Our Goals

Young Oon Kim
March 1966
New Age Frontiers March 1966

A man who is rather agnostic and anti-religious asked me, "What is the ultimate goal of the Divine Principle movement?" I outlined the goal of our movement as follows:

For those who have some kind of religion, it is to correct the erroneous teachings and false doctrines they hold, and to offer a complete exposition of truth to their partial understanding of it. The erroneous teachings lead man in a wrong direction of life and establish a wrong standard of values, thus making him judge things in the wrong way. The false doctrines assail him with fears and unnecessary guilt complexes, and damage his personality. Therefore, by teaching the Divine Principle, we want to liberate people from the tyranny of falsehood and blindness.

For non-religious people and the youth of this country, the Divine Principle movement is to show the purpose in life. Today countless people suffer from aimlessness, their lives like barks drifting on the ocean. Such drifting may lead them to catastrophe and destruction.

Those people who have no central purpose in their lives are easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles and self-pity, all of which are indications of weakness which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins, to failure, unhappiness and loss.

A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his life and set out to accomplish it. He should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings and imaginings. This is the royal road to self-control and true concentration of thought.

To put away aimlessness and weakness, and to begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment; who make all conditions serve them; and who think strongly, attempt fearlessly, and accomplish masterfully.

What do we show as the purpose in life?

The chief concern of human life is happiness. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is, in fact, for most men at all times, the secret motive of all they do and of all they are willing to endure.

However, happiness will not come to you when you pursue it only for yourself. Happiness comes to you when you make other people happy. Therefore, in order to make yourself happy, you have to serve others, forgetting yourself to some extent and concentrating on their happiness.

If the object whom you serve to make happy is many in number and greater in value rather than a single ordinary individual, your happiness will be greater and your life will be much more worthwhile. The community in which people make each other happy by serving the highest reality is called the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Divine Principle shows the legitimate purpose and the ultimate meaning in life that man ought to conceive, and the secret of finding happiness in engaging in worthwhile life.

This answer satisfied my agnostic and anti-religious friend. You may sometime come across people like him, to whom it would be unwise to present our message as a new revelation or a new religion. It is always good to appeal to the sense of judgment, value, responsibility, and the spirit of service.