The Words of the Longo Family
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The Words of the Longo Family |
Joe
Longo addresses the workshop.
The present day reality is based on the concepts of the fallen archangel. To recreate society, we must recreate the concepts upon which our whole reality is built. The purpose of the coming of the Messiah is to restore the world, and restoration equals recreation. Our mission as tribal messiah then becomes the mission of at least recreating the tribal level reality. The means that we are given to recreate reality are the Principles of Restoration through indemnity. I feel that our mission as Unification Church members is to be those artists who can recreate the world. If we don't restore the world, the True Children will certainly do it. But honestly, I feel it is our responsibility to do it and to allow them to exist in a more ideal way. Because we haven't had enough faith in ourselves to manifest what we were supposed to, they suffered things they never should have had to suffer. I feel right now is a time when we can accelerate our lives of faith and quickly catch up to the point when we can do all that should have been done before. That is my hope.
Hyo Jin Nim used to say of our mission to play rock and roll music, "We can't stay up here and ask people to jump up to our level; we have to go below them and lift them up." I feel like I am dealing in a realm that needs to be obliterated, but through our music we are trying to get to where people are right now so that we can then elevate them. In a similar way, I feel that our mission as tribal messiahs is a kind of rock and roll mission: a mission to meet people, both in and outside of our movement, where they are and lift them up. It is a restoration course.
Basically, the Principle talks about many different things, but actually it is very simple. The Principle of Creation gives us an ideal that we are drawn to, a light at the end of the tunnel. The fall talks about all the things that went wrong. Then the Principles of Restoration tell us how to climb back up. So the Principles of Restoration through indemnity are the main thing we should focus on. They are the way we can remove our fallen nature and come to stand before the True Family.
The power to recreate the world comes as we first recreate ourselves. The means we have been given is man's portion of responsibility to accomplish the foundations of faith and substance. Of the two, the only thing that removes fallen nature is the foundation of substance. If we are doing one without the other, there is no real progress, as we can see through history.
As a movement, we have done many things together, but in general we know we haven't fulfilled. That is a very painful thing for us, especially when we feel like we're pushing it to the brink of our physical endurance. Though I am kind of a lazy person, still there were a few times on MFT when it was physically impossible to work harder than I worked. We all did that, and still do it when we can. But no matter how much we push ourselves, even if we die for what we believe in, it doesn't remove our fallen nature. On MFT you might have been the purest person in the world, but in a different mission, especially one like Sunburst, suddenly you may be attacked by, for instance, desires for drugs -- it is amazing. So no matter how hard we work physically, just that is not enough to remove our fallen nature. If you fast for 40 days, you may come to understand a deeper truth, but until you apply that deeper truth, there is no substance.
This movement is extremely creative and hard-working in making foundations of faith. But I think the problem of not fulfilling lies in the foundation of substance. As a whole, we have been very obedient to our subjects, but I don't think we've been aggressive and creative enough as objects. I don't mean we haven't been aggressive enough in telling our central figures what our viewpoint is! I think we haven't been aggressive enough in making a foundation with them to have them want to receive what we want to say. And that is really important. Many times we say, well the central figure doesn't love enough, he is not capable of giving enough love, and so on. However, if you can conceive of that kind of love then you are responsible to generate it. Central figures generally are people who are just taking more responsibility to fulfill a certain mission than the rest of us. Their pay is not any better or their hours shorter, or their vacation longer. So if the guy is not capable of generating the kind of love that we feel he should, perhaps it's our responsibility to help him, to give the central figure that love so that he can give you it in return.
If we want to recreate the world, we have to recreate ourselves, and that is through restoration of the subject/ object relationship. Honestly speaking, the world around us is stupid from one point of view. For me, stupid and evil are synonymous. Satan is not this really hip guy. Despite the amount of intelligence that Lucifer was given, he adopted a really limited, fearful attitude toward God -- the God that he watched for billions of years making incredible things. Rather than breathe the wisdom of God and continue to grow, he locked himself into some weird notions. He could have thought, "Adam must be a pretty hip thing too. Maybe God is trying to give me something more through a relationship with Adam. Maybe if I help Adam to grow up to be an object to God, I can receive more love than I have ever experienced before." But he thought in a negative way and thus separated himself from God. God is the kind of being who can look on mud and say, "Wow, I bet I can make some really cool creatures out of that mud." But if you give Lucifer gold, he says, "Hey, this gold is kind of tarnished. How come you always give me the crummy gold and you give the other guy the good gold?" Lucifer thinks the concept of proper order is some limitation that God is putting on him instead of the way great love can be channeled. He also thinks dominion means forcing people to do what he wants -- though even God Himself will never force us to do what He wants us to do.
We need to get beyond those concepts that Lucifer drove into us for so many years. They are all based on fear of not getting or being enough. For us to have a foundation within ourselves to truly receive and manifest Christ, we've got to do the Foundation of Faith and Foundation of Substance much more than we have been. If you keep these limited concepts, you are going to limit yourself and all those you work with.
When we join the church, we say, "God, I'll give up my bad habits, everything I have; all I want is Your way." I think God is very idealistic -- when we say that, He believes us, and He desperately needs us to change the fallen natures we inherited from Satan. He says, "Okay, my child, I need you to go down to the servant of servant's position and be grateful." God gives it to everybody. We are pushed down to this position because that position is below the position that Lucifer got negative about. Then God says to Lucifer, "Now watch his attitude when I send my kid down there. I am going to put him in a position lower than where you were." As we fulfill what God asked us to and break through some aspect of our fallen nature to reach a point of gratitude for that servant of servant's position, you graduate to the next level.
God doesn't want us suffering or following a leader who is incapable or unloving. He just wants to know that we can follow even such leaders with a positive viewpoint, and take responsibility to help those leaders. That is the way we can change, and everyone can benefit. However, it's easy to feel we've been through a lot, and we want to make sure we protect ourselves. Sometimes our relationship with our central figures is not so absolute anymore. We keep our distance and avoid any kind of intense relationship with anybody.
But if your give and take is very distant, getting rid of your fallen nature isn't going to happen very fast. Even just doing whatever we are asked to do isn't enough if we don't take responsibility for the subject, to aggressively serve and go out of our way to show, even in an external way, support and respect. If the object position is aggressive in trying to make unity -- internally as well as externally -- aggressive in really seeing God in that person, then God is going to come through that person more than either of them might ever expect.
Everybody in the fallen world wants to be subject. Lucifer has done everything possible to slander the word "object," and to make it seem the most absurd thing to be. I feel that our mission is to recapture the meaning, value, and beauty of this word. If we really understand the value of the object position and love it -- not just suffer with it until we can graduate into a subject position -- then nobody will mind being object to us because they will feel how sincerely we appreciate them.
I think Father's hope was that we would purify ourselves enough to be able to stand in a position around True Children to protect them. I think his hope was that we could reach a level of Christhood where we could be able to really influence people in America. And not just work hard. Father works hard, but Father is also manifesting the Christ as he is working. He can do almost anything and it is a prayer; it is a condition to transform the world because of the way he thinks. Many times, I heard Father say that it is not only how hard you work, but also what you project and how you think of and offer even the little things you do. Rev. Won Pil Kim says even if we don't have time to go to our home church area, if we pick up paper in another area and just offer it up like it is our home church area, it matters.
True
Children celebrate Shin Eh Nim's eighth day on October 27th, 1989 at
East Garden.
In the final stages of our movement right now Father has said we are the tribal messiahs. For all of history we'll be the first tribal messiahs. How boring or how exciting we are is up to us. We have got to be aggressive in our relationships with our elders and central figures because frankly speaking, if they made a movie out of your relationship with a person in the subject position with you, would people be excited or would people fall asleep? I always ask myself that question. If you want to become a national or world level messiah Father is not going to tell you to stop; and if you want to take responsibility for a continent, Father might be able to take a rest for once!
We have really got to write the script and get to the point where we can manifest Christ. The degree that we do this is the degree that we can help our subjects manifest Christ by seeing their ideal potential, at least as much as Don Quixote saw the ideal in the people around him. Many times the subject is not ideal, but if, because we believe in God, we as objects do everything we can to have an inspiring relationship with that person, then we are practicing our attendance muscles. When we are practicing the proper relationship with a subject position in a non-ideal situation, then when we stand before an ideal person, it comes easy. If we wait for when Father comes to really be holy and give our whole attention to him, Father will feel that lack of depth; the depth of our attendance to him depends on how much we practice it with our other subjects. So a lot of times what we are given by Father we cannot receive so deeply, because of the lack of depth of relationship with our immediate subject.
If we treat that non-ideal subject as if he were Father, we are removing our fallen nature, even removing the excuse, "Well, if you treated me better, I'd be better." No matter how I'm treated, I'll just do my best for this person, because I believe in the principles of restoration through indemnity. However, we must avoid getting arrogant. There has got to be love. Love doesn't judge what comes out of that person so quickly.
If you haven't used the faucet in your house for a while, and you come back and turn it on, rusty water comes out. You can turn it back off, saying you can't use that water, but if you let it flow for a while, then the rusty water gives way to pure water. Since we haven't been practicing the ability to manifest Christ, we are quite rusty. It has been cool to manifest rusty water for so many years. The rustier your water, the hipper you are. People will pay $30 for a ticket to see people who play the crudest music and talk about the crudest things. Sometimes when our subjects first try to give the water of life to us there may be some rust in that water. If you just keep shutting the subject down, "You don't know what you're talking about," that is not right. If Hyo Jin Nim says Matthew 36, and it was Matthew 37, or whatever, we may say, "That's not right, how can he say that?" We get caught up in the externals and stop listening, instead of catching the wisdom and helping him let it flow by being restored objects who are drawing from him the spirit of God.
Though Jesus was a good channeler of God, there was no one to teach the people around him how to be good minuses and receive what h, had to give. He couldn't defy the laws of the universe: plus and plus repel each other even though he tried everything to get through to them. Jesus had no way to teach his disciples how to be good objects because the person who was supposed to teach them the foundation of substance failed to do so. John the Baptist didn't understand the value of the object position. He wanted to stay subject, and thus he showed a completely bad example of how to respond to Jesus:
"Hey, this guy Jesus is a great person. Please take care of him. I'll see you later."
We cannot just "believe" in the principles of restoration; we have got to start making changes in our lives. We can't just say, "You know, I have this difficult marriage, but the noble part about it is that we are enduring." That may be a really noble thing, but honestly, nobody is going to get inspired and join the movement from that! We are in pretty tough situations many times, but it is not our responsibility to just endure them -- it is our responsibility to use our creativity to make good things out of nothing.
We are restoring some heavy stuff in our relationships and we have to help each other. Our foundation of substance with our central figure is most important. We've got to be more aggressive and turn our marriages and any other situation in the Church that we may have been just enduring into more ideal situations. We have got to solve things that we've been ignoring, and we need each other. What we need most, and can give the most in each situation, is how much we have removed our fallen nature. When we unlearn that and reach zero, then learning ideal behavior will be very, very quick.
As tribal messiahs, you want to have disciples who not only follow you but also believe in you, and who are really trying to get inside your words and understand what they mean, trying to make your words flesh and blood. If that is what we want, then we have got to do that with our subjects. We have got to do our best to raise our subjects up if they are not already there. How do we raise them? Not by telling them what to do. If you can become a true minus, your subject can receive the understanding and love from God that he needs to be a better leader. Rev. Kamiyama explained that after we are blessed and get our Cain children and our physical children to absolutely unite in oneness, we can stand before the True Children. He said that if we can win the trust of the True Children, to the point where they want to go to Parents and say, "Please accept these people as our brothers and sisters," then Parents can freely accept us as their true children as they desire to do. Even when we don't fulfill, Father will still try to hold onto us. But I really feel that that final stage, becoming a true child of True Parents, is something we can't accomplish unless we assimilate the mind, heart, and will of a true child through the True Children themselves. Our viewpoint of True Parents can't be fully completed until we understand how the True Children feel about True Parents.
One time Hyo Jin Nim blasted me for everything that ever happened in America. I went through many things within myself to be able to cope with what was going on. But at a certain point during that time, I started to cry. It was like I had this vision of Father and Mother and I realized that Hyo Jin Nim was born of Father and Mother's love for each other, literally. All of a sudden the love I felt from him was on a totally different level. He is very easy to love as a person, but at that point in time, something clicked, and I realized that all the things that he had been through, Father and Mother went through as well. Because we didn't make enough of a foundation here in America ourselves, Parents allowed their family to go through things here that they wouldn't have if Father and Mother had moved back to Korea instead of staying here with us. Hyo Jin Nim came to America to be with them, and consequently went through many things he probably wouldn't have in Korea. He won't blame anybody because he says, "When you start blaming it is just endless. At some point you must take responsibility for it."
Hyo Jin Nim and Heung Jin Nim both brought a lot of judgment. These are young guys. They have to work for what they get, and they are setting an example. I think Hyo Jin Nim is putting himself on the line to tell us, "Look, if I can do what I am doing now, you can do it too." Here is a guy who never even played in a band, but now he's making albums. Somebody like Bruce Springsteen makes an album every two years, Hyo Jin Nim makes four albums in six months, and writes all the songs in the three months preceding it. We can't say, "'He is the Messiah's son; he understands everything." A lot of time he doesn't know what he's doing until he does it, but he just goes forward trying to do his best. He has the kind of freshness we had when we first joined. He pours it out, trying to learn as much as he can about Father, and as he gets a point of Principle, he just applies it and multiplies it. He is really trying to be an example to us. I think he is trying to pour it out to us every Sunday because he wants us to pour it out like that to each other. He wants us to be taking responsibility for each other, and I think he wants us to be aggressive in our relationships to our central figures, as he is in his relationship to Father. Hyo Jin Nim is a very subjective person. If he is not choosing to subjugate his mind, he is not going to follow anybody. So he is consciously making himself a minus before Father. He is hearing Principle, believing it and choosing goodness. He is not being forced into goodness.
We've been studying Principle for 10, 20 years now. We've got to get his attitude, his ferocity toward wanting to teach. We have no excuse for not taking what has been planted in us, setting it on fire, and manifesting Christ to other people. He's not God, but he is working on trying to emulate God by giving everything. It is really incredible.
Many of the staff at the Manhattan Center are either older and wiser or bigger and stronger than me. If they didn't choose to subjugate their own subjectivity and follow me, I couldn't force any of them to do so. Have you ever seen Leon Harris? He's a big guy. If he does something wrong and I am yelling in his face, I've got to pray that he believes in the Principle. If he hit me once with the fist he's got, that would be it for me. They follow me because of their belief in the Principles of Responsibility through indemnity. Also, they try to treat me with the same respect as they would Hyo Jin Nim. I admire these guys for believing in and practicing the Principle. They are even bringing back that old stuff, like serving me a cup of coffee when I sit down, because we're starting to understand how that kind of attendance recreates the subject, how that makes a foundation for the Messiah to come and makes God feel comfortable.
In the I Ching, it says reverence is the foundation of true culture. In America, there is no reverence for anything, and we are even proud that we are irreverent. If you are an irreverent actor, or artist, or anything, it's taken to mean you are bold and strong, but really that is nothing but stupid concepts, because the amount of reverence you have for a rock is how much you are going to experience God in that rock, let alone in people.
We really need to have a reverence for the subject position no matter who is in it. There is no excuse. The only way you are going to graduate to the next level is if you do it, by serving, loving and believing in the subject, and praying that they can achieve the ideal; then everyone benefits. If your leader is blocked, help him out. We've got to learn to be absolute objects again, because we are tribal messiahs and that means we are going to have a tribe following us. The way that you treat your subject is exactly how your tribe is going to be following you. The amount you can help your subject channel God is the amount that your objects will help you channel God. If we don't learn this point we are going to be stuck. We are going to worship Christ, but we are not going to be Christ or manifest Christ.
The movement now is standing before True Children. How comfortable they will feel with you is how much you practice the foundation of substance with your central figure. There is no way around it. Though you feel a little bit more for True Family, you should be doing your best to treat your subject to the max the way that you would treat Hyo Jin Nim, and then you will always find more to give to Hyo Jin Nim. But if you don't do that, he is not going to feel comfortable around you, and neither will Father or the other True Children. If you don't practice this, your objects are not going to practice it. And God is not going to come through.
When you are in the subject position you have to speak authoritatively. You have to give your best. If you see suspicion on your object's face, then there is something in your character which is not restored yet, and you also know the person who is suspicious is not aggressively practicing the foundation of substance in his or her own life. The only way to eliminate that conflict is through eliminating the conflict in our relationships with our central figures. If we can remove our fallen nature, then we can serve and stand before the True Children because they will feel comfortable with us. The foundation of faith and substance create a foundation to receive the Messiah and allow anyone in a messianic position to feel comfortable in our presence.
Why is it that I can be with Hyo Jin Nim so much? I think it has to do with the fact that I can subjugate myself and be an object to any subject.
Mr. Kamiyama said that once the True Children accept us into their family, and ask True Parents to accept us, that we become true children and can enter the direct dominion of God. I think that is why we are all here. We want to enter into the direct dominion of God.
After we went up to the New Hope Farms horse show the other day and upon seeing the magnificent facility that Father built, my wife Felicia said, "What is next, are we going to send a man to Mars or start our own space program?!" There are not too many things left on this planet to do that Father has not already done, or touched in some way. To expand the incredible foundation True Parents have made for us and to fulfill as tribal messiahs, we must really aggressively deal with our relationships especially with our immediate subjects. The foundation of substance, our relationships especially with our immediate subject, determines what kind of subject we're going to be and what kind of objects we are going to have.