Good morning. The other day I spoke about happiness. I explained that God is the primary source of happiness and the secondary sources are our parents and siblings, our spouse and children, our neighbors and also nature. These are all sources of happiness for us.

Certainly everyone wants to be happy. So you should feel happiness in your heart and mind. In order to experience this we need to know how our mind works. The Divine Principle teaches that the functions of the mind are emotion, intellect and will. We know that man's emotion and intellect work together to determine his direction. So the primary elements are emotion and intellect. What are the bases of emotion and intellect? The base of intellect is reason, through reason you can understand and gain knowledge. The base of emotion is heart. Which of these two is subject and which is object? We know, that no matter how much we learn we cannot be happy through knowledge alone. Sometimes those who didn't study or have much education are happier than those who did. This is clear evidence that knowledge is not the source of happiness, but that the emotion or heart is. When your heart's desire is fulfilled you will be happy. Thus to experience happiness we must develop our heart and work to fulfill our heart's desire. This is the most important condition to gain happiness.

Nowadays, due to the development of technology, we have many conveniences, airplanes, automobiles and all kinds of appliances that make our life easier and more comfortable. Nonetheless, many people aren't happy even though they have those things. Statistics show that more and more people commit suicide in affluent countries, especially teenagers. There are many reasons. They usually have everything they want, but some part of their being still isn't satisfied; they cannot find any meaning in life so they commit suicide. From this example we can see that material well being alone isn't enough to satisfy man, but that the essential purpose of our life is to develop our heart. This is why we say that man's perfection is the perfection of heart.

Then how can we develop our heart? Everyone wants to develop their heart and be happy, but they don't know how. In order to discover how we must go back to the beginning of history. The first man and woman were inexperienced. Our knowledge is a combination of what we have learned through our experiences and the accumulated experiences of all our ancestors. But the first man and woman didn't have any ancestors; they were the first, so their knowledge was very primitive. They could not know things as we do, but they knew God and by having give and take with Him their hearts could develop more than their intellect. If they hadn't fallen, their hearts would have been fully developed by the time they reached perfection and they would have developed their intellect later, through their life experiences. This was God's original plan.

We teach that heart is sung-sang and intellect is hyung-sang. Naturally the sung-sang aspect should be developed first. If Adam and Eve's intellect had been developed on the base of their heartistic maturity, they would have been well balanced. Heart would have been subject and intellect would have followed as object. Based on the harmonious give and take of heart and intellect they could have led a life of goodness. Due to the fall, however, man severed his relationship with God and as a result his heart could not develop to its full extent. Your heart cannot develop fully without God in your life, but your intellect continues to develop despite His absence. Reason must be guided by truth in order to develop in the proper direction. The problem is that man also lost the truth through the fall and thus his reason couldn't develop properly either. So even though we learn many things, our knowledge is incomplete without the truth. Mankind has developed many things; unfortunately they are all based on man-centered ideologies, not God.

When you lose God, man becomes the center. In other words people's lifestyles become egocentric; each individual has his own view of life and perspective of value which often doesn't harmonize with other's views. As a result conflicts arise and man cannot have good give and take. When God is our center we have a common base to relate with others, otherwise each one goes their separate way and conflicts arise. Contemporary problems are a result of man's lack of relationship with God. Another reason is that we don't have good give and take with our parents and brothers and sisters.

Originally man's heart should have developed through his give and take with God. This relationship would later have been passed on to his children and the childrens' hearts would have developed through their relationship with their parents. This relationship would then have been expanded to brothers and sisters. These three relationships are the base for the development of man's heart: the relationship between God and man, parent and child and brothers and sisters. The family is the schoolroom where we learn about human relations. Many people suffer because they didn't have a good relationship with their parents or brothers and sisters. Even if you have a good relationship with your parents, if you don't have good relationships with your brothers and sisters, it will be difficult to connect to other people or establish good relationships with those around you. So in order to develop our hearts we must restore our relationship to God, our parents and our siblings. On this foundation we can develop our relationship with our spouse, our children and our neighbors.

Seeds absorb all the nutrients they need from the earth. We also need nutrients if we are to develop our spirit and our body. If we don't receive the proper nutrition our spirit and body cannot grow. Then what do we need for our heart to grow? Our heart can only grow in the soil of heart; it can never grow if we don't have good relationships.

If we live with hateful people, our heart can never grow. It needs positive heartistic elements in order to develop. Many members live alone; they say that they cannot live together with many other people. This is not challenging the problem though, but trying to escape it. You can never develop your heart by living alone. If man doesn't have contact with people, he loses his ability to deal with them. If you don't exercise your physical body but just lie down all the time, after a while you may not be able to walk. God made man to walk, but if you don't use this ability for a long time, your body cannot function normally. Man's mind is the same. Many people use computers nowadays, working from morning till night in front of a computer. And new diseases are being discovered in these people. Of course, if you work with computers after your character is formed, you may not be so strongly affected. But if you work with computers at a young age, you may lose the capacity to deal with people. You may feel more comfortable with a computer than with people. Many such phenomena are being discovered. If you cut yourself off from human contact and just work with machines all the time, you cannot work with people anymore. This demonstrates the importance of having contact with people. Living alone doesn't contribute to the development of our heart and is therefore not advisable.

In many families the parent-child relationship isn't very good. The parents often say they must earn money to support their family, so they work day and night. Some people have two jobs, or husband and wife both work and the children are often alone. In such a situation the contact between parents and children constantly decreases. This is why parents cannot control their children anymore. They don't know their children and therefore have no base upon which to control them. This lack of relationship between parents and children causes serious problems in society. Children don't have a good example of harmonious life in their parents, and thus cannot live together in harmony with each other. Parents should set a good example, but in many cases they cannot. So there is no one the children can learn from. And even if you do have a good relationship with your parents, if you are an only child, you may still experience difficulties dealing with other people as an adult. Actually all the current problems in society stem from this lack of good give and take in the family. We must restore this, otherwise we cannot restore society. Restoration must start in the family. We are already grown up though, so how can we restore this? We don't live with our parents anymore; in many cases they have even passed on already. So how can we restore these things? We need God. If we restore our relationship with our True Parents in our daily life and can live in harmony with other brothers and sisters, we can restore what we didn't have in our own family.

We hear that the Orient is more emotional and that the West is more rational. Sometimes Japanese sisters have difficulty in the West because they are used to more intimate relationships among sisters. We must realize the need to develop our hearts. A man without heart is like a computer without software. You have the hardware but you cannot function properly. Heart is so important. We need to be more concerned about others. Sometimes we hear people say, "I like my independence and therefore I don't want to interfere in someone else's life either. He is he and I am I; we are separate." It sounds good externally, but in reality it isn't good. We can never develop our heart with such an attitude. Heart and intellect both need truth in order to develop properly. The desert is a good example to illustrate the relationship between heart and intellect. Just as this world becomes a desert when there is no water, our character becomes a desert if we have no heart. Heart is the water of life. Too much water can cause floods though. So God created emotion and intellect to interact in harmony and control each other.

All things need some form of control. For example, no matter how rich you are, if you don't control how your money is spent, it will soon be gone. And if we don't control our physical body, it will quickly wear out or get sick. Complete freedom cannot exist; there must always be some kind of control. Our mind controls our body so it can remain healthy and our mind is controlled by our body. Likewise our emotion controls our intellect and vice versa. In this way a harmonious relationship can exist between the two. Sometimes members want to live alone because they don't want to be controlled or told what to do by someone else. Of course domination is not good, but everyone needs proper control. We should be able to control ourselves, then nobody would need to control us. But if we cannot control ourselves properly, someone must help us. Of course there are limits, we cannot intervene too much. It is important to have a good balance. We need some control, but not domination; we all need some freedom. So freedom and control must be balanced. Then how can we find the balancing point?

This is difficult but we must find this balance in our lives. If we control our subordinates with love no one will ever complain. The base for good relationships is love; control and freedom must both be based on love. If we cannot succeed in establishing this balance in our church life, there will be no other chance in our lifetime. Therefore we must try to find this balance. The best time for you to establish successful relationships with members is before starting family life. I hope everyone will find a way and succeed in developing good relationships in your life.

Let us pray:

Our loving Heavenly Father, we came here this morning to greet you and to receive your word. You have so many things to tell us but because of our weaknesses and shortcomings we cannot receive all of your wisdom and truth. We know many things but we often don't grasp their true meaning. This can only come about when we put them into practice and make them ours. Knowledge by intellect alone is not true knowledge. We must be able to use what we've learned in our daily life and become victors of your word. This is what you want us to be, Father. You give us much truth and we have received much guidance from our True Parents, but we are far away from being practitioners of those words. We must grow our hearts to perfection, otherwise we cannot become perfect people nor enter your Kingdom of Heaven. We want to achieve this goal during our life on earth, Father; this is our purpose in coming to you. We live as your family in our church. It is a training ground to perfect ourselves and become your children. We must establish your Kingdom of Love in our church and wherever we live. It isn't easy; we cannot do it alone. We must work in harmony with others and follow our True Parents' example in order to succeed.

Father, you sacrifice yourself for others. When we follow your pattern and sacrifice ourselves for others, we can succeed. We know this, but it's still difficult. So we ask you to give us the power to practice your principle of life so that each of us can become a victorious son or daughter and return joy and glory to you. We want to be happy people and be an example for others. Our Father is in Danbury suffering and praying for us. We must live up to his expectations by becoming his true sons and daughters and doing the work he has entrusted to us. We want to work together to build your kingdom here on earth. Father, we need your guidance and help. We ask you to be with us always so Satan cannot take us away from you.

We pray all this in the name of our True Parents. Amen.

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