This address was given at the Chicago TFV Banquet on December 16th, 2000

I am truly grateful that you have granted me the opportunity to speak to you today. I am Reverend Moon. No doubt you have already heard about me through many rumors and stories. I have stirred up a good deal of controversy around the world. At the same time, I have initiated a number of events and accomplishments with worldwide impact. I must add that these things have resulted from the historical reality of my having served God to this day.

Today in this brief encounter I would like to speak to you for a time on the subject "The True Family and I," because the world’s problems stem from the family. Let us ask what we mean by a "true family."

Why Are Mind and Body in Conflict?

Today, if we ask whether the world in which we live is good or evil, we must answer that it is evil. Why, then, is it evil? It is because whether we consider world history, American history, or the history of any country, there has been constant conflict. Conflict and struggle mean that the parties involved will not develop, but will necessarily decline. To say that the world is evil implies that America is evil, that Americans are evil, and that we, ourselves, are evil. If we study ourselves, we cannot deny that within ourselves there is a struggle between mind and body. The origin and cause of this struggle remains a mystery which must be solved.

If an individual does not possess a foundation for peace within himself, then he will not be happy, no matter how peaceful his family, his nation or the world might be. This is because the individual is the true battlefield. As you know, World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War have already ended. In the midst of any other future conflicts, it will be possible to have a truce. However, the struggle between mind and body has existed from the beginning, without a moment’s truce. It has continued throughout history and, of course, it continues today. We do not know how much longer it will continue in the future.

When we think of this and at the same time consider that God exists, the fact that God would permit the historical struggle between mind and body to continue is a major problem. But if we agree that human beings committed sin, we can understand that it is the human responsibility to indemnify it. God cannot take that responsibility upon Himself nor can He interfere with it.

Where does the struggle between mind and body originate? We inherit life from our parents and from the parents of their parents. If we continue going back in this manner, we eventually arrive at the first generation, that is, the first human ancestors. It is a fact that the struggle between mind and body originated through a problem in the conjugal love of Adam and Eve. Our life originates in our parents’ love. Since this struggle began before any of us were born, we have to conclude that the problem relates to the circumstances in which our first parents entered into a love relationship with each other.

The love of Adam and Eve was not a love of true happiness. Instead, it was conflict-ridden love. Because the roots of our life are in this love, we must conclude that the conflicts in our inner self originate there. The Bible teaches that because Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. After they were driven out of the Garden, they began to multiply children. God could not follow them and bless them in marriage, because it was He who had driven them from the Garden. Thus we must ask, under whose guidance did they marry? We must concur that, because of having fallen into sin, they married in the hands of Satan.

The fall consisted of Eve being tempted by Satan and her later temptation of Adam. Therefore, when our ancestors, Adam and Eve, established a relationship of conjugal love, that relationship was not a happy one. Instead, it was conflict-ridden. Humanity, because of its roots in that relationship, cannot separate itself from that struggle between mind and body. This reality is very clear and my explanation is logical. The fall began with immoral love. Due to a love relationship which God did not desire, Adam and Eve united with Satan. They did not become the ancestors of goodness, but rather the ancestors of evil, planting the roots of evil love, evil life and evil blood lineage.

If this is true, then what began with one fallen family grew into tribes, nations and a world of five billion people who are descendants of Satan, incapable of denying that we inherited the lineage of evil parents. Satan betrayed God and stole Eve away from God. No one knew that the blood of this adulterer, Satan, is present within our bodies, or that this is so displeasing to God.

How are we going to eliminate those roots within us? Satan dug his roots into our physical body, our flesh. God cannot avoid working to separate good from evil and thus to reverse this situation. God is public-minded and continues on the path of living for the whole, going toward the goal of love and peace. On the other hand, Satan is selfish and individualistic. Satan is always trying to destroy the good side through hatred, evil and war. He intends to prevent the earth from ever returning to God’s side.

God, who represents goodness, cannot severely punish humanity for having gone with Satan. God’s strategy to regain humanity on His side is to allow evil to attack Him. He can then, later, claim indemnity for damage and abuse. Satan’s strategy is to strike first, but in the end he loses everything. Satan has marched through history, wishing to ruin God’s plan through hatred, evil and war. On the other side, God has been working to recreate humankind through love and peace.

When the Last Days come, Satan has to give over to God’s side his spiritual power as a ruler over humanity and the respect which he once enjoyed. Satan retaliated by coming up with atheism, the ideology of no God, which supported the appearance of humanism, materialism and communism. After World War II, the struggle between God’s side, the right wing, and Satan’s side, the left wing, moved to the world level. Further, after World War II, because of the victory of God’s side, the world entered a transitional period in which to welcome victory and peace based upon the realm of Christian culture.

The present era is the era of the realm of individualism: the era of free sex, the era of children denying parents, the era of parents denying children, the era of denying the couple. Through homosexuality, an attempt is being made to destroy completely the family ideal. It is this ideal that the Messiah, at his second coming, intends to establish in order to change this hell into the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Messiah, as the True Father, desires the unity of mind and body, the unity of husband and wife, and the unity of children.

Problems must still be solved on a worldwide level. They include: (1) Which came first, matter or spirit? (2) Is the materialist theory or the idealist theory correct? (3) Which comes first, reality or concept? (4) Is evolution or creationism correct?

Let us attempt to answer these by way of an example. When we observe the animal kingdom, we discover that the first thing formed in a newborn animal is the eyes. The eyes are made of matter. Would those eyes know prior to birth that the sun existed? Being purely material, the eyes do not know, but something or someone prior to the material knew that the eyes were created to see sunlight. Someone knew.

Being purely matter, the eyes did not know that the atmosphere existed, but the eyes were formed with eyelids to assure that dust in the air does not damage the eye. The eyes, being purely material, did not know that steam and other heat radiations could dry the eyes and damage them, but someone knew and, for that reason, we blink so that our eyes can stay moist.

The conclusion is that through the simple example of the eye, we can solve the great debate over whether thought precedes existence, whether spirit precedes matter, and whether concept precedes reality. We can answer the debate of spirit versus matter, of creationism versus evolution. Given this, we cannot deny that everything was created by God. Therefore, we must return to the original world of creation, and realize the kind of self, the kind of family, and the kind of world God desires.

Thus, I would like to explain the complicated relationships that came to surround each one of us after the fall. It is logical that if Adam and Eve had not fallen, it would have been normal for their minds and bodies to have been one, just as God is one. Due to the fall, the body emerged as another positive, which was opposed to the positive of the conscience that relates to God. The repulsion between these two positives led to a history of struggle. We must be aware of this.

The body became the base of operation for hell, and the conscience became the base of operation for heaven. Man did not know that he contained, within himself, the division of two worlds.

From this perspective, we all should ask ourselves if our body leads our mind or our mind leads our body. In reality, throughout history, the body has had complete license to lead the mind. If the conscience were strengthened, we would automatically return to God and bring the world to be with God. The fact that the physical body leads the conscience, instead of the conscience leading the body, originated at the time that our ancestors established a relationship with Satan. This resulted in the power of false love.

The problem is that this power of false love, which tied the first ancestors to Satan, was stronger than the force of the conscience. God, who knows the situation of human beings very well, cannot abandon fallen humanity. Instead, He must establish a strategy to weaken the body-centered force that dominates our conscience. The historical system for salvation which was created and driven by God is religion. Religion was necessary in the past and it is still necessary today. God has established many religions. According to their different circumstances and antecedents, the world’s cultural spheres formed. Until now, religious people did not know that the purpose of religion is to prevent the body from continuing to lead the mind. If there had been no fall, religion would not have been necessary.

Something bad happened, and religion became necessary to correct it. What does God intend to do through religion? He intends to discipline the body. You probably think that by believing in religion you will be saved, that by believing in Christianity you will go to heaven, or that by believing in Buddhism you will go to paradise. But it is those who are united with God’s love who will enter heaven. To enter heaven, Adam’s family should have been a family whose center was the love of God, a family that had a blood relationship with God. Until now, no one knew that the place where such families dwell is the Kingdom of Heaven. Therefore, to strengthen the power of the conscience, we must dominate the body. We must liberate our conscience, so that it can lead our body by our will. We can then return to the bosom of God’s love as original beings, free from sin.

If we ask what religion should do, the answer is that it should motivate our body to do everything it hates to do. What does the body hate most? To fast! To serve! To sacrifice! Furthermore, religion asks us to be an offering. The offering is destined to shed blood; it must be capable of sacrificing its life. Therefore, the Bible tells us that he who is willing to lose his life shall gain it, and he who wishes to save his life shall lose it. This paradox teaches us that if we live according to the flesh, we are going to hell. If we win over the flesh and liberate our conscience, we will go to heaven. If we completely subjugate the body, and our conscience stands in a totally subjective position, our conscience will open us to unlimited desire and infinite hope.

In the course of history, there have been many religions and religious leaders. Yet those who believed in those religions and in those leaders could not totally control their bodies and deny themselves. They could not liberate the conscience and position it to relate with God on the original basis. We sinful people did not become true olive trees. Instead, we became wild olive trees, with our roots in false love. Man should have had his roots in God’s true love, yet we established roots in Satan’s love. How are we going to solve the problem of being wild olive trees, instead of true ones? This remains an inescapable, extremely crucial task, which we must fulfill.

If you study yourself, you will notice that your conscience knows everything about you. Your conscience is closer to you than are your own parents. It desires to possess eternal love and to be embraced eternally in God’s bosom. When we marry, we separate from our earthly parents, but not from our conscience. The conscience exists with us prior to our birth on earth. It loves us, and its mission is to transform us into eternal sons and daughters of God. In this sense, the conscience does not need a teacher.

Have you ever heard of a Secretary of Education announcing a plan to educate the conscience? If the conscience had gone the original way, we would have known clearly the course we should follow in life. It would have taught us and guided us to return to God’s bosom. On the basis of our conscience, which knows everything about our life, there is a computer in the spirit world that registers everything we do on earth. When you go to the spirit world, you will discover this.

Until today, we did not know that the mission of the conscience is to convert us into unblemished, true sons and daughters of God. Is there anyone here who is convinced that he or she will never die? We all will go to the spirit world someday. When you enter the spirit world, they will immediately know you by your name. They will know about your entire life. They will also know about your ancestors, because the spirit world transcends time and space. We should not bring anything into that world that would stain our conscience. For that reason, know that the conscience is above all other teachers.

There are many distinguished personalities gathered here today. Some of you are professors. I can honestly say that there has never been a professor who possessed a teaching superior to that of the conscience. The role of the conscience for a man is the same as that of a compass for a ship.

I would like to ask those of you who are married, "When you married, did you want your spouse to be inferior to yourself?" The answer is "No." If I asked you whether you wanted a spouse ten times or one hundred times better than you, no doubt you would reply that, if it were possible, you would prefer that he or she be one thousand, ten thousand or one million times better than you.

The conscience’s ambition demands the maximum amount of love. It wishes to possess the Absolute Being. The same was true for our ancestors. The same will be true for our descendants. If we were to ask God, He would respond that it is true for Him. Is it not impossible for all of our desires to be fulfilled? A mayor will want to be governor. Later, he will want to become president. Ultimately, he will want to ascend to the highest position in the world. That is how far the ambition of the conscience extends. From the beginning of history, people have generally thought that the conscience’s ambition cannot be satisfied completely. But Reverend Moon, the person who is standing here, has arrived at the conclusion that it is possible to satisfy even the highest ambition of the conscience.

How big is the conscience? How can we measure the conscience? Do you think that the day will come when the conscience possesses God? Do you think that if something bigger than God exists, the conscience will desire to possess it? What is it that the conscience’s ambition is seeking? The conscience desires to possess whatever has the maximum value in the cosmos.

Then how big would God’s conscience be? Which is bigger, the human conscience or God’s conscience? If God’s conscience is bigger than a man’s, what would He do with it? The conclusion is that we, in our immense ambition, desire the same thing that God desires: true love.

What do you think? We know that God is absolute, but does He not feel lonely? Do you think that He feels happy? Ladies and gentlemen, even if a person becomes the president of the nation, if he lives alone, without a spouse, that person will feel neglected. If we do not have an object of love, we are unhappy. Doesn’t God need someone? How would you feel in that situation? Even if God is God, He feels very lonely.

Human beings feel empty when they lack money, knowledge or authority, but God does not need money, knowledge or power. We must ask ourselves what God needs most. We call God "the King of Love"! God is the Creator of Love! If it is the case that God is the King of Love, then He is like a bridegroom. This means that He needs His object of love, whose position is that of a Queen of Love. This is an absolute principle. Who, then, can be the absolute object of God’s love? My answer is: a true human being!

Ladies and gentlemen, you need money. You need knowledge. You need power. But if you do not have a spouse, all of that will be useless. A husband needs his wife and children. A wife needs her husband and children. The family is the place where we find these partners of love.

The individual serves God, the subject of love, in the position of an object of love who completely satisfies the ambition of God’s conscience. The family in which a man and woman unite as objects of God’s love, and where children live happily, should be the initial foundation of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, centered on the true love of God.

Just as a man wants his object of love to be infinitely more valuable than he, God also wants man, His object of love, to have infinite value. A person of that value is a true person. We did not know that Adam and Eve were meant to be that kind of man and woman. No one has known that we were created with such value. If we were given such a high aspiration in our conscience, it is because God is the subject partner and He wants man to be in the position of His object partner. He did not want man and woman simply to be a part of Him, but rather to be completely different personalities. God allowed us to have such an elevated power of conscience because He hoped that we would be one thousand or ten thousand times more valuable than Himself. You must understand this very well.

If, at the beginning of creation, God and man had united in a relationship of true love within a family, we would not have to worry about hell or heaven today, because we automatically would have entered the Kingdom of God. The problem here is that God’s true love and man’s love did not begin at a common point, united as a subjective and objective love. From the first family, God’s love and man’s love moved in two different directions with two different goals. Therefore, it has been impossible to realize the ideal world for which God and man are longing.

God’s ideal of a common point of beginning was completely frustrated. False parents arose centered on Satan’s love. As their descendants, we inherited that false love, false life and false lineage, and are thus destined for hell. We have nothing to do with the Kingdom of Heaven. A person may have money, knowledge and power, but if she loses the love of her life, none of those things have any meaning. We did not know that, by being people whose spirit dominates our body through willpower, we were supposed to conquer God’s love through our conscience.

What does the conscience do to win the true love of God? If you unburden and liberate your mind completely, your conscience will automatically connect with the true love of God. If we compare the size of the conscience to that of love, we will see that the size of love is greater. We can know this from the fact that the conscience begins from love.

The Kingdom of Heaven is the place where we go to live in unity with God, in true love and with a free conscience. It is the place we go after having lived centered on love and after preparing ourselves to be in the lineage of God’s love. Without winning this love, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God for thousands of years. Due to the fall, there will be no connection with the Kingdom of Heaven until humankind is illuminated by God’s true thought and sustained by God’s true love.

The person who lives in unity, with a true conscience and true love, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven automatically. No matter how much a person believes in Jesus, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven if he is not linked to the love of God. The struggle of our mind and body prevents us from entering the kingdom. The person who remains in Satan’s lineage cannot enter the kingdom. The religions that have the mission of opening the way are struggling among themselves. They will meet a sad end in the Last Days.

God cannot be found where there is conflict. Catholicism and Protestantism must become one. Religion is not a key to open the doors to salvation; rather, it is a movement to subjugate the body and liberate the conscience. We have to know that we cannot receive the key that opens that door if we fail to inherit the love, the life and the true lineage of God. We will not receive salvation just by believing in religion. In reality, religion only exists to discipline the body.

When our conscience is liberated, its ambition for love can be raised to encompass God. How does this seem to you? Reflect first about what you are doing with your life. Will you try to find out more about this? Who is the first to know what someone is doing? Who knows first, the conscience or God? The conscience knows first. Man is distinct from God because he occupies the object position. In the same sense, husband and wife are distinct. The characteristics of each are clearly different. If we were to conclude that God knows everything prior to its happening, we could say that we are a part of God, as if we and God were a single entity. But if such were the case, we could not be the object partners of God’s love.

A person who stands alone cannot realize the ideal. After Adam and Eve sinned, they hid themselves among the trees. God asked, "Adam, where are you?" and Adam answered, "I am here." God understood, and said, "You hid yourself because you have sinned." Since man began from God, he should return to the position of object partner to God. We must return to God.

Ladies and gentlemen, your sons and daughters grow up. When you reach the age of one hundred and your children reach the age of eighty, the relationship of father and son also becomes a relationship of friends. Friends! We cannot compare the physical strength of a woman with that of a man. Women can never defeat men physically; but, through love, wife and husband are attracted to one another and they come to resemble each other. If Adam and Eve had become the objects of God’s love, would that have been pleasing to Him? Absolutely, yes! God created the universe before Adam and Eve perfected themselves as the objects of His love. God had the ambitious hope that in the future they would be His ideal objects. If, after having perfected themselves as the objects of God’s love, they had asked God to create something greater than what He had already created, do you think He could have done so?

Given the infinite ambition of our consciences, we should know that God can create everything we desire. God created us with the value of true love object partners. Because this absolute value was lost, it must be restored. This restoration is the purpose of human life and history. God established religions and promised that someday each of the founders of those religions would return.

Christianity has taught that Jesus will return. In Buddhism, they speak of the return of Buddha. Confucianism alludes to a new Confucius. Likewise, in Islam, believers await the return of Mohammed. What could be the reason God established the different religions? We need to understand that the Will of God is accomplished centered on His beloved children, children who are like God’s flesh and blood. With that type of son and daughter, God wants to form families, tribes, races and nations.

We need to understand, then, what the Messiah is. The Lord in his second coming is the person who completes the ideal for which all religions have longed, descending to the earth with the root of true love from the eternal God. He will become a True Father. Through the restoration of that lost true love, he will work to establish a true family on earth, on the foundation of true life and true lineage.

That is the purpose of the providence of salvation. Due to the fall, God lost the true mother as well as the children of Adam’s family. This means that God could not have true children. There was no family connected to the blood lineage which was to come from God’s love. Through fallen parents, blood ties originated from false love and false life, and the struggle between mind and body began. Adam and Eve became enemies to each other. There was a fight to the death between Adam’s sons.

The providence of salvation is the providence of restoration, which God has been leading in order to restore his lost sons and daughters, restore the absolute unity of mind and body, restore the absolute unity of husband and wife, and restore the absolute unity of parents and children in the true love of God. This true family, which is qualified to live eternally with God, should be connected to Christianity, which is in the position of the bride to the Lord. By establishing such a blood relationship with God, we can realize united families, united tribes, united races and united nations, which thus will bring about the united world, the culmination of the providence of salvation.

Distinguished people of America, is it not true that America would like to receive God’s Blessing? To do so, you must become a people whose minds and bodies are united in God’s true love. You must also unite as absolute husbands and wives. When the number of families that unite as absolute children of God grows, then God will come to live in this nation. If this happens, then automatically this nation will be the central nation of the world.

Man has this nature. If his beloved lives in poverty in the countryside, he wants to live there with her. In the same way, wherever God’s beloved sons and daughters dwell is the Kingdom of Heaven, even if it is a place of poverty. If it is prosperous, it will be the Kingdom of Heaven as well.

Today, the founder of the Unification Church is here speaking to you. If you ask me, "What is the mission of the Unification Church?," I will say that it is a place where God’s true love is present. It is the place where we want our mind and body to unite in true love. It is the place where we want to form ideal marriages with absolute unity between husband and wife. We are carrying out the mission that God has given us, by means of an ideology that can make all people into inseparable brothers and sisters.

Centering on the love of the True God, my wife and I are cleansing all the polluted elements that originated in the false family formed through false marriage. This false marriage was caused by false love, false life and false lineage, which stemmed from the false, fallen parents. My wife and I established Headwing Ideology, an external ideology through which we can overcome and defeat both left-wing ideology and right-wing ideology. We also introduced the internal ideology of Godism. In other words, through True Love, we have purified the world of conscience and the spirit world. By doing so, we have achieved True Parents’ position. Thus we are able to sow the seed of True Love, the seed of True Life, and the seed of True Lineage, which signifies the unity between God and human beings, to the couples participating in the International Holy Wedding, the ceremony of resurrection bequeathing this great Blessing.

This is the ceremony, then, that opens the path by which mankind will reach the new and true family. By having families from around the world participate in these marriage ceremonies, we want to connect the world to God’s great Blessing. It is my fervent desire that all the world’s people receive this great Blessing and become families and peoples that can establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

The purpose of the Unification Church is to establish relationships of brotherhood that transcend nations through this means. Through this means, we want to realize the ideal of one great universal family, centered on God, and thus proclaim the ideal of True Parents, true spouses, and true brothers and sisters. In this way, we will begin the world culture of heart. From earth to heaven, we will be liberated to fulfill the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

Since the end of World War II, for the past fifty years, the entire world has persecuted and criticized Reverend Moon. The time has come for you to know that such persecution was not the result of my committing a crime. Instead, it was to save you. And now, unlike in the past, people realize that I am a man of goodness.

I was instrumental in bringing about the collapse of communism. It was Reverend Moon who reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev and Kim Il Sung. To save the United States, which is going toward collapse, I built a foundation for the sake of creating hope. There are difficult political circumstances between North and South Korea which Reverend Moon is resolving. The same is true for the Middle East.

What I have proclaimed has come to pass. The entire world did everything it could to put an end to me, yet I did not die, and today I am firmly standing on top of the world. If I can boldly proclaim the truth to you today, it is because of God’s love. You need to know that if I survived, it was because God absolutely protected me. For this reason, I believe that you should study the Unification Church with this same seriousness.

We have met together today and this is a day of deep significance. I have shared a very important message with you and I have placed my trust in you. I kindly ask that you not forget this. I also ask that, based on this new awakening, you determine to follow the path to bring God’s Blessing to your families and your nation. In that way, ideal families will begin to appear on this earth.

As you probably know, Reverend Moon and his spouse are known throughout the world as the True Parents. If it is true that as the True Parents, we are connected to God in true love, true life and true lineage, I would like you to remember one thing. Beginning from a true family and you, a realm of liberation, liberty, unification and happiness will begin. This will allow the hope of peace to sprout upon the earth.

Thank you very much.

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