The Words of Hyung Jin Moon From 2011
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The Words of Hyung Jin Moon From 2011 |
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I am so honored to be with such distinguished panelists today. I feel very unworthy. I am grateful to True Parents. My first vocation is that of a minister of the Unification Church, though I also have other responsibilities. I want to welcome you to Cheon Bok Gung; this is our international headquarters. It also functions as a living church. We have services here every day, and on Sundays thousands of members come and worship. So it really is a house of God. While you are here, I want to invite you to look around.
When I was studying the world's religions -- of course you can never finish being a student in the great faith traditions -- but when I had the opportunity to give more focused attention to the world's religions, I found it was very common for people to say that the center of the world's religious traditions are qualities such as love and compassion, ethics and morality. We can see that there is consistency among all the faiths in those great virtues of compassion, love, benevolence, patience, kindness, tolerance, and so forth.
But this week, we're celebrating the birth of Father and Mother Moon. They were actually born on the same day -- twenty-three years apart but still on the same day. We of the Unification tradition see them as not only a regular man and woman. We see them as the returning Christ; Christ who has returned. This is very important for us. They reveal for us a truth, a teaching, that is at the very core of every single activity they've ever initiated; whether it be service work in different countries, the promotion of family values across the world, the strengthening of politics to facilitate a return to core principles or interfaith harmony, it comes from the revelations that True Father has received in his direct encounters with God and Jesus Christ. True Parents' teachings arise from this background.
I would like to share with you today that the very core of these teachings is that there is a God and that He is discernible -- we can know Him. I would like to share a presentation with you today. I've given this presentation in the church, and I've given it in person to Father Moon -- twice. He asked me to share it with you.
When we look at the core of religion, it is Father Moon's great insight that, across the religious cultures and traditions, we have the same values and virtues; and that we aspire to compassion, morality, and so forth. Yet at the very core, what religion truly seeks is a relationship. When you look at the Latin etymology of the word "religion," it is religio and that means "to reconnect." To reconnect a relationship, a relationship first and foremost to our Creator, God -- it is to Heaven, it is to earth; it is to mankind.
It's only in relationships that the virtue of love can exist. It's only in relationships that the virtues of peace, tolerance and compassion can exist. Everything is based on relationship. This is Father Moon's great insight even as it relates to the beginning of time, to the creation of time and space -- that it is all based on God's desire for relationship.
There was a great mathematician in the thirteenth century. His name was Leonardo Fibonacci. He was the Italian mathematician who introduced Arabic numerals to the Western world. In 1202, he published a sequence that he'd discovered. Known as the Fibonacci sequence, it's a series of numbers -- one plus one equals two; two plus one equals three; three plus two equals five; five plus three equals eight -- and so on.' From this is derived the "golden mean," or the "perfect proportion." Through this sequence, one can create an incredible shape known as the Fibonacci spiral. The Fibonacci spiral can be found all over the universe. It is created from this sequence of numbers. One of the great truths that Father Moon has taught us is that God relates to us also with numbers.
When you look at nature, throughout the entire galaxy and even at the vegetation around us, the Fibonacci spiral is everywhere, from the spiral galaxies of the cosmos to the swirling of water as it goes down a drain. All these things spin and curve in what is known as the Fibonacci curve. They fit this ratio exactly. You will also see it in the way subatomic particles move in zero gravity. You will see it in fossil forms and in the oceans that nourish the earth. You will see it in snail shells and in vegetation -- in the number of flower petals and in phyllotaxes, the number patterns in which branches grow on trees, or in other vegetation.' You will see it in the way grape vines and pumpkin vines curl. You will see it in the spirals of a dandelion and in the numbers of flower petals. Three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one.... You will see it in the tusks of mammals, in ancient mammals such as the mammoth and in living mammals such as the rhinoceros and the elephant. You will see it in the horns of every creature that has them -- whether it he African sheep or mountain goats. The horns are shaped according to the Fibonacci spiral. You will see it in the proportions of the beak of an eagle or of a parrot. You will see it in flying creatures like the moth, in the shape of its wings and its antennae. You will see it in the tail of a sea horse and the tail of a chameleon.
The Fibonacci spiral can be seen in snowflakes and on your fingertips. No evolutionary advantage comes from having spiral fingerprints instead of square fingerprints, but we all have them. You will see it in the cochlea of the ear and in twenty-six curves within the human brain. You will see it in the DNA helix; it fits the Fibonacci spiral exactly. You can see it in a baby's umbilical cord and in chlorophyll algae.
Can you see a pattern emerging? There is a creator. The Creator, God, created the universe. He created it with His love, with His desire for relationship and with His mind. We can see this in the natural world.
This proportion is known as the proportion of beauty, or the divine proportion, or the golden mean ratio. If a person's body has these proportions, which is 1 to 1.618, every person across the globe who sees that person will say that the person appears to be beautiful because of their pleasing proportions. We know that God is not only a god of intellect or mind, but that he's also a God that seeks beauty; because this proportion is beautiful. It teaches us that there is beauty.
We know that when the universe began, it started from a single point, the first dimension. It moves into the second dimension by extending into the four directions--north, south, east and west, as it were. Then we approach the second dimension of reality. This second dimension of reality is the beginning of time, because we can now plot time, though there is no space yet, because there is no way to gauge relative distance without boundaries; so God in his architecture of the universe must create boundaries, from which He then can gauge relative distance. When you close off these lines/ you have boundaries, and then space emerges. You have a perfect square, which when it rotates, creates a perfect circle. Now you may have seen a symbol, with circle, and within it a square, and with lines that go to a central point. It's our symbol, the Unification movement's symbol. This symbol shows the beginning of the architecture of the universe, the beginning of time and space, and of the Creation.
I'm sure that all of you who have been with us over the years have seen it, but when you looked at the symbol you may not have been aware that it has profound significance, that it is connected to what Father has revealed.
In the Bible we read that God created Adam, and from Adam He created Eve. This also is mathematical. Father is an incredible scientist and mathematician; of course, a lover of God, but of God's entirety -- His beauty, His intellect, His will, His emotion, His heart.
If you would like to create a feminine form, which usually is described as curved, one first must create masculine lines. You must create Adam before Eve. This is also geometrically true. In order to create a circle from a point, you need a radius. Straight and rigid lines have been described over the centuries as masculine. The curve and the circle have been described as feminine. Within this are the patterns of male and female; they move together in what Father calls give#and-receive action. They set up what has become known as the four-position foundation, upon which families and tribes, and societies and nations and the world and cosmos emerge.
For us, God comes from the center and reveals Himself into the world. The task of humanity is to get back to that center, to the central relationship. This is what the Unification symbol signifies -- our desire to return to the center of our entirety, which is God. When we take this to the three-dimensional realm, Father often talks about right-left, left-right, back and forth. When I first heard these things, I thought they came from the Confucian tradition. I did not realize he was speaking to us mathematically. When you extend a line up and down from a perfect square -- Father has always been talking about the relationships God has given us -- you create an octahedron. When that rotates in all directions, it creates a perfect sphere.
If God wants to create any orb or sphere -- anything from your eye, to a planet, to the sun -- God first must have preliminary shapes to create the sphere. God must first have more foundational forms to create the sphere. For the golden mean ratio, the one we saw in the Fibonacci sequence, there is an equation. I'm not going to go into it, because it's getting too mathematical, but in order to create the equation, you need a perfect square. But in order to create a perfect square, you first need more foundational forms. Before it can create ovals and other forms we will see, the Fibonacci spiral requires the foundational form of the perfect circle and the perfect square with a common center.
In the great architecture of all the religions and also of the ancient cultures, we find the vesica piscis, a shape created when two circles overlap and their radii are the same. That small American football shape in the middle (the overlap) is called the vesica piscis. This is how Christ was depicted in early Christian iconography. Jesus was the vesica piscis. One circle was God; one circle was man, and Christ comes from the vesica piscis. The vesica piscis is the womb of creation. From the vesica piscis, all shapes such as ovals and circles can be made, though you need the circle to do it. Every type of perfect triangle comes from the vesica piscis. Trigonometry, one whole division of mathematics, emerges from vesica piscis. Six circles with the same radius around a center creates a star in the center; you can see that everywhere, from the Mediterranean to Egypt, to the ancient world.
In order to create these shapes, and in order for God to create a Fibonacci spiral, he first needs the foundational forms, which are the circle and the square with a common center. As you continue to replicate the shape with the star in the center, every type of architectural shape emerges from tetrahedrons to icosahedrons to dodecahedrons to octahedrons to hexahedrons to megatrons cubed to yin-yang. Every single shape in the universe comes from that pattern you see.
But from this universe of shapes, the central shapes, the foundational forms are the forms we find in the Principle -- the four-position foundation and give-and-receive action, the circle, the square with a common center, which represents God, whose essence is true love. The whole universe emerges from this pattern.
All relationships, even the relationship between your DNA and your father's DNA, emerge from these shapes. When you were conceived, your father's and mother's seed became one. Everyone in this room, at one point, was one cell. By the process of mitosis, cell division, we began to grow. We go from one cell to two cells, two cells to four cells. [Referring to a slide]: This is an actual picture from an electron microscope of you when you were four-cells big. [Laughter] What's very important about those four cells is that they are not just four cells floating in fluid; those cells are in a pattern -- a specific pattern. Three cells are on the bottom and one on top. When you connect the centers of those cells, you get a perfect tetrahedron. When you were four-cells big, geometrically, you were a perfect tetrahedron. When you became eight cells, they multiply with three on the bottom and one on the top. When you connect all eight centers there appears a star tetrahedron, or we could see it as a Star of David. But there is something interesting and little-known about this star tetrahedron. When you rotate this star tetrahedron, at one point, it becomes a perfect square with crosspieces joining in the center. Just like the Unification Church symbol. When you were eight-cells big, you were the unification symbol within a cell, which is the circle! [Applause]
What's amazing about this is that it is all revealed in Father's teachings. He also teaches us that God created man and woman in His own image and that the universe as well was created in the image of man. That's fascinating.
I want you to look at the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. You can see in the famous picture, that da Vinci has already drawn a circle and square around that man. What this represents is averages. When the man stretches his arms out horizontally, the length of his arms and the height of his body is the same. Of course, human beings vary; we are not all perfectly proportioned like that. But on average, if you take a hundred people, you will get that proportion to within 1 /1,000th of an inch.
The center of the square in the Vitruvian Man, interestingly, is the reproductive organ. Father Moon's great insight is that all sin, all destructive sin comes from destroying the value of this sacred part. Two men are in this drawing of the Vitruvian Man. The second man has his arms diagonally up and his legs diagonally out. Da Vinci drew a perfect circle around that man. That center is the navel; it's not the reproductive organ. It's interesting that when you bring those two centers together [moving the circle whose center is the navel over the one whose center is the reproductive organ], it shows that when you are an adult you are still in the same circle–square proportion as you were when you had eight cells. Again, it fits the Unification Church symbol.
Father Moon has always taught us that the heart is the center. Of course, through our children, we have created new lives, new loves and new descendants.
It's fascinating that if you draw a circle within that square that the Vitruvian Man has created and then draw a circle of where the diameter is from his heart to his descendants (his reproductive organ represents his descendants), the ratio of the size of the two circles is 1:3.65.11 That's the exact ratio as that of the diameter of the Moon to that of the Earth. What does that mean, that these ratios are the same? It's an incredible testament to the microcosm and the macrocosm that True Father has taught us regarding our relationship with the created universe. Also fascinating is that the distance from the Earth to the Moon to the diameter of the sun is in the same ratio.
There is a God, my friends. [Applause] The truth that True Father has revealed to us is within the holy scripture we call the Divine Principle. All these things are explained within the Principle, which stems from the teaching that God is our creator, that He desires relationship, that He desires to be with humankind and the created world to be in a give-and-receive relationship. It is based on that understanding that I believe true relationships can emerge. True relationships that are centered on God -- on God's essence, which is to sacrifice Himself for the one that He loves. False relationships are the opposite -- sacrificing the other for myself. It is the Unificationist perspective that true peace, true love, and true compassion can only exist within a true relationship.
That is why, throughout his entire ministry, Father Moon has stressed the value of human beings' relationship with God, each husband's with his wife, parents' with their children and our families' with the world. From all this we can decipher that God wants to be in relationship with us, that He wants all of us to find relationships with each other. He wants to lead us with truth, with beauty, and with His essence, which is true love.
For me, it is a great privilege to stand among you, to be asked by Father and Mother Moon to address you this day. But I'd like to encourage you to get to know their teachings, to study the Divine Principle, because revealed through them is the pathway to true peace. Through the Principle we can find it; we can find the true path to our true destinies, to true relationships, to true love and true families.
So, brothers and sisters, I would encourage you all to study the teachings of Father Moon, get to know what he teaches, see how he has lived out that teaching in the face of persecution and betrayal and hurt and suffering.
Then, I say, you will see the face of God. Thank you very much.