Cheon Seong Gyeong – Sun Myung Moon
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Cheon Seong Gyeong – Sun Myung Moon |
Your natural parents and True Parents have different concepts of love. Your natural parents teach you love centered on your physical body, and True Parents teach you true love centered on the spirit world.
It seems that natural parents should suffice, so why are True Parents needed? Because the Fall occurred. Fallen parents have been teaching their children to be inattentive to the important things, and in so doing have held them down, allowing them to remain self-centered. Thus, parental love has drawn a decisive line holding you eternally within the satanic world, and there is no way to sever it.
Then what are True Parents? The higher you rise on such a foundation, the greater the things they teach you, so that you can be synchronized with the rhythm of the heavenly nation -- the eternal nation -- and so that you will have no problem breathing when you go there.
When people educated by their natural parents go to the spirit world, they will all have to go into some corner and stay there, as if to shelter them from the wind. If they turn around, they will only see people who deny themselves and who want to live for others. That sight would be too much for them and they would feel as if they were going to suffocate.
Who made it this way? Satan. That is why people are hoping for true parents to come and liberate them. To liberate them, you cannot just resolve the situation just like that; you have to do so by going the opposite way. (129-99, 1953.10.1)
If you want to return to God, you have to be ready to train for the spirit world, which is a four-dimensional world. The training center for loving and becoming one with the spirit world is where you love God and True Parents. The Messiah comes for the purpose of fulfilling the role of True Parents on earth to connect the spirit world and the physical world to God. That is all there is to his mission. He truly loves us and lives for our sake to a greater extent than anyone else.
Before the Messiah -- in other words, the True Parents -- comes on the earth, the entire spirit world is completely divided, similar to this divided world. The True Parents in corporeal form must tear down the many walls that have been built up. Only then will the two worlds be connected. In that connection, the True Parents not only represent the physical world but also the spirit world.
By attending the True Parents and by means of absolute love, for the first time you are able to pave a road that connects to the spirit world. By demonstrating absolute loyalty before the messiah, you establish the precondition of having demonstrated absolute loyalty before even the greatest of all spirit people. You establish the condition of having demonstrated absolute loyalty to God's commands. You have to demonstrate absolute loyalty to the True Parents in the place of God. Why is that? It is so that you can establish a tradition that enables you to become one with the citizens of heaven.
Why do you need to attend the True Parents? Because they represent the spirit world and God. It is so that you can form a bond of heart with the True Parents and be qualified to participate in the realm of the victory of heart that True Parents sealed with love. (105-112, 1979.9.30)
Where are there true parents? Where are there true siblings? Where are there true families? Where are there true societies? Where are there true nations? Where is there a true world? If these do not exist, you only go from one unhappiness to another in your life. That is not how life should have been originally. That is why we spend our lives in this world struggling and gasping for air in search of the truth. Until now people applied religion and philosophy in their search to find truth, but they could not succeed. This cannot be resolved through human efforts. (159-282, 1958.5.19)
We must unite the world together with the True Parents. Through the heart of God, the axis of the spirit world and the axis of the earth have to be united with the True Parents. You cannot take True Parents out of the center of the spirit world or the earth.
When evil parents came into being a confrontation occurred on the horizontal plane that led to humanity being split in two. On the vertical plane, it brought about the division of the separate worlds of the God of goodness and a god of evil. Because all this was caused by the emergence of false parents, the True Parents have to come at the point that leads to the give and take of these two worlds. The Fall occurred because of false parents. To deal with this, True Parents have to come into being. That which is true has to appear. (149.279, 1986.12.7)
The democratic world represents the right wing whereas the communist world represents the left wing. They are now breaking down. The same can also be said of the United States. Neither world has a center. What is needed at this time is Headwing thought and Godism. No form of humanism can stand before God. God alone is the absolute and eternal center. Only Headwing thought can become the center of all humankind.
The true center for the spiritual and physical worlds can only be the ideology centered on true parents. From the perspective of true love, Headwing thought and Godism are the same concept. (205-261, 1990.3.9)
Is there a limit to the need for the True Parents? There is none. Whether in this world or in the spirit world, this need is infinite. On the other hand, where is the limitation of the President of the United States? In four to eight years, he topples over and drops out, but the True Parents do not. The limitation is different. In four to eight years, the American president has to pack his bags, but that is not the case with the True Parents.
The True Parents are needed not just in this earthly world but also in the spirit world. Why? A palace was supposed to be built in the spirit world by people who lived on earth with love, but there were no such people. Even God and the people in the spirit world cannot build the palace of love. The True Parents must build it.
The palace of love in the spirit world begins from the True Parents. Even if there were already a palace in the spirit world, the entire spirit world could only settle with that place at the center if the True Parents entered and declared: "This is where we will have a palace." The spirit world absolutely needs me because this responsibility has yet to be fulfilled. (205-255, 1990.9.9)
The True Parents are the true parents whom all humankind must seek. Their existence makes it possible for true goodness to be established. So what kind of people are they? They are the foothold enabling you to move with God. They stand as an altar that bridges the gap between God and humankind. They are like the bridge by which we cross over the world of death.
They are the position where you can be with God, the focal point enabling you to bond together with God as Parent and child, and become one body with Him. It is the point of origin where two boundaries that became separated from each other can converge, and where humankind can become one with God for the first time since being separated from Him as a result of the Fall. The True Parents are the ones who stand in the position of the indemnity sacrifice.
If there were a place where we could go and call on God in times of desperation and have Him forget all that has happened during the past millennium and come forward so that we could form a relationship with Him, such a place would be so valuable to us that we would not exchange it for anything in the world.
God sent the True Parents so that humankind, which is not qualified to be in His company or to form a bond with Him, can do so in relaxed surroundings. How then are we to give thanks for this grace by which the bond of the True Parents has been given to us unconditionally? How much did you thank God? In response to the grace by which you are now able to receive salvation, how much have you thought about how you have been given the opportunity to be jubilant and take a vow of victory? How much have you realized that you are making a new start with unlimited hope and eternal values? This is the question.
How much must God have been longing for the True Parents, whom He knew could realize His historical desire to find His sons and daughters! Consider two standards of longing: God's longing for the True Parents, and your longing, you who are in the world of death and long to be saved from it. You would normally place greater importance on the True Parents than you would God, esteem them as more precious, and value them more than you would God. Until now, though, this has not been the case.
How much must God have been looking forward to that occasion when humankind can be with True Parents, establish a bond with them, and stand face-to-face with them! Each of you must be able to say: "I will achieve such a position and I will lay the foundation for such a victory." The important thing is how strongly you are determined to overcome any difficulty, however great; that you will view this position as a turning point that determines all the values in your life, and that you will make this bond your primary motivating force. Viewed from this perspective, we need to recognize how fraudulent we have been. We must realize how much we have failed to establish our own positions as we wandered as aimlessly as the wind.
Are we people with whom God can live? No. We need a savior. What kind of person is this savior? He is the one who substantiates the bond with True Parents. From this perspective, how extraordinary the bond with True Parents is! Thanks to True Parents, we are able to begin a true life, and undertake a relationship of new life. Through this relationship of life, you are able to initiate new families, new societies, new nations and a new world. Also, you must realize that through that relationship, you can obtain the essential factors for the victory to resolve all the paths of life and death of the past two millennia.
There is no self there. God is not the one who must walk the way of suffering in order to save the fallen world. He does not have to deal with the fallen world. He comes forward with a new bond of true love. He comes to us with new hope and a new foundation for restoration. These are the circumstances in which the bond between God and you is formed. It is a bond by which the four directions can be brought into oneness, and it is linked at one point of origin so that it can destroy the world of death and establish the foundation for a new heaven and earth in the bright future. In this way, the world can make a new start by practicing the parent-child relationship.
No sword or power can break the bond between you and the True Parents -- not even the power of Satan. Why? Because this bond possesses the special authority to break through all of today's problems and bring salvation to humankind, and because the power that humankind has historically desired has been concentrated in this bond, or stronghold. Thus, no historical concentration of power would be strong enough to break this relationship. In this way, the True Parents are the ones whom God has sent forth as historical sacrifices for the purpose of doing away with all evil and making a new victorious beginning based on a new bond.
In the same way that God is in a serious position and miserable circumstances, we should he also. The Father's circumstances should be felt as our own. Unless someone appears on this earth to fulfill the duty of a child and comfort God, there will never be a way to resolve historical problems.
Even if we were to find ourselves in extremely difficult circumstances, we should not stand before God hoping to receive His sympathy, but rather we should stand in a position to sympathize with Him. Jesus was the crystallization of all the elements that were carefully accumulated throughout history in the context of such a bond. Yet, because Jesus could not realize God's will, the returning Lord must continue it and go that way. The True Parents are the concentration of all historic hopes. God has sent them to represent the whole as the condition for the restructuring of history.
You bond with the True Parents not from the spirit world, but from the earth. Since the True Parents come to the earth in corporeal form, they can answer when you call on them and sympathize with you when you are in difficulty. You cannot imagine how blessed you are that you can meet True Parents on the same horizontal plane.
Until now, God has worked to overcome all the difficulties that might be faced in order to achieve a decisive victory. Here, the question is whether you have become the princes of victory. You must be able to say that you have become one with that heart and are completely inseparable from it. In other words, the pivotal axis of your life has to be the conviction that you are with God and that you are together with the True Parents.
Only if each of you becomes the self that can continue on the same course for a thousand years, ten thousand years even, will a linkage be established between God's Kingdom on earth and His kingdom in the spirit world. This means that you will be the masters of heaven and the masters of earth, and then God's Kingdom on earth and in the spirit world will be opened up for the first time.
Such a bond is not something formed in a position of comfort. It is formed in a position of extreme difficulty, a position so serious that it could not possibly be any more serious, a position where life and death are on the line, a position where there is an increased level of risk.
That is why the Bible says, "Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Jesus' expression may sound archaic, but this is the normal approach and attitude for going the way of restoration and for progressing through the world of heart. It is clear that each person must strive to achieve such a state, and that path will become the true course. (31-73, 1970.4.19)
Many of you here have passed your forties and are in your fifties. If you were asked what you had accomplished up until now, what would be your answer? Perhaps you will die within the next ten or twenty years. Imagine the moment when you come face-to-face with death and look back on the course you have taken after you came to know God's will. Then think about how God could not claim His rightful place and remove the servant-like mask of unsatisfied desire from His face because of your failure to complete your responsibility to restore human beings, who remain the devil's descendants. Will you be able to keep from bowing your head in shame after you enter the spirit world? How will you go there and walk around with your head held high? How will you live there? You will just have to go hide somewhere. Everything about you will be revealed for everyone to see.
You cannot avoid going to the spirit world. We are all destined to go there. What are you going to take with you? Let us look at the example of a daughter in a poor family. Her pitiable appearance would make it difficult to present herself to her relatives. Worse, without taking a dowry with her, how could she face marrying the son of a rich family with more than a hundred clansmen in a home shared by layer upon layer of people from four generations?
How could she withstand the ridicule if she were to go empty-handed? Her in-laws would proudly tell her, "According to our family tradition, so-and-so did this, grandmother and all the other women did this, and big sister did it this way, and so did everyone else." If she is seen as a failure in the family, how could she hold her head up in front of them or sit down to eat? How could she even pick up her spoon or chopsticks?
It is terrible to be unable to fit into a group. What will you take with you? If you were asked, "If you have been a Unification Church member for forty years, then what have you brought with you?" How would you respond? Is the spirit world where you are going to a place where you are worse off or better off than here? Is the place where you are going after you die worse than here or better? It is a place that is tens of millions of times better than here. It is a world where you can accurately measure everything.
It is a place where each individual feels the pain of knowing exactly where he is situated. If you want to raise yourself up one stage, it will take you a thousand, even ten thousand years.
Because you received the precious thing called the Blessing, the door is open for you, but you cannot enter because you are not dressed in formal attire. You must go to the banquet house in formal attire. Can a groomsman go to a wedding in work clothes? Think about it. You have to dress appropriately for the occasion in order to go there and be welcomed into that environment. Otherwise you will be thrown out. People will say to you, "Get lost, blockhead!"
There was once a rich man in Mokpo who was said to be so rich that he owned all the land in the northern part of the city. Then, my friend married this man's only daughter and became his son-in-law. Since this was during the Japanese occupation, almost no one could afford the expense of a modern Western-style wedding with tuxedos and gowns and such. Usually, a groom would just wear his civil defense uniform and stick a single flower into his lapel.
However, because this man was rich and had all his rich friends coming, he decided to have a modern-style wedding. I was asked to be one of four groomsmen. When the bride's family prepared the outfits for the groomsmen, they decided to make all of them match the height of the groom. The groom was about the same height as I was, but he was not nearly as heavy. So when I put on the white shirt they had bought for ???? won and buttoned it up, you could see my belly button. Wearing this tight shirt, I had to maintain a posture that put a lot of pressure on my spine. After a couple hours of this, I started to get muscle cramps. What was I supposed to do? Could I cry out in a loud voice? I remember going over to a wall and bending over like this to massage the cramped muscles.
Dressed like this, I had to stand in front of this huge crowd of thousands of people, including everyone who was anybody in South Jeolla Province. I would much rather have found a rat hole somewhere that I could crawl into. It was all I could do to stay there in my place and endure.
Being unable to fit into a particular environment is oppressive.
I know the spirit world well. I know all the saints and all the founders of religions who are in any way significant. They do not want to yield to you, but you must not be shut out from that group. (212-224, 1991.1.6)