elucidate Heaven’s truth, and this has brought grief to God throughout history. The providence of restoration, which sought people who would live for the sake of God and have compassion for God, never even got off the ground.
I cannot count the days I spent in tears and lamentation after I came to know the world of God’s inner heart. Who could even dare to imagine God as being grief-stricken? He created the first human ancestors as His children and tried to place them in the position of His eternal object partners of true love. However, they committed the Fall. Since then, He has been carrying out His providence of restoration for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of years. After the Fall God was sorrowful and mortified. Anger exploded within Him. His heart overflowed with grief as He walked this course.
God is the Father and glorious King, but the enemy Satan stole His throne and usurped His position as Parent. Although He is clearly alive and carrying out His providence, people say “He is dead,” and mock and mistreat Him. Still, He has persevered on the path with patient endurance, waiting for the day when people themselves would understand the truth. Please understand that God conducts His providence on a foundation of true love, which involves living for the sake of others, continually for eternity.
For that reason, He did not just annihilate the universe and begin again after witnessing His children descend into the bottomless pit that they dug as a result of the Fall. With the power of His omniscience and omnipotence, God could have judged the world and Satan at once, smashing them to pieces. Though He has this power, He has chosen until now to absorb all the contempt and accusation. He has placed Himself in a prison-like environment, because He is our Father.
The course of self-sacrifice to teach all humankind
Ladies and gentlemen, have you spent even one day before God our Father, shedding tears of sincere sympathy and repentance? Can you stand before God and close your eyes, to avoid seeing Him as He bites His tongue and endures humankind who inherited the lineage of Satan and became his tool? Can you ignore God’s impatience, as He waits for the day of His liberation and complete release?
For this reason, my life has been more serious than any other in history. In walking this fateful course of restoration through indemnity, I had to go the way of perfecting my character to stand as the lord of judgment, determine the sin of Satan, and judge him. I had to say goodbye to four of my young children, whom I loved deeply, as they went to the spirit world, and I had to watch as my remaining children struggled in the wilderness.
I stand before you as one who has received Heaven’s appointment as Savior and True Parent for the sake of liberating and releasing God and, on that foundation, liberating and releasing humankind. I am not here out of a need for money and power, or honor and fame. For more than eighty years, I have lived oblivious to morning or evening, day or night, weathering even the coldest winters and severest snowstorms and rainstorms, in order to move as quickly as I could along the heavenly path. Even in the torture chamber, where my flesh was torn from my body and I vomited blood, I never prayed for God to save me. Instead, my life has been that of a filial son, patriot, saint, and divine son of heaven and earth, shedding tears to comfort God’s heart as He weeps at the sight of the tragic state of His children. I left my parents and homeland behind to follow the straight and narrow path to human salvation, that is, the path of true love that involves living for the sake of others. My life of never compromising and never acting in a cowardly manner may seem incredibly pitiful and bleak from a worldly viewpoint.
No torture or punishment could make me compromise from following the heavenly path. Neither could six imprisonments stand in the way of the True Parent’s search for his children. As I sat in a cold prison cell and watched drops of water fall from an eave, I pledged to myself, “Just as those droplets will eventually bore a hole through a boulder, the day will certainly come when these hot tears that fall from my eyes will melt the heart of God, frozen in grief, and liberate and release Him.” That is how I have lived. It has been a sacrificial course, in which the love that I practiced meant I had to love the enemy more than my own children and offer everything to teach all six billion people in the world.
In following this course, I went to America in the early 1970s and announced, “I have come as a firefighter to extinguish the fire and as a physician to cure the disease.” It is important to understand that, more than thirty years later, humanity has entered a new age. Finally, heavenly fortune is settling on planet Earth. The blood, sweat, and tears that I shed on the course of restoration through indemnity for the sake of human salvation are now beginning to bear fruit.
The fire of true love under God’s direct dominion
In 2001, at the commencement of the twenty-first century, I dedicated the Enthronement Ceremony for God’s Kingship, offering to Him the day of His liberation and complete freedom. This marked the beginning of the opening of the era of God’s direct dominion. On that foundation, the “Coronation of the King of Peace” was held this year on March 23, 2004 in the Dirksen Senate office building of the United States Congress. World leaders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and members of the United States Congress, gathered to crown me the King of World Peace. How could this possibly be a result of human efforts alone?
Just as the French prophet Nostradamus had prophesied, and just as the Orient’s greatest book of prophesies, Kyeog Am Yu Rok, clearly recorded, Reverend Moon has come as the one who has received Heaven’s appointment and fulfilled the responsibilities of humanity’s True Parent and the King of Peace. So now, leaders from all walks of life and from all over the world are surging forward in a giant wave to join the ranks of people working to build the peace kingdom on earth. They are acknowledging that peace cannot be achieved without my help. This is true not only on the Korean peninsula, the only place in the world where the conflict between democracy and communism still divides an innocent people and land, it is also true in the Middle East, which has become the most serious and bloody area of conflict threatening world peace.
A true love movement enveloping the entire globe
On April 10 of this year, I declared the complete freedom of the angelic world, the complete freedom of Cain and Abel, and the complete freedom of the Parent of the Cosmos, the Parents of Heaven and Earth, and the Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind. I am marking May 1 with the declaration, “God’s homeland and the peace kingdom are built on the foundation of the realm of His liberation and complete freedom.” I am thereby completing many levels of spiritual conditions that are needed for God to exercise His dominion and demonstrate His complete immanence, complete authority, complete power and complete transcendence. Based on God’s liberation and complete freedom, a world of freedom, peace, unity and happiness is spreading across this land. In this respect, there is a special meaning to today’s commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.
Heavenly fortune is with each of you present here today. Though our time together is short, you can become people of the kingdom of heaven simply by living according to what I have taught you today. First, live with the certainty of God’s existence, to the point that you can feel His presence against your skin. Second, be certain of the reality of the spirit world, and use your life on earth to prepare for your eternal life in the spirit world. Third, live in attendance to your conscience as you would your teacher, your parents, and God.
The flames of true love, fanned by the spring breezes of the twenty-first century, are spreading like wildfire across the earth. International marriages are becoming acceptable among young people belonging to traditionally enemy countries. Just as water, air and light will flow to fill the tiniest crevice, the movement of true love is flowing and covering the planet. Intellectually astute young people are now awaking from their sleep to inherit God’s love, life and lineage and settle in the peace kingdom on earth.
Eminent world leaders, I hope that you, too, will join the ranks of the owners of Cheon Il Guk, to “establish His kingdom and His righteousness” (Matt. 6:33) and become a revolutionary army of true love. Please put into practice the truth that true love grows larger the more it is given. Thank you.