Sun Myung Moon
January 12, 1990
Janggyo-dong Hall of Religion, Seoul, Korea
Invitational lecture at the Association of Religions in Korea
Photo date and location unknown
I am grateful for this opportunity to meet all of you prominent figures of every religious denomination. I believe that when religious leaders serve their denomination, and when each denomination fulfills its mission, there is hope for the future of the Republic of Korea. Nonetheless, there is no religious denomination that can fulfill this hope on its own. The issue lies in having religions come together in harmony. This is not just a religious problem; it is a political and ideological one as well. In any event, humanity is bound to head toward one destination in the end.
Problems encountered in life and the teachings of the saints
When we consider the external world, we see there are many powerful groups that have been shaping the history of politics, economy, culture and society. When we consider the internal world, there are the various religious denominations. The leaders of these faiths are also all different, yet they have the same responsibility to lead the world and guide the flow of history. If you were to compare all this to a human being, religion is like the mind and society in general is like the body.
Now, when we consider ourselves as human beings, a question arises: when will our body and mind unite? We know only too well that there is not one saint who has been able to confidently declare, “I have united my body and mind as one through my doctrine. I have brought peace; I have ended this war between my mind and body.”
We can see that the external and internal worlds are in conflict. This clash is also apparent on the global level, where to this day the rulers of nations in the secular world have all too often oppressed the religious realm. The religious realm has suffered a great deal. In particular, religions in their formative stages have been on the receiving end of the blows, though they have not attacked the secular world. Religions grew as they received such blows.
This conflict of internal and external is the fundamental problem; hence the title of today’s address: “The Fundamental Truth.” Born of the white-clad people of Korea, I am a person who has thought and agonized more than anyone about the question of religion. Furthermore, I have thought deeply about the problems of life and the human condition. Who can solve the problems of humankind? People cannot do so by themselves. Then how can they be solved? They can be solved through the teachings of the saints.
By the saints, I am referring to the leaders of the four great religions. What did these founders center their lives upon? It was the question of absolute values, which in turn was rooted in questions concerning the existence and nature of God.
The difference between religion and philosophy is that religion begins together with God. This is not the case with philosophy. Religion has a backdrop of mystery and defines its purpose within an unfolding providence of God, the Subject Being who moves history from behind the scenes. This means that the founders of religions lived their lives together with God.
What kind of life is one that has begun together with God? Is it a private life, a life centering on the family? Or is it a religious life lived together with God and centered on the tribe? If it were the latter, would it center only on the white-clad people of Korea? Is it a life centered only on the nation? We can take this question to the level of the physical world and spirit world, and heaven and earth.
Has there ever been a religion that advocated the notion of saving the family? Has there ever been a religion that promoted the salvation of the society, the salvation of the people and the salvation of the nation? Most religions advocate individual deliverance. They say the individual needs to be saved. They were begun centering on the individual. For this reason, the higher the level of a religion, the more its doctrine separates believers from the material world. It requires the believer to renounce the world. This is true for Buddhism, and for Christianity as well.
What does it mean to renounce the world? When you are born a Korean, you are born into a tribe with a certain surname. You are completely enveloped by that tribe’s traditional and historical culture. To renounce the world means to renounce your family, which is at the center of that culture. To leave your home and renounce the world entails renouncing your nation, renouncing your society, renouncing your family and even renouncing the parent-child relationship within your family. This is a problem.
It is a problem because, while each of us can try to pioneer the path of our destiny, we cannot alter that portion of our path that God has ordained. Then the question is, what can possibly sever the God-ordained relationship between parents and children? To attempt to change that fact creates a problem. Even if a dictator were to try to educate parents and children for thousands of years, saying, “You have no father! You have no son!” he could not alter that relationship.
Where, then, lies the reason to renounce the world, leave your home and renounce even the relationship between parents and child? Does the act of renouncing the world suggest you just leave home, and still cling to your relationship with your mother and father? Or do you renounce that relationship and leave behind everything ego-centered, so you can achieve your own principles based on a standard of individual perfection? It focuses solely on the standard of self-perfection.
The origin of religion and our relationship with God
All religions are based on the standard of self-perfection. This is why all advanced religions celebrate the solitary life. They urge you to renounce your blood ties to your parents, and then they urge you to renounce even your own descendants. This is true for Catholicism and Buddhism. One has to renounce the world, one has to renounce the nation, one has to renounce one’s family, one has to renounce one’s parents, men have to renounce women, and women have to renounce men.
The question is how a religious denomination can find and establish the doctrine, the logic, that explains why such ties need to be renounced. Christianity is vague on this point, as are Buddhism and Confucianism. It is said, “The four seasons representing the circle of life are unchanging heavenly laws, and this is also the nature of human beings, who pursue love, righteousness, courteousness and knowledge to follow such heavenly laws.” What a wonderful saying this is! The Chinese character cheon in this saying means Heaven. Even if there is a Heaven, if that Heaven is not one with which I can form an eternal connection from the very beginning, I cannot serve it as the ideal Heaven. From the beginning, through the middle stage and up to the end, every part of that connection to Heaven must be eternal. Together with that Heaven, I must be happy. It will not do for me to be unhappy. When you are one with that Heaven, all existing beings will envy you, and everything will uphold and follow you. You will not be limited by the particular circumstances into which you were born, such as being a part of the Korean people. You will move forward transcending race and philosophy.
In this regard, the founder of each religion initiated his ministry when he began living together with God. When we consider the relationship between the founder of a religion and God, the question is whether people ought to follow God or the religions founder. In the relationship between the religious leader and God, the founder needs to follow God. If that God is an absolute God, then the religious leader ought to follow Him absolutely. We need to know about the relationship between ourselves and this God whom we have to follow absolutely, as well as the relationship between God and the religious leader. The matter of how we can connect the relationship between God and the religious leader and the relationship between the religious leader and ourselves is not a simple one.
While pondering questions about the spirit world and the religious realm, I came to realize that there is a mysterious world. If you ask whether there is a God or not, the answer is, there definitely is a God. Nowadays the world of relationships is a problem.
A household is composed of the relationship between parents and children, the relationship between husband and wife and the relationships between siblings. Beyond that, there is also the relationship between one family and another. No matter how great a person is, he or she is at a disadvantage if family relationships have been severed. What is the center in the relationships between the individual and family, between family and family, and between tribe and tribe? The fact is, human beings cannot leave the world of relationships.
There is a saying to the effect, “When one’s home is harmonious, all goes well.” For one’s home to be harmonious and for everything to go well, the relationship between the grandfather and the grandmother needs to be ideal. The relationship between husband and wife and the relationships between siblings need to be ideal. It will not work if the grandfather and grandmother are happy only by themselves, or if the husband and wife or the siblings are happy only among themselves. Only when the grandfather, the grandmother, the parents and the sons and daughters are all in harmony vertically and horizontally, from front to back, and from left to right, can the home be harmonious.
It is difficult for the home to be harmonious. Why is this so? It is because the body and mind are fighting each other within our individual self. The thirty-eighth parallel is not the problem and the wars of the world are not the problem. After all, what is the cause of war? The origin of war is found within the self.
Religion requires a lifestyle of denying the desires of the body and following the dictates of the mind
Humankind consists of men and women. And each of them has two sides, mind and body. In believing in a religion, do you believe in it with your mind and body or with only your mind? It would be ideal for you to believe in it with your mind and body united. When they are not united, God centers first on the mind, which is the subject partner, in order to bring them into oneness.
When the mind is said to be upright, it means it is vertical. You must become completely one with God centering on the mind and then unite the body as one with the mind. This is the task today’s religious believers need to fulfill in the course of their lives. You need to live together with God and stand in a position where you know the Will of God. In other words, you need to live centering on the Will of God. However, the body does not follow willingly. Since the mind is in the plus position, how nice it would be if the body would just take the minus position. The body, however, tries to take the plus position. Because both are in the plus position, they can only repel each other.
Then how can they be brought into unity? There are two ways of doing so. First, find the fundamental truth, achieve an attitude of absoluteness with a strong faith and an unchanging mind, and thus weaken the body. In short, practice asceticism.
Is there anyone who likes to practice asceticism? Is there anyone in this world who enjoys carrying out ascetic practices? Out of the thousands and tens of thousands of practitioners, not one of them enjoys it. If there are millions of Buddhists, would there be even one among them who enjoys practicing asceticism? The answer is no.
This being the case, can the ideal possibly be realized by forcing people to perform an ascetic practice? This would be self-defeating. Since it is impossible to achieve the ideal by practicing asceticism even by force, the notion that you can reach perfection when being forced into it is absurd. At the same time, the life of religion is one of denying the body.
The second way is to center on the mind in the plus position. This places the body in the minus position, and once the body is in the minus position, there is no need to say they are to unite as one. When the body is returned to the minus position, the body and the mind can be brought into oneness.
There are some people who deny God. But what they are really doing is complaining that God failed to create human beings in such a way that we would not have to deny our body. Although we do not know the reason why, it is true that human beings are disordered. There are Buddhist monks who, no matter how much they cultivate their mind and recite Buddhist canons, cannot rid themselves of their lust for meat. That desire is alive in them. You have no idea how strong it is. No matter how much devotion they offer and how much they train their mind, it does not work out well. The path they tread, and their process of advancing toward that world, is set like a formula.
Then why do you need to make your body suffer through following a religion? It is to weaken it so it can be made to follow the conscience. You need to weaken your body and drag it around for about three years, until it becomes used to such treatment. This is for the purpose of emphasizing faith absolutely. You absolutely can’t think about anything else. Leaving behind your mother and father, siblings, the person you love and the miscellaneous things of the nation and the world, you have to try to train your body to be absolutely submissive before the standard of morality and thus find the point at which the mind and body can unite. All religions must teach this. Otherwise development cannot take place in the religious world, and a revolution of character cannot come about.
This is why you need to abstain from eating, practice other forms of asceticism, and go out into the society to be persecuted and receive opposition.
In order to achieve the purpose of morality, no matter how much your body clamors, complaining that it is on the verge of death, you must to ignore it. The life of religion is a life of self-denial through which you make your body obedient before your mind and thus find your true self. Those religious people who have not achieved this are frauds. Based on this universally valid viewpoint, a person who says he or she will train his or her body to reach a level that is higher than what is taught by the scriptures, in order to bring his or her conscience and body into accord, is a true practitioner of that person’s religion.
I am sorry to say this, but if Buddhist monks were to marry and have sons and daughters, how difficult it would be for them to achieve a state of unity in the world of the mind while caring for their family! How difficult it would be for them to carry out all their family responsibilities! Don’t they renounce the world and leave their homes in order to reduce such problems?
What is to be done after one has renounced the world? After a man and a woman have fulfilled their goal and completely achieved the standard of morality, they can become one. This is why in the Last Days the era of the power achieved through asceticism will come to an end, and a time will come when all those who have achieved the moral standard will marry as a matter of course.
In the secular world, many problems arise because people marry in the wrong fashion. That world has become a nest of demons, a nest of devils, a nest of Satan. God will say to these people, “You accursed, you are following a path that goes against morality, centering on earth-bound ethics, and so you will come to ruin. In order to set you right, you need to have an example. Buddhist priests ought to marry, and priests and nuns ought to marry, to set an example for you.” Can such a thing be found in the scriptures? It is not in the scriptures.
The four great saints are all leaders of morality. They are the founders of religions. Centering on the founders of religions throughout the course of thousands of years of history, humanity has become gradually enlightened. Heaven, or God, is the Absolute God at the center of history and propels heavenly fortune. Since the intentions of the moral leaders were good, God established them and used them as models for the rest of us. Therefore, you cannot say, “Our moral leader is God!” It is a serious problem when you say your moral leader is the Absolute God.
A showdown with God to discover fundamental truth
Human beings began from a first cause. What is the first cause? The name of that first cause does not matter. He is the one with the ideal that we human beings yearn for. He is not a being who comes and goes and thinks just any thoughts. Since He is the Absolute Being, the ideal He is thinking of is also absolute.
No religious founder can be above Him. No matter how eminent a religious founder or religious leader, or how great the power of a religious believer to overturn the world, he or she needs to center on God. The person will be in serious trouble if the focus is on the self. This is because human beings are, after all, only resultant beings and not the Causal Being.
How did human beings, who are the second beings, come to be born? For us, the first being is our mother and father. And our mother and father’s first being is our grandfather and grandmother. This is the way it traces back and upward. Ultimately, the grandfather and grandmothers first being is the first ancestor. And though we human beings may not know it, if there is a God, He would be the one to whom we can trace our first cause all the way back, centering on our first ancestor.
What is the Will of this God? Is it to establish religions and save individuals and families, or is it to save the nation, the world and heaven and earth? At present, there is hell on earth, and Heaven is in great anguish over the state of the cosmos. Thus, the salvation God intends has to mean to do away with the suffering of heaven and hell on earth and to build the kingdom of heaven. A being who intends such salvation is a being of absolute goodness.
I have thought long and hard about such questions. I prayed deeply and confronted the entire spirit world in pursuit of the fundamental truth of the universe. And thus I found God. Then I challenged God in a showdown, saying, “I have discovered You, and I am ready to die in pursuit of the truth. Please teach me the fundamental secrets of the universe.” Going through terrible struggles, I discovered the fundamental truth by asking God, “What kind of being are You?”
Today the question of whether there is a God or not is a global one. From that question arose the materialistic interpretation of history, the idealistic interpretation of history and the theory of duality. The question can be reduced to: Which is dominant, the mind or the body? It has been revealed that neither the mind nor the body is dominant, and that such a dualistic conflict exists because the body and the mind are not united. The democratic world is in a sense an extension of the mind, while the communist world is in the same way an extension of the body. And they are fighting each other. How can this struggle between the two be stopped? Unity between the democratic world and the communist world begins from the mind and body unity within you.
While pondering such questions, I set as my motto, “Before you desire to have dominion over the universe, you must first have dominion over yourself’ This was my first motto. Consider that even though every person and every religious denomination desires to rule the world and heaven and earth, they are unable to control themselves. Engaged in this struggle, I wandered and searched for ten years. And I shed many tears.
You are taught that the duty of a filial child is to become absolutely one with the parents. You are taught about the way of the patriot centering on the nation. Filial piety connects to patriotism, and if you broaden it, it becomes the way of the saint Are the religious founders you believe in saints or sages? Jesus, Confucius and Buddha are all saints.
A true disciple is one who can receive love from a religious leader
From among each of the four great religions, which one can set the standard of morality? There cannot be two highest peaks. Though you may climb peaks in all the four different directions, east, west, north and south, there is only one highest peak.
What are the traits of a true believer? There are many Buddhist monks present here, as well as the high priest. How wonderful would it be if the Buddha told you, “Your high priest is number one!” What would Buddha really wish for? When you go to the spirit world, you do not need money. Nor do you need knowledge. I have been there, and that is what I saw. You do not need power. God can create money. He can even make a diamond as big as a star. He is the Absolute Being, and the Great King of knowledge and power. He can transcend the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and exercise His power freely and eternally. What then would He need?
Buddhist believers are those who have earned the trust of Buddha. Is having his trust the best thing there is? It isn’t. In the end, where you need to go is to the internal relationship from the external relationship. You need to become the person who receives the love of Buddha more than anyone else. After all, would you rather be a person who is trusted or a person who is loved? A mother absolutely trusts her child. However, it will not do if she only trusts in her son and does nothing else. She will be happy only if she holds him in her embrace and breastfeeds him and loves him. It is her original nature to do so.
That is why, as I have said before, there is a relationship between the moral leader and the believer. It is a relationship based on the saying, “When one’s home is harmonious, all goes well.” What is this relationship like? A relationship centered on a doctrine is excellent. Yet the doctrine only teaches you the path to follow. It teaches you what is morally right and wrong. The Chinese character for morality do (道) signifies the path you walk. It teaches you what direction to follow. What will you do once you have arrived? What will you do when you meet Buddha and Jesus? Everyone wishes to meet all the religious leaders. What will you do when you meet them? Would it be nice if what belongs to Jesus also became yours, and what belongs to you also became his? When all is said and done, it is about embracing the faith. In other words, it is the wish of believers to be on an equal footing with their leaders.
What will you need to do to be on an equal footing with them? Centering on Buddha, would it be nice to have a relationship of niece or nephew with him as your uncle, either on your father’s side or on your mother’s side? Or would it be nicer to be in a master-servant relationship with him? If you were to ask believers, “What kind of a relationship would you like to have with him?” they will answer, “We wish to be Buddha’s sons and daughters.” That is the ultimate conclusion.
The sons and daughters are the heirs. And they can live together with him and go with him wherever he goes. They can participate in whatever he does. In the parent-child relationship, when you are centered on love you are entitled to the inheritance. One of the attributes of love is the right of inheritance.
When a man and a woman are in love with each other, to whom will the husband’s possessions belong? They will belong to the wife. Similarly, the wife’s possessions will belong to the husband. For that reason, a married couple with separate bank accounts can be said to be false. It is as if they are prepared to pack up and leave at any time. Such behavior needs to be set right, and set right at the root.
With respect to the relationship between Buddha and his disciples, or if you were to ask Jesus, “What do you desire of believers?” they wouldn’t say, “I wish them to work as my servants for generations to come,” would they? Christian ministers in prayer say that they are servants of God. Why do they offer such prayers? Are they satisfied only to be servants of God? Above the servant are the adopted son, the stepson and the son of direct lineage. Since you recognize three stages through which to climb from being a servant to being His son or daughter, all other things being equal, wouldn’t you just want to establish yourself as His son or daughter? Why would you opt for being His servant?
Reverend Moon is the philosopher of true love
If there are believers in Jesus among you, would you wish to stand in a position quite close to him, like that of his sons and daughters, or would you wish to stand in the position of a next-door neighbor? If you were to ask this question of Jesus, he would answer, “What are you asking? Of course you should wish to be in the closest vertical relationship, which is the parent-child relationship,” not in a horizontal relationship. Why would you want it to be the parent-child relationship? This is because it is a vertical relationship. The husband-wife relationship is a horizontal relationship. Then what comes first, the vertical or the horizontal? If the vertical comes first, why is this so?
When all things in the world were created, the Creator created them vertical while looking at the horizontal. That is why all good things have a perpendicular orientation. Stalks grow perpendicularly. The heads cause them to curve, while the stalks grow erect. Stalks include roots and bud stalks. They are all perpendicular.
If the ancestors of humankind are the second cause, then the First Cause, God, is in the higher position and human beings are in the lower position. Under the circumstances, if you were to talk about the love between God and human beings, such love is only vertical.
At this point, we can formulate a concept. What is it that can create complete perpendicularity between vertical and horizontal? Knowledge is not enough. You cannot go in a straight line with that alone; it makes you go in circles. And money is not something that comes vertically down from heaven, but rather cycles around on the earth. Not even power can be perpendicular. True love, however, passes through the shortest route, which is perpendicular.
You have no idea how delighted I was after I discovered this simple truth. You cannot explain the universe without this principle. What is true love? It is a force that passes through the shortest and most direct route. This is why if there is a true love that comes down from above, it can only be perpendicular. If it were to swerve even a little, however, it would not be perpendicular. Then it would not be following the shortest and most direct route. What could possibly achieve the perpendicular, which involves the shortest route in the universe? It is only true love.
Nowadays, I have become famous worldwide by talking about true love. I have come to be known as the philosopher of true love. When their beloved child is in danger, would the parents try to save the child by going in circles? They would travel by the shortest route to save the child’s life, even at the risk of their own lives. This is in itself a truly great gospel. What is the center of the universe? What is that which can travel the shortest and most direct line to create perpendicularity? Whatever that is, the world needs to place it as the central value and determine locations in relationship to that point. Centering on that perpendicular line, one would determine whether one is to the east, west, south or north.
Perpendicularity has no meaning in and of itself. It is a term that can only be used on the premise of the horizontal. The word “above” is not centered on itself; it first takes below into account. The word “right” implicitly acknowledges the fact that there is a “left.” Similarly, you cannot use the term “woman” if only women exist. The use of these terms without their counterparts would be confusing. The term “man” is the primary, decisive factor that clarifies the use of the word “woman.” These words are used on the basis of their relationship.
The example of the child in danger shows us that if you have to find the most direct, perpendicular line in the universe, you cannot do so with knowledge alone. You cannot find it with power alone. And wealth will not lead you to it. With love, however, it is possible. Since God is the Absolute Being and His love is also absolute, that love is absolute truth and that love creates the shortest route. This is the fundamental truth.
The origin of the universe is love, life and lineage
A person who studies philosophy reads books and ponders the question, “Why was I born?” Women may think to themselves, “I am vexed and mortified from being ill-treated by men. I wish I could have been born as a man so I could take revenge on them. I wish to transmigrate and be reborn to do so.” However, they should not think like that.
Who is the cause for women and men, human beings in general, to be born? Children are born because of their parents. Why do parents exist? They exist because of their children. The term “parents” presupposes the existence of children. Similarly, the word “children” is premised on the word “parents” as a prior condition. Relationships are formed based on such prior conditions. No relationship is formed centering on one’s own self. Men were born because of women. To become a true man, one has to first become a true son. To become a true son, one has to become a filial son. Next, one has to meet a true woman and they have to become a true husband and wife. In a true couple, the wife represents women and the husband represents men. They are the representatives of all men and women in the world. The animal kingdom has males and females, and the world of atoms is made up of positive and negative particles. Everything in the universe exists in pairs. And all males and females multiply and live centered on love.
Buddhist priests may say, “This is a serious problem, since I am not even thinking about forming a relationship with a woman.” When they go to the heavenly world they will see the repercussions. If you were born as a man, why were you created in such a way? Was the convex created for the sake of the convex? That fundamental question arises in the context of my logic. The convex came to be because of the concave. In the same way, was the concave created because of the concave? It came to be because of the convex. This is the principle of heaven and earth. Oriental philosophy talks about all things existing as positive and negative, and that positive and negative need to come together or else they remain incomplete. Then through what can positive and negative be brought together? It is through love. This being the case, what is the reason for which a man was born for a woman? It is for love. The love of a man does not lie with another man but lies with a woman. And the love of a woman lies with a man. One does not possess love by oneself.
The basis of the universe is love, life and lineage. Without them, human beings cannot feel love. God is the Subject Being of love, the Subject Being of life and the Subject Being of lineage. We also have these three, yet we cannot realize them of our own accord. Once our object partner appears before us, however, we feel the resonance of love. Our life writhes within us. Our blood is stirred. Whom do we take after when this happens? It cannot happen without an origin.
In light of this, God is the same. God also has love, life and lineage. What does it mean to become mature? One meaning is to yearn for love from the opposite sex. When this is consummated, the entire world is encompassed in it. Anyone who experiences love for the first time becomes like a poet filled with inspiration and intoxicated by that love. During adolescence, there is not one person who does not become lyrical from love.
If you are a man, you would think, “I represent the male sex,” wouldn’t you? How can you do so? Can you do so by studying, piling up money or amassing power? That will never happen. However, if you, among all men in the world, can stand as a representative who is second to none when it comes to love, all men will shout, “Hooray!” for you. If you have become the representative of love, everyone will cheer for you, regardless of whether they are good people or bad. The same is true for women.
Human beings desire to stand at the very top. What is this desire based on? It is not money. It is love. Men were born for women, and women were born for men. That is why God has exchanged the ownership of their most precious parts. If the man is the master of the woman’s love organ, then who would be the master of the man’s love organ? The woman would be the master. And if she is the master, by what right can she claim it? She claims it by the right of queenship. She does not do so as the wife of a man who lives in a shabby cottage. She claims it as the master who represents the queenship of love.
Only when you get married with such thoughts in your mind can the earth tremble with drums beating with joy as the wedding ceremony is held. Otherwise, you do not know the world, and then what will become of you when the dark night comes? These words have never been said in history, and Reverend Moon is the one saying them. Have you ever heard such words? You cannot find them in the Buddhist scriptures.
Why do men and women marry? It is because of love, and this love is absolute and true. The parent-child relationship cannot be severed or altered by anyone. It is absolute, and the love that flows in it is absolute. If that relationship is absolute, are the mother and the father themselves also absolute, or are they relative? They need to be absolute. Since the relationship between the mother and father and the sons and daughters is absolute, even if the mother and father were to leave the family, the sons and daughters could not leave. Nowadays, however, there are families where the mother and father leave, abandoning their children.
For a husband and wife to live together, there needs to be absolute love. Nowadays, however, there are couples who get a divorce before a week of marriage has passed. Are such couples true or false? They are false couples. You feel good when you are told you were born because of love. Buddhist priests have become highly virtuous in the Buddhist realm of Korea through their life of devotion, yet don’t even they miss the embrace of their mothers and fathers? They never forget it. This is something that cannot be altered. A part of their heart wishes to find their way back to their parents. Why is this so? It is because love is the root. Since love was the motive that gave them birth, the process that unfolds cannot be completed unless it passes again through the relationship of love.
God, true love and eternal life
Then who is God really? He is our Father. In Buddhism, we do not find a personal God. How could we possibly discover a personal God if we only debate the unitary method of all phenomena in the universe? How could we possibly find this God who can also feel the emotions connected with affection, knowledge and righteousness, both internally and externally? What would the parents of a loving, devoted son do if their son returned to them? Thinking nothing of whether their son is a highly virtuous priest or a moral leader, they will exclaim, “Oh, my son!” and their faces would glow in delight.
Let us return to the root. We will be in serious trouble if we love only for ourselves. The universe does not welcome that. If we love only for our own sake, it is a complete disaster.
God, the basis of the universe, is the Absolute Being. If you were to penetrate to the purpose of God’s creation, you would come to realize that the God you believe in is a greater being than you ever imagined. What is that indisputable thing that the Absolute Being can believe? God also needs absolute peace and absolute happiness.
Then what can bring about such absolute peace and happiness? Is it money? He can create as much money as He likes. Is it knowledge? The omniscient God is the great King of knowledge. Is it power? God is omnipotent. Then what would it be? It is only love. It is true love that even the Absolute God cherishes without question.
No matter how much power God has, when He meets His sons and daughters of true love, He says, “I will give you everything I own.” A true husband says to his wife, “I will give you all I have.” It is not true love if you say, “What is mine is mine.” You need to completely turn around in order to give as well as receive. This is what caused God to create heaven and earth in the first place.
Christian ministers say, “The Creator is holy and the creation is lowly” They say this only because they don’t know any better. Such words result in denying that God is a God of love. Be it the love of God or the love of Jesus, the word “love” cannot be meaningful without a relationship. Who is God’s object partner? It is said, “Of all the creation, humankind is the most precious.” This is only too true.
Why did God create heaven and earth? It was because of love. The way for God Himself to establish that ideal love was by investing Himself thoroughly in humankind and creation. God needed to invest Himself completely. God had to invest more than 100 percent, even 120 percent, of Himself.
Therefore, people who live with true love cannot be dominated, no matter how much they are persecuted, because they are connected to the source of the original nature that can invest 120 percent, and even as much as several hundred percent, of themselves.
Even if a dictator devastates an era, the world revives again. This is akin to the feet that, no matter how old your mother and father are, they always rekindle their love for you. Regardless of how much the dictator oppresses, the world revives, transcending history, and moral authority is reestablished with dignity. Similarly, the world may persecute moral leaders in their time. Subsequent history reveals their greatness, once an environment develops in which what they have invested can be reclaimed. And so society often honors them after their time.
God is a personal God, so if you were to ask whether God has a body and a mind, the answer would be yes. If you were to ask if God has love, the answer would be yes. And if you were to ask if God has life and if God has lineage, the answer to both would be yes. And yet, all these things cannot come to be by themselves. They need an object partner. Since God is vertical, He tries to make a connection centering on the vertical standard. We grow up in the position of the children, which is also a vertical orientation, and become husband and wife. And then we come to learn everything about the world. Thus, we come together as one. Where do we go to unite as one? We go to the vertical orientation. That is the position where the sons and daughters are, and also where God has entered and will remain.
It is the chord in a circle. Becoming the reduced versions of the first quarter and the last quarter of the circle, Adam and Eve come together in a united form. In other words, they become like the bones and the flesh. This is why the title “Heavenly Father” cannot be established if there isn’t a relationship of lineage. If you ask who God is, the answer is that He is our Father. He is our vertical Father centered on true love.
If Adam and Eve had not fallen and instead reached perfection, God would have dwelled with them at that very place of true love. If Adam and Eve had married and become one horizontally as husband and wife, the vertical God would have come down to them. He would have carried out a powerful motion by pushing His way down. Everything is created in such a way to exist by engaging in spherical action. Therefore, if you were to wonder who your body and mind resemble, you would get the answer that they resemble God.
Then would the mind and body of God fight like those of fallen humankind? They would not. Then why do human beings fight? It is because they are broken. They have a terrible flaw. This is what Christianity calls the Fall. What kind of a flaw is it? You can live if one of your arms has been cut off. You can, yet you can’t truly live if the order of love is destroyed. This is what God hates most.
After they fell, Adam and Eve covered their lower parts. This is the problem. God is our vertical Father of true love, the Creator, and if human beings had not fallen, their vertically directed love would have been at right angles to the horizontal. For men as well as for women, the path that leads to true love is the shortest and most direct route. The true love path, which runs through heaven and earth, is the shortest route and so it is perpendicular and at right angles to the horizontal. And in terms of a sphere, if you ask where the prime position is, the answer is that it is at the very center.
You desire to become the central figure of all creation. Why is this so? It is because it is only when you are at that center that you can come in touch with God’s love. What happens when you come in touch with God’s love? God becomes yours, and everything that belongs to Him belongs to you.
Why do men and women marry? It is because of love. What are they trying to do by loving one another? Ultimately, they are trying to go to the center and form a relationship of love with God, thus making Him theirs and His love theirs and His possessions theirs. Therefore, the right of inheritance is connected centering on love. Next comes the right of cohabitation, by which they can live together for all eternity.
Accordingly, you can reason that there is eternal life where true love moves. Where is eternal life? The eternal life of true love is in that world where you breathe the air of love. The being “I” is the one who has inherited love through parents of love. That is why there is not a man or a woman who does not possess love. Whether you are a man or a woman, you have inherited the flesh and blood and the life of your parents, so all of you have love, life and lineage.
The standard of peace and the way to love in all religions
What is the mind? It is the internal “I” that has been inherited through the love and lineage of the vertical God. The internal “I” is the vertical “I.”
Then what is the body? If “I” had not fallen, the “I” who would have inherited the fundamental, originally created ideal would have stood at right angles to the love of God. If I am born inheriting the love, life and lineage of the unfallen True Parents, I would become a person of both the body and the mind. The one would have been the character centered on the internal God of the mind, and the other would have been the character centered on the external parents of the body. At that place, the two would have formed a compound, united realm of a man and a woman centered on love, life and lineage. Since in this way the mind resembles God, the mind is said to be the internal “I.”
When I desperately prayed to ask what the secret of the universe is, the answer that came was simple. It is the parent-child relationship. If that parent-child relationship is literally the relationship between parents and their child, it can also be found in the fallen world, a world where parents sometimes sell their children and children kill their parents. Then what kind of a thing would be this parent-child relationship that is the secret of the universe? In terms of the sanctity of love, it would be the same as the ideal relationship between husband and wife.
What is the Human Fall? It was the stealing of that which is most precious to God. This act was committed by the devil. He stole and defiled God’s precious love, life and lineage. This is why, throughout the historical eras, what God hated most was the lustful act of the Fall. Why did Rome come to ruin? It was not destroyed by outside forces invading. It was because of the promiscuous culture within. The devil sowed evil through lust. If populations across the world sail by the winds of obscenity, the iron rod will strike them.
When a religious denomination falls into such a state, it falters and decays, and when a nation falls into such a state, it also falters and decays. And when history thus goes wrong, its direction becomes perilous. Who brings this about? It is actually not people who make this happen. Nor is it the nation. Such a thing comes about because God dislikes sexual promiscuity.
That is why I am saying we need to find a true religion. What all religions are trying to find is the true God. The God who has carried out salvation until now is not the ideal God. He is not the God who can educate and guide moral leaders.
If you were to ask God what He would like to live with, He would say He wishes to live centered on love. What love would this be? It would be the love that is completely one, with mind and body at a perfect right angle. What would be the focus of God’s mind? It is true love. Then what is true love? It is the love that sacrifices completely and that invests 100 percent and then forgets having done so. Otherwise, do you think God could have observed the wrongdoings of humanity throughout the historical ages until now and endured that? If He had been like the people in the world, He would justifiably have killed us all.
Only one aspect of true love remains in the fallen world. The only vertical standard left is parents loving their children in place of God. This is why the providence of salvation is possible.
Where is happiness? It is in your mind. Then, what would God Himself desire to live for? He desires to live for true love. He desires to live together with men and women of true love. Parents desire to embrace all their children in their bosom. Similarly, God desires to live on this earth, holding on to His sons and daughters of true love.
The purpose of God’s salvation of humankind
Buddhist priests have raised a clamor, saying Rev. Moon claims he is higher than Buddha, Jesus, Confucius or anyone else for that matter. However, has there ever been anyone among the religious founders who has worked as much as I have in a lifetime? Despite opposition, I laid foundations in dozens, even hundreds, of nations. If you think about this one lifetime of mine, you will see there is no one who has worked as much as I have.
If I had done so with human energy alone, I would have been long dead by now. That would have happened if I had worked at all to satisfy my own greed. The course of the Unification Church, which is a path of goodness, is one that is centered on the ideal through love. It is not love merely on the individual or family level. The Unification Church’s view of love is “perpendicular.” This perpendicular view of love changes the philosophical view. It is a horizontal love that has a perpendicular perspective. Because I know about this, I can transcend peoples and races.
The members of the Unification Church, regardless of their nationality or race, are happy when I advise them to marry someone of another race or nation. Why is this so? It is because they understand that doing this is an act of reclaiming the brothers and sisters they lost thousands of years ago. The members come to realize that other members are their own brothers and sisters. And so the members sympathize with each other, asking how much they have suffered because of the color of their skin, and cling to each other and weep. Their meeting starts out with such weeping, and they cannot forget this experience. What would make them act like this? It is true love. This is what the Unification Church is like. I am an intelligent person. I have met and held discussions with the most prominent people in the world and won them over. This is why religious leaders of the world respect me.
An illogical doctrine is useless in the twenty-first century. In other words, a religion contrary to logic and not beneficial in real life is useless. The members of the Unification Church may seem naive, but in reality they do not take things at face value; they look deeper. They have serious discussions about God and also God’s heart.
Since God’s goal is the salvation of the world, God endeavors to find His people even if it means sacrificing the family. God tries to save the world even at the risk of sacrificing the nation. God tries to liberate all spirits of all generations who have gone to the spirit world, even at the risk of sacrificing this earthly world. And after that, God Himself needs to be liberated.
I have willingly shouldered the cross because I know this to be true. This man standing before you has undergone myriads of hardships for forty years, saying to himself, “In the religious world, the person who knows this truth will bear the cross.” When you see my passion and vigor, you will see that they are more than enough to stop all heaven and earth. From the moment I learned about the Will of God, I have continually advocated that we need to save the world, even if it means having to sacrifice the Unification Church and all religions. This is why I have invested huge sums of money, which amount to hundreds of times more than the budget of the Unification Church, to carry out the interdenominational movement. Thus on the world stage, I have made a religious foundation and have been investing vast amounts of resources in it The Unification Church members support and carry out this work by following my model of carrying the cross.
I invest for the world. This is because I know that if I invest in the same way God does, the spring days of revival will come and the ideal world as originally intended by God will dawn. Such a world is a place where we can dance with joy centering on the jubilant ideal of love. To carry out this work, someone has to bear the cross for humanity, be it in the east, in the west, at home or anywhere else. Otherwise, we cannot purify the filthy water in the drainage ditch. The members of the Unification Church are people who live with faith in this truth.
I set before you the paths to prosperity or destruction; where you go is determined by whether you live for the sake of others or not. When you consider input and output of energy in the realm of natural science, you see that input is always greater than output. However, in the world of true love output is always greater than input. Because of love, you can rescue a world that is in decline. Only when you inherit the tradition of true love, which is based on living and sacrificing for the sake of others and on a heart of unconditional love and service, can this world’s decline be brought under control. This is the rule of Heaven.
The path of living for the sake of others as well as the path of love of the dutiful child is the path of the love of the patriot and the path of the love of the saint. The love of the saint is love for humanity. Saints know how to love heaven and earth and how to uphold the laws of the heavenly palace. They are able to serve God with all their heart. This is the vertical position you must hold on to.
Without learning about the way of the saint and the way of God’s love, we cannot find the standard of peace for all religions. Isn’t this the goal of the Association of Religions in Korea?
With these words, I would like to conclude my address. Thank you.