William Lay and his wife Lisa are the New York Metro area chair-couple of the Family Federation for Unification and World Peace. He is an attorney in New York City. They live on Long Island with their four children.

It has been said that there are four great realms of heart, and it is the destiny of each persons to experience fully these four great realms of the heart.

The first realm is the realm of the child. In an ideal situation, every child experiences an abundance of supportive love of their parents. Children look to their parents as the examples and representatives of God. A child comes to know God through their parents. They take the words of their parents to be true until something causes them to doubt those words. They expect their parents to love them. And when parents love their children unconditionally and completely, those children come to see the world as a place of opportunity, not as a scary jungle where you have to fight for everything you can get, but as a place where your dreams can come true. Children want to return that love.

So in this children's realm of heart, there is the love of parents coming down and there is the love of children coming back. In the natural course of progression of life, this realm opens into the second great realm of the heart -- the realm of brothers and sisters. Together with brothers and sisters, we experience life, learn and have adventures. We begin to serve each other, begin to give each other joy from giving and receiving.

This realm is then expanded so that we come to view all people as our brothers and sisters. Furthermore, whether or not a person has brothers and sisters in their own family, they are able to develop this realm of heart in themselves by relating to people in their extended family and country as brothers and sisters. This is a vital part of the process of becoming mature. It is in this growth process that a person come to follow their conscience -- the inner sense of goodness instilled by God. When a person learns to always follow that original sense of goodness, we may say that they have united mind and body.

Ultimately, when this basic level of maturity -- the union of mind and body -- is reached, a person is ready to open up the vast realm of heart between husband and wife. In other words, for a man, one sister becomes unique -- his wife. For a woman, one brother becomes unique -- her husband. That sister and brother are joined eternally as man and wife and in that unity, they come to resemble the fullness and totality of God.
Because God is father and mother, it is only when man and woman are joined together, with eternal commitment of love, that they truly come to manifest and represent the nature of God and be the children of the Creator.

Marriage opens up a limitless realm of exploration, discovery, challenge, accomplishment, joy and happiness based on God's true love, uniquely manifested throughout the marriage process. In marriage, a man does not loose his sisters. But at the same time, in a way that is both very real and somewhat mysterious, one woman becomes fro him the embodiment of all women. And he becomes the embodiment of all man to her. As they come to love another as husband and wife, and begin to achieve the unity which reflects God's image, each couple opens the fourth realm, the realm of parents. As parents they will give love to their children, and those children will return that love.

Parents are able to learn a great deal about God since God's purpose of creation was first to have children. And those children come to understand what their parents were all about, what it was like being a parent, what kind of sacrifices had to be made. And they come to appreciate their parents all that much more and those parents, now grandparents, experience a deep, deep satisfaction. And God, the Grandparent of everyone, experiences the satisfaction that his children now understand what it is like to be God; what it is like to have children; and what it is like to take responsibility as a parent.

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