The Theory of the Original Human Nature is a study concerning the image of what the original human being, but for the human fall, would have been like. Because of the human fall, human beings have lost their original condition. They have lost not only their original selves, but also their original world. As, a result, up to the present time they have been endeavoring, sometimes even unconsciously, to restore the original human self and the original world. This means that, throughout their entire lives, human beings harbor the idea of becoming better selves and the hope of living in a better world. Yet, human history has continued, even until today, without the ideal being realized.

Fish swim freely in the water; birds fly in the sky as they please. But what would happen if they were taken out of their natural environment? If fish were taken out of the water and thrown on land, they would stiffer tremendous pain. They would desire to go back to the water, their natural habitat. Similarly, if a bird is caught and put in a cage, it feels restrained and longs to go back to the open sky.

In the same way, people ardently desire the realization of the ideal, and at the same time feel disappointed in the world as it actually is. This means that human beings have lost their original selves and the ideal world. Since that ideal, even until today, could not be realized many have lived in constant disappointment, under dire hardships and difficulties; but having no other choice, they could not but live in this world as it is. Some people, however, have never ceased to pursue the original human way of life, especially religious people and philosophers. They seriously grappled with the question, "What is the human being?" and looked for ways to recover the original way of life.

Buddha, for example, spent six years of his life in strict monasticism and asceticism, engaging in deep meditation. As a result, he came to realize that human beings originally possessed Buddhahood, but through ignorance came to be bound by worldly desires and fell into suffering. Buddha taught that the way to recover one's original nature is through a life of spiritual discipline.

Jesus, likewise, inquired deeply into the problems of human life while traveling through many places, until he started his public ministry at the age of thirty. Consequently, he preached that human beings are sinners and have a satanic blood lineage resulting from the human fall, and that everyone must be born again by believing in the Son of God, that is, in Jesus himself

Socrates said, that the true way of human life is to love true knowledge. In Plato, the supreme ideal of human life is to recognize the idea of the Good. For Aristotle, reason is what makes a person human, and he said that virtue is best realized in the communal life of the polis (city-state) and that the human being is a social animal (or polis-animal). Greek philosophers, broadly speaking, held the view that reason is the essence of human nature, and that if a person's reason is allowed to operate fully, that person will become an ideal being.

In the Middle Ages, Christian theology reigned over philosophy, and the Christian view of human nature was that human beings are sinful beings and can be saved only by God's grace. In this view, reason was regarded as ineffective. In the modern period, however, currents of philosophy that believed in human reason again came to appear. Descartes considered human beings to be rational beings, but he believed that people incur error or become confused because they do not know how to make proper use of reason. Therefore, Descartes discussed the method of how to use reason properly. Kant claimed that human beings are personal beings that obey the voice of moral obligation ordered by practical reason, and that human beings are personal beings that obey the voice of moral obligation ordered by practical reason, and that human beings should live according to reason, without succumbing to temptations or desires.

Hegel, too, regarded human beings as rational beings. Reason was something that would self-actualize in the world. Freedom, the essence of reason, was to be realized along with the development of history. According to Hegel's theory, human beings and the world should have become rational beings with the establishment of the modern state (i.e., the national state). In reality, however, people have remained deprived of their human nature just as they always had, and the world has continued as irrational as it had been before.

Kierkegaard opposed extreme types of rationalism such as the one offered by Hegel. Kierkegaard did not agree that humankind would become increasingly rational as the world progresses, as Hegel had claimed. In actual society, lie said, human beings are nothing but aver-age people, whose true nature has been lost. Accordingly, only when a person carves out life independently as an individual, apart from the general public, can that person's true human nature be regained. Thus, the conceptual framework for dealing with people in actual society, who have lost their original nature, and for seeking to restore human nature independently, was subsequently developed as the thought of Existentialism. This will be further explained below.

Feuerbach, in opposition to Hegel's rationalism, regarded the human being as a sensuous being. According to Feuerbach, human beings alienated from themselves their essence as a species, objectified it, and came to revere it as a god. Therein lay the loss of human nature, lie thought. Thus, Feuerbach asserted that human beings must recover their original human nature, and that this can only be done through denying religion. Departing from Hegel's idea of actualizing freedom, Karl Marx called for the true liberation of human beings. In the society of Marx's time, the lives of laborers were indeed miserable. They were forced to endure long hours of labor, and were given wages that barely could sustain their lives. Diseases and crime were rampant among laborers, who were deprived of their human nature. In contrast, the capitalists were living in great affluence gained from their merciless exploitation and oppression of laborers. But in Marx's view, the capitalist themselves were deprived of their own original human nature.

Determined to liberate humankind, Marx first started with Feuerbach's humanism as a way to restore human nature; later, however, he came to realize that human beings were not only species beings, but also beings engaged in productive activity -- and this led him to the view that the essence of humankind is the freedom of labor in capitalist society, laborers were deprived of all the products of their labor, and they labored not by their own will, but by the will of the capitalists. Therein, precisely, lay the laborers' loss of human nature-according to Marx.

From that, Marx concluded that in order to liberate the working class, what must be done is to overthrow capitalist society, where laborers are exploited. When such liberation occurred, the capitalists themselves would regain their own human nature, Marx thought. Furthermore, based on the materialist view, Marx concluded that human consciousness is determined by the relations of production, which are the basis of society, and that the economic system must be changed by force. Nevertheless, the Communist nations, in which revolutions took place in accordance with Marx's theory, have become dictatorial societies where freedom is suppressed and human nature is violated and neglected. Those are societies in which people have increasingly been losing their original nature. This implies that Marx was mistaken both in his grasp of the cause of human alienation and in his method for solving the problem of human alienation.

Human alienation, however, is not a problem of Communist society alone. In capitalist society as well, individualism and materialism are rampant, and a self-centered way of thinking-whereby people think they are permitted to do anything they want-has become pervasive. As a result, in capitalist society, too, human nature is quickly being lost.

In this way, numerous religious people and philosophers have developed their own views of human nature, devoting great effort to the recovery of the original human nature; yet they have been unsuccessful in actually liberating humankind. The difficult problem for everyone has always been how to determine what the human being is.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon has trod his entire life course trying to provide fundamental solutions to such unresolved questions in human history. He has proclaimed that, originally, every human being is a child of God, even though, having lost their original nature, people have become miserable.

Human beings were created in the image of God, but due to the fall of the first human ancestors, they have become separated from God. They can restore their original nature, however, by living in accordance with God's word, thus coming to receive God's love. In this chapter, the problems of the human fall and the way to restore the original human nature will not be discussed (these topics are entrusted to Divine Principle); our focus will be on describing the original human nature itself.

From the original standpoint, each one of us is a being with Divine Image, which resembles the Image of God, and a being with Divine Character, which reflects the Character of God. We are also beings with position, which resembles the characteristic of position in the Original Image. Each of these characteristics will be discussed below.

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