Sun Myung Moon
Inaugural Assembly of the Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace August 20, 1996
Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel, Seoul, Korea
Photo date and location unknown
Respected chairman, distinguished guests from around the world, representatives of all walks of life in Korea, ladies and gentlemen:
I truly appreciate your hard work for the welfare of humanity and the realization of a world of peace. I welcome you to my homeland, the land of Korea. It is my hope that a conference held at this time, with the twenty-first century just four years away, will provide an environment for profitable discussions that can give hope for a world of peace. I would like to express my thoughts on the ultimate ideal of humanity and the realization of world peace.
I grew up on the Korean Peninsula and saw how it suffered in agony as the major powers of the world waged a war on its soil over ideology and resources. From a young age, I endeavored to find answers to the fundamental questions about life and the universe. I came to know the living God by experiencing Him, and I also learned that this God is the owner of true love who has continued to be with humanity throughout history. I could not believe that God had planned and intentionally created the world’s sin, contradiction and struggle.
I don’t have the time to talk about the experiences of my adolescence. I will say only that my youth was spent in dedication and struggle to find the truth. Through my struggles and searching I discovered the Divine Principle, which is the thought system of the Unification Church. The Divine Principle was not developed by ordinary means. I found its basis through conversations with Jesus and the sages in the spirit world, through prayer and, most important, by communicating deeply with God Himself. It is the fruit of victory reaped after waging a fierce battle with an obstructionist Satan. By teaching and practicing this Divine Principle, I am devoting every moment of my life, straining myself relentlessly, to guide humanity. The Divine Principle is being taught in 184 nations across the world, and it is changing the lives of people by forming within them life-giving relationships with the living God.
God is a Parent who yearns for love
God created us, so we were born with dreams related to Him and an eager desire for the ideal world. Even in the most wretched of environments, we do not abandon the hope that directs us toward the ideal world of peace. When we talk of the ideal world, the word “ideal” originates from God, the causal Being. God did not create the world for power, glory or wealth -- for which He has absolutely no desire. This is because God, who is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, and who is the causal Being of all things everywhere, already possesses every such thing.
Nonetheless, it is not right to think that God has no desires. Though He exists as the original Being of true love, in order for Him to actually experience love, He needs -- and therefore urgently desires -- an object partner. This is because love is an experience and a joy that is made possible only by forming a relationship with an object partner, that is, by forming a relationship between subject and object partners. No being can feel love if he or she is isolated and all alone, and God is no exception. His motive for creation is true love and His object partners are true people. God created human beings as persons who could give and receive love freely with Him. In short, human beings were created to become perfect object partners of God’s love. Human beings are God’s sons and daughters. God the Creator is the True Parent of humankind.
God wished for Adam and Eve to grow up in innocence, centering on true love, and become true people. He created the world and everything in it as a beautifully and delicately prepared environment that would be the foothold for their external, biological growth. In such an environment, human beings would grow to maturity and flourish physically. However, God had the deepest interest of all in the internal nature and loving character of human beings. By experiencing true love, they were to resemble God’s true love and perfect it. He created the power of love to be the strongest of all internal, non-material powers. That we experience the power of love within the love of God and according to the laws of God signifies that we take after God, our Parent.
People can embody the true love of God
For people to become the owners of infinite true love, they need to cherish their sense of responsibility. Human beings can possess flawless character, that is, become the perfected beings of love, only when they have become one with God through true love and come to resemble Him. Herein lies the reason God’s love is the source of the happiness, life and the ideal of human beings. Adam and Eve were meant to become a true man and a true woman within the true love of God, after which they were to become a true couple, by sharing true love with each other. Then they were to have children and become true parents.
Human beings learn the true love of God by experience, through stages. As they go through their lives, people are meant to feel and learn the heart of children by receiving the love of their parents, to feel and learn the heart of siblings by exchanging the love of brothers and sisters, to feel and learn the heart of a couple through the love of husband or wife, and to feel and learn through experience the heart of parents through raising children. The family is the dwelling place of these four kinds of heart and love.
Thus, the family is the base for the love, happiness, life and lineage of human beings. In no place other than the family can human beings learn these four kinds of love and heart. Love is something that can be felt and learned only through experience. The perfection of individual human beings, families, societies, nations and or any other human community is based on the manifestation of true love within the family.
However, what is the reality of the world? In spite of the development of technology and practical conveniences, human beings are now facing a serious crisis leading to the degradation of human nature. Evils such as war, social conflict, violence, crime and drug abuse are arousing apprehension everywhere. What is yet more serious is that the sexual morality of young people is rapidly deteriorating, the divorce rate is dramatically rising, and family breakdown, leaving all too many fatherless children in its wake, is destroying human society.
The quest for peace and why it has been fruitless
People have sought peace and happiness in so many ways, yet they have not achieved satisfying results. After the First and Second World Wars, the League of Nations and the United Nations were created to prevent the reappearance of international conflict. Yet the global activities carried out by these organizations could not bring about a world of peace.
Even the efforts of religious organizations have not realized a world of happiness. And of course the ideal of international communism and the dream of fascism have also failed to realize an ideal world. Highly developed technology and political efforts have failed to bring peace and happiness to humanity. This is all because humankind’s misery and anguish stemmed from disobeying God and thus falling away from Him, and this problem has not been solved at the fundamental level.
By engaging in a premature, selfish sexual relationship, Adam and Eve deviated from the Principle of God, and they had children before they themselves had grown up within true love. Adam and Eve distrusted God and consequently obeyed Satan, thus becoming a false couple, and so human history began with false parents. This resulted in their descendants living in sin, war and agony. Such life has nothing to do with God’s ideal of creation. How sorrowful, therefore, must be the heart of God!
At all costs, God needs to realize the true love and ideal of peace that He originally planned. His providence of salvation is the providence to achieve the original state, that is, it is the providence of recreation. For this, He established religions and has continually expanded the domain of goodness. The Messiah sent by God is the one who comes with the full responsibility to complete this providence of recreation. Therefore, the Messiah needs to come as the True Parent and carry out the work of re-creation at the fundamental level.
Jesus, who came as the Messiah, came with the mission of the True Parent. He came to give rebirth to humanity on earth through true love, and to redeem them to be true people and true couples so they could become true parents. Unfortunately, due to the distrust he faced on earth, he died before he could fulfill his will, but he promised to come again. His words suggest that he needs to come once again as the True Parent and completely actualize God’s ideal of creation.
Though Jesus was born in the land of Judea, he did not exist solely for Judea. The will of Jesus, who came in the position of the Messiah and the True Parent, was to realize the ideal of God on earth, which is a world of peace and true love. At the time, Judea was a province of the Roman Empire. Therefore, God carried out His providence hoping that, when the will of Jesus was achieved in Judea, His Will would expand to Rome and be fulfilled across the world.
The shift of civilization to peninsular nations
We know that peninsular nations, extending into the ocean, have given rise to important civilizations in history. Many great religious doctrines and ideologies originated from peninsular nations to guide the world of the human heart. Greek philosophy began on the Balkan Peninsula. Christian culture flourished on the Italian Peninsula. Hindu culture and philosophy arose on the Indian subcontinent, another peninsula. Islamic culture arose on the Arabian Peninsula. Buddhist culture came to fruition on the Southeast Asian Peninsula. Furthermore, the art of navigation came from the Iberian Peninsula, Norman culture from the Scandinavian Peninsula, and there are other examples. As can be seen, peninsular nations have had great influence in the history of world culture.
If you study the flow of the development of civilizations, the ancient continental civilizations that originated in river basins shifted to the peninsular civilization of places such as Greece, Rome and Iberia. European peninsular civilization then shifted to an island civilization in England, which in turn passed to the United States as a continental civilization, and then moved to Japan in the form of an island civilization. From a providential viewpoint, this pilgrimage of civilization will now come to fruition in Korea as a peninsular civilization.
From a different perspective, the ancient civilizations on the shores of rivers such as the Nile and Tigris shifted to the Mediterranean civilizations of Greece, Rome and Spain, among others. This then shifted to the Atlantic civilization extending to England and the United States, and it in turn will come to fruition as the Pacific civilization connecting the United States, Japan and Korea. Since the will of the Messiah was to have borne fruit and become globalized from the Italian Peninsula, it is fitting that a peninsular nation is again to be the center of the providence of the Second Coming of Jesus, that is, of the Second Advent of the True Parent, and that it is Korea.
The planet Earth is made up of lands and oceans. I believe that the sea plays the role of the mother, including giving birth to the simplest forms of life. In this way, we can think that the sea symbolizes the feminine in that it nurtures and embraces, and the land symbolizes the masculine. Similarly, it can be said that island nations, situated as they are in oceans, represent woman, and continental nations and peninsular nations adjoined to continents represent man.
The citizens of peninsular nations have strength and courage arising from a life of defending themselves against enemies from both land and sea. Moreover, they are endowed with a progressive spirit of pioneering and adventuring. They have given rise to resplendent cultures and spread them to the world. Thus, at this point in time when we are on the verge of a new millennium, peninsular nations will play an important role in the providence. The Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace is compiling these nations’ meritorious deeds, contributions to world culture, and similar experiences to enable them to play a leading role in realizing a world of peace.
A life of pursuing world peace
Respected leaders, until now I have done more than just teach about the way humanity can live happily in a world of peace. I have also pioneered the way, founding multiple organizations for the realization of a world of peace and nurturing them with unending support while surmounting so many difficulties. I have inaugurated organizations such as the Federation for World Peace, the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace, the Women’s Federation for World Peace, the Youth Federation for World Peace, the Student Federation for World Peace, the Professors World Peace Academy and the Federation of Island Nations for World Peace for this purpose. I am inaugurating the Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace at this time for the same purpose.
There are many obstacles blocking the realization of humanity’s happiness and ideal of peace. There are numerous destructive dynamics, including conflict over political and economic interests. Of these dynamics, the most fundamental has to do with the human condition itself, namely, the conflict and contradiction between mind and body. Through the long course of human history, the conflict between mind and body has never been resolved. The Fall of our first human ancestors brought a result that is this serious and wretched.
As people with inner conflict and contradiction formed families, could those families unite completely as one in harmony? Families are shaken and fall apart when the responsibility to love selflessly is forgotten. Without people gaining the complete experience of heart based on true love, they cannot establish the perfect standard of ethics and morality. When families thus break down, can we expect to see societies of peace, and nations and a world of peace?
From July 30 to August I of this year, I hosted the inaugural assembly of the Family Federation for World Peace at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. Representatives of one hundred twenty nations came together with two former United States presidents, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and former and present heads of state and prime ministers from more than forty countries. The Family Federation can be called the most important organization I have inaugurated. It aggregates the work of multiple global organizations, which are the foundation I have dedicated my entire life to build for the realization of the peaceful world of true love.
The way to peace on earth
The people of today need to recover their original nature by uniting mind and body as one in harmony in the true love of God. Through the Pure Love movement and the True Family Values movement, human beings need to prepare the ground for eternal happiness. To facilitate this, I have founded this organization.
From the viewpoint of God’s administration and the trend of history, all people constitute one great family that needs to live attending God as their True Parent, transcending nationality and race. All people are a community sharing a common destiny and can harmonize and cooperate with one another within the bounds of one global family. We have entered an era wherein we can no longer think that the difficulties of our neighbors and other nations have nothing to do with us.
We cannot just sit back and watch as humankind is engulfed and degraded by war and crime, drugs and violence, environmental pollution and ecosystem destruction, immorality and AIDS. We need to answer before God and history. We human beings, who need to harmonize and unite on a grand scale, need to declare how we can overcome the present reality and usher in the coming millennium with hope.
Furthermore, we need to consider how we can build a world of peace wherein we can think beyond the profits that individuals and nations can reap, and live for the sake of others and trust them. We need to consider how we can establish a new set of values that can maintain this. Rather than standing on the glittering pinnacle of science and technology, wearing the glasses of humanism to filter out our having fallen into a valley of sin, we need to open the door of our original heart and search for answers with humility. If we cannot find them on earth, we need to find the solutions through the voice we hear from Heaven.
It is my hope that the discussions you hold at this time will prove to be most beneficial and rewarding for realizing the dream of a world of peace.
May the divine protection of God be with you and your families always.