Sun Myung Moon
March 1, 2009
As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen Pages 176-178
Photo date and location unknown
I taught American young people how to endure difficulty. I thoroughly taught them the principle that a person must be able to rule himself before he can rule the universe.
"Do you want to bear the cross of pain?" I asked them. "No one wants to go the way of the cross. Your heart may want to go that way, but your body says, 'No!' Just because something is pleasing to the eye doesn't mean it is good for the heart. There are many things that look good, but an examination of their inner aspect shows them to be evil. If you catch yourself seeking after only things pleasing to the eyes and try following that path, you must immediately stop yourself and say, 'You rascal!' Also, if you feel the desire to eat only things pleasing to the mouth, you must scold your body, saying, 'You rascal,' and block yourself. You young people are attracted to the opposite sex, aren't you? In this case, too, you must make a strong stand against such urges. If a person cannot control himself, he cannot do anything in this world. Consider that if you break down, the universe will break down."
I was teaching them the motto that I had followed as a young man, which was, "Before seeking to rule the universe, first perfect your ability to rule yourself." America had great wealth and had become obsessed with material goods. I stood in the midst of this material civilization and talked about matters of mind and heart. The mind cannot be seen with the eye or held in the hand. Yet, we clearly are ruled by our minds. Without our minds, we are nothing. Then I talked about true love, God-centered love, which should guide the mind. I said that true freedom can be enjoyed only when we have a clear understanding of ourselves based on a foundation of true love and are able to exercise self-control.
I taught them the value of labor. Labor is not suffering but creation. The reason a person can work all his life and be happy is that labor is connected to God's world. The labor that people perform is nothing more than taking things that God created and shaping them in different ways. If you think that you are making something to give to God as a memento, then labor is not something to think of in a negative way. Many American young people were so steeped in the affluent life provided to them by their materialistic civilization that they didn't know the joy of working. So I taught them to work with joy.
I also awoke in them the joy of loving nature. The young people were caught up in the immoral culture of the cities and enslaved in selfish lives, so I talked to them about the preciousness of nature. Nature is given to us by God. God speaks to us through nature. It is a sin to destroy nature for the sake of a moment of enjoyment or an insignificant amount of money. The nature that we destroy eventually will make its way back to us in the form of poison and make life difficult for our descendants. We need to go back to nature and listen to what nature tells us. I told the young people of America that when we open our hearts and listen to what nature is saying we can hear the word of God.