Book Thirteen - Restoration of the True God's Homeland
Chapter 6. True Parents' Textbook for the Unification of Korea and the World
Section 2. The Cosmos is Our Hometown and Homeland

Respected guests!

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude that so many leaders from a wide variety of fields worldwide have gathered here in Korea to celebrate with and congratulate me on my eightieth birthday. I would like to offer all glory and honor to God who has accompanied and protected me.

I have lived my entire life with the earnest desire to solve the many problems related to manifesting God's ideal of creation. Since receiving His calling as a boy of sixteen, I freely communicated with Jesus and all the saints and sages in paradise while seeking His will and fought against tremendous odds to complete the history of His providence of restoration for the sake of human salvation. I have come to realize that God does not sit on a throne of glory and majesty. Instead, He is a God of deep sorrow and profound suffering, who has endeavored to save His children that fell into hell.

What we must bear in mind on this meaningful day is that we must all become completely one with God's heart, and moreover, accomplish His will. As a result of the Fall, human beings fell into spiritual ignorance. This meant humanity was fundamentally ignorant regarding God's existence, the meaning of life, and the entire universe.

Accordingly, people did not know how they should live their earthly lives, that there is a spirit world after death, and that the former should properly prepare them for the latter.

Knowing God's will and heart, I have worked with single-minded determination in devoting my entire heart and energy to accomplish His will without regard to the time of day, changes in the seasons, or my circumstances. Looking back on the eighty years of my life, I realize I would not be here with you today were it not for His help during that time, notwithstanding my hardships and persecution. I have spoken publicly on some 10,000 occasions in many places around the world. These speeches have been published in a series of more than 300 volumes.

On this very significant occasion today when I am meeting some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, I would like to share with you my thoughts and teachings on the topic, "The Cosmos Is Our Hometown and Homeland." The cosmos was created as an enormous house where human beings would live as its owners. Being at the center of the universe, they live within the spherical relationships of 'above' and 'below', 'left' and 'right', and 'front' and 'rear', namely the parent-child, husband-wife, and brother-sister relationships.

God exists in the seventh position which is at the very center of 'above' and 'below', 'left' and 'right' and 'front' and 'rear' numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Thus, He can guide us in our daily lives even while existing in an invisible central position. Human beings can with God's help be liberated from the satanic realm of bondage and suffering resulting from the Fall, to mature as true sons and daughters, meet their mates to become true husbands and wives, go on to have children, and become true parents according to the normal course of life.

Consequently, we cannot reject the idea of becoming true children, spouses, and parents. Doing so would be to violate a fundamental principle of the universe, thus destroying our own existence. Hence, each of us must participate in building a true family consisting of true parents, spouses, and children, which is the model for the ideal existence.

People need to fully experience true parental love, true conjugal love, and true filial love in their families. Money, knowledge, power, or physical force cannot perfect such human relationships; only God's true love, which balances everything, can do this.

True love is a force that invests. It is a giving force, not a force that only receives. It gives completely to the degree that it ultimately reaches a zero point. Whatever then enters that completely empty position is okay. This process of giving and receiving will achieve a balance that continues forever. This is the reason that relationships of giving and receiving will perfect an altruistic world centered on true love.

Likewise, all beings in heaven and on earth exist in reciprocal relationships so as to form a world of true love through giving and receiving. In reciprocal relationships every giving force causes a returning force, and this is what eternally settles the central point.

God exists in the central position of true love -- that of the lucky number seven -- giving balance to the entire universe. Heavenly fortune develops through the cosmic process of being received and returned. Within such relationships, the flow of love, air, water, and light takes place in circular motion, and after circulating, the flow returns to its original form.

Ladies and gentlemen!

What makes people good? We could define this in many ways, but one way would be to say that bad people are those who take whatever they are given and use it only for themselves, while good people are those who add to whatever they are given and share it with others. Thus, no parents want their children to achieve a status lower than theirs. We all want our children to be better than ourselves. Also, a husband would like for his wife to be better than himself, and a wife wants her husband to be better than herself. Further, an elder brother and younger brother would wish the same for each other.

Consequently, we all want to give back something more than what we received. This is our fervent wish as parents, husbands and wives, and children. It is also the fervent wish of all things in nature and ultimately the entire universe. Moreover, only those whose hearts are so wide that they think, "The cosmos is our hometown and homeland," will be welcomed by the cosmos. We can conclude, then, that in order to become God's true sons and daughters we must be welcomed by individuals, families, nations, the world, and finally the cosmos.

That being the case, where would you most like to live? I think you would like to live in your original hometown where you were born. Broadly speaking, 'original hometown' can refer to the planet Earth within the cosmos, and our homeland is wherever God dwells as its founding Father. Our hometown is the earth as God originally intended it to be -- a place where parents, siblings, and children who have not fallen would live together. This was to be a place where black, yellow, and white people could live together in harmony.

Whose children are these different races? They have only one parent. God, who is with us wherever we go -- whether north, south, east, or west -- in the universe, is the Father of humankind.

Thus, it would be a mistake for anyone to think that white, black, or yellow people are the owners of America. God is the owner of America. This is also true for Korea. Differences in skin color are nothing more than the result of having to adapt to different climates and environments in different parts of the globe. In areas with large amounts of snowfall, we find mainly white people. Conversely, in places such as Africa where the rays of the sun are particularly bright, we find mainly black people. Fundamentally, though, people are the same.

For example, the color of our blood is the same, and our flesh and bones have the same structure. We all love each other in the same way. Thus, there should be no racial discrimination. This is why the Unification Church has been working through large international weddings to create racial equality. In deference to the laws and principles of nature, we have inter-married all five colors of skin. When a black person and a white person marry, it is like the North Pole and the South Pole coming together in unity. When a yellow person and a black person marry and have children, both parents contribute their good attributes, and their offspring are better as a result. Where there is love, there can be no strife. Each of us comes from a different hometown and homeland, but we can all agree that the homeland and hometown of true love is the hometown of faith, peace, and unity.

In the human world, true love, true life, and true lineage are most important. True love leads to true life and true lineage. True love is not realized without producing a true lineage. Further, love without true life is false love. True life is conceived within the context of true love and true lineage. Thus, true love, true life, and true lineage open the way to eternal life. God's ideal of creation is for each of us to become true individuals and bequeath true love, true life, and true lineage to our descendants. God is the ideal Being and the Owner of eternal true love, eternal true life, and eternal true lineage. Those who resemble Him become His true sons and daughters living in heaven.

Why do people marry? They do so to link together past, present, and future in the tradition of true lineage that I have described.

Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve could relate to God freely and directly, but no longer after it. Likewise, due to the Fall, Cain and Abel, the children of Adam and Eve, inherited not God's lineage, but Satan's instead; hence, Jesus' words according to John 3:3, "... unless one is born anew, he cannot see the Kingdom of God."

People need to realize that they have inherited a false life through a false lineage, which originated in a false love relationship. They should be ashamed of the fact that they have come to occupy the position of the enemy of love, life, and lineage. God feels unspeakable pain and sorrow when He sees free sex and homosexuality that are so prevalent in our world today. Yet He takes the position of loving His enemy's children more than His own. His providence of salvation is to recover all His lost children by continuously investing Himself without expecting any return. For Him to revive a fallen person, He must invest a life force stronger than false life. How miserable He must have been at the sight of Eve being pregnant with the baby conceived through the Fall! Such children have multiplied to the point that now there are six billion fallen human beings in the world.

Human beings are created to pass through three stages of life. The stage in the mother's womb is spent in the water, the stage of physical life is that of soil, water, and air, and the stage after death is that of love. In the same way that a fetus grows by receiving nutrition through its mother's womb, our physical bodies grow through eating food taken from the creation on earth. Thus, we should love the Earth as our mother. In the spirit world, light as bright as the sun radiates regardless of day or night. It is always day on the sun. That is how it is in the spirit world. The light of love in the spirit world is unchanging. Love does not change, whether by day or by night, either at the North or the South Pole. The spirit world is the world filled with true love. As it is also like a storehouse in which the fruits we harvested through spring, summer, autumn, and winter on earth are kept, it is the resultant place of our earthly life.

In the course of the history of restoration, Jesus was the only one born with true life directly connected to God's true lineage. Accordingly, no one else among fallen humanity has ever entered the realm of God's direct dominion either on earth or in the spirit world. Thus, God has been alone, spending eons in solitude and sorrow. Hence, the world has become a place where people and all things of nature are sad. God has been seeking one person whom He could trust and who could purify the fallen lineage of humanity and transform it into true life, that is, the Messiah who inherits God's true love and liberates all humankind.

As you all know, the history of the Old Testament Age after Adam's fall is that of the people chosen to receive the Messiah. God's will was for Jesus to come as the Messiah through the prepared chosen people of Israel, for all people to be grafted onto his family, and for this to be expanded to encompass the world. Yet his death on the cross caused by the faithlessness of his people left this process as an ideal to be accomplished at the time of the Second Advent. Accordingly, the returning Lord must stand in the position of the True Parent of humankind and restore the true love nest by fulfilling together with his bride the position of the Parents of heaven and earth and complete God's providence for human salvation.

The Messiah must begin by forming a family that attends God more gloriously and with greater filial piety than the family that Adam and Eve would have formed had they not fallen. He is the head of the family that represents the core of the ideal for a new humanity that must begin by inheriting true life and true lineage. From there, he must go on to create Blessed Families in order to complete God's Kingdom on earth and in heaven. Accordingly, he must come as the True Parent of humankind. He must deny the love and lineage of the satanic world and establish the perfected individual, family, tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos linked to God's true love.

All humankind must receive the new marriage blessing through true parental love and inherit the new family lineage. You must understand that this is only possible through true love; this is how the hellish world of Satan's dominion can be liberated.

Accordingly, everyone must go through the following eight-stage process of restoration and recover their positions as God's sons and daughters: gestation, infancy, fraternity, engagement, matrimony, parenthood, grandparenthood, and kingship. We should understand that we were born with the ultimate purpose to become God's children, princes and princesses, and the great lords of heaven and earth.

Ladies and gentlemen!

We were originally to grow up so that men and women would meet each other to become kings and queens, and, as heavenly princes and princesses, inherit everything in God's Kingdom. For this, we must start at the bottom of hell and work our way up through the eight-stage indemnity process until God's Kingdom is established, which is possible only through the Blessing of the True Parents, who come as the Messiah.

Therefore, blessed couples should become 'plus' couples who take the initiative in serving the world. To be completely reborn, we should practice absolute faith, absolute love, and absolute obedience centering on God. I have personally practiced this throughout my life.

When creating the universe, God did so with absolute faith. He went on to create us to be the absolute partners of His love. Absolute obedience means investing ourselves completely to the extent of total self-denial. Furthermore, we forget about the investment we made and reinvest; such a process continues until reaching the zero point without any concept of self. If our love were rejected, we would continue to love even more; even if we have already invested, we should continue to invest everything that we have, until we can make our enemy surrender voluntarily. God walked such a path, and the Parents of heaven and earth have also walked such a path. The person who invests love continuously without expecting a direct return becomes a central being, the one who inherits everything, and the child of greatest piety. In a family with ten members including the grandparents, the one most exemplifying altruism will be its center. The same principle applies with respect to patriots in the nation. The more we invest without expecting a direct return, the higher we can rise as loyal citizens, saints, and God's holy sons and daughters.

God can be the King and Ancestor of all those who live for the sake of others because, since the beginning of human history, He has, more than any other being, continuously lived centered on true love for the sake of others and invested Himself without expecting direct return and will continue to do so for eternity. The reason the Unification Church that I lead could become a worldwide religious group in such a short time is that its members have worked hard according to this very principle.

When I reflect upon my life totally committed for the sake of humankind, I can testify that it truly has been the focus of opposition from innumerable satanic forces in both the invisible and visible worlds, as well as from numerous religious leaders and many governments; yet because I lived for their sake, I eventually came to stand in their center. As I lived for those who opposed me because of their inability to understand the truth, invested myself for their children, and lived for the sake of governments that persecuted me, they eventually came to respect me. From this, we can learn God's strategy in contrast to that of Satan. God's strategy is to initially take the blow and then recover everything in the end. Satan is the first to strike, but he loses in the end. Under this principle, I blessed myriads of young couples of five skin colors from six continents across the five oceans in international mass weddings as a means of human salvation and to establish one world under one God. When the West and the East come together as one in marriage, the greatest cultural clashes in the world will be eliminated. When Americans and Germans intermarry to become couples of true love, then unity will be created between their two nations, which were once enemies.

Furthermore, I blessed even those who are now in the spirit world. In order for God's Kingdom to be realized on earth and in heaven, the people living in the spirit world must also be liberated through the Blessing, and only the True Parents on earth can do that. Since the first human ancestors sowed sinful seeds as false parents, the Messiah should liberate humankind both on earth and in the spirit world by coming as the True Parent. Even omniscient and omnipotent God cannot by Himself solve the problem of the false lineage. If He could accomplish this alone, He would have saved His children a long time ago. In fact, He would not have allowed the Fall to occur in the first place. However, being the God of Principle, He cannot interfere with the human portion of responsibility. Accordingly, the returning Messiah who comes as the True Parent should give rebirth through true love to humankind, whose lineage was defiled by the original sin. From this perspective, the international mass weddings are not conducted simply to bring young men and women together as husbands and wives. In fact, they are holy ceremonies in which people are reborn as God's true children through His original seed of life.

The principle of indemnity requires that we pass through the stages of individual, familial, tribal, racial, national, global, and cosmic indemnity to finally hasten the time of liberation for both the spiritual and physical worlds. The world is divided into myriads of ethnic groups; parents, spouses, and children have been divided; and even the religious world has been divided into the four great cultural spheres of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism. Now, we have entered the age of the great unified family and the Kingdom of Heaven by entering the age of the unfallen original realm of the Fourth Adam, passing the Old Testament Age, the New Testament Age, and even the Completed Testament Age which is the era of completion. In other words, the age of nationalism and the age of globalism have already passed and we have entered the age of the cosmos unified under one God. Moreover, through the earth becoming the hometown of all Blessed Families and the spirit world in which God dwells becoming their homeland, and through their oneness, His kingdom will emerge on earth and in heaven as the eternal liberated and restored homeland.

Ladies and gentlemen!

With the arrival of a new millennium, at midnight, I proclaimed a message titled, "The Cosmic Expansion of True Love is the Completion of God's New Millennial Kingdom."

The cosmic expansion of true love means that heaven and earth should become a house of true love, and the new millennium must be a time in which we complete the building of God's Kingdom throughout the world. As the cosmos originated from God, families, tribes, races, nations, and the world must work to complete a house of love that stands in the position of His object partner by becoming one with each other according to the principled formula. The nation must be a house of love where all families can enter, the world must be one where all nations can enter, and the cosmos must be one that embraces the world. Here, the family of true love becomes the starting point and core of our enormous house of the Kingdom of Heaven and the cosmos. Within the family, husband and wife must be the house of love for each other and likewise, parents and children for each other.

God's Kingdom is the place where the ideal of true freedom and faith blossoms and bears fruit and the place occupied by true families that are the results of true love, true life, and true lineage. It marks the beginning of God's millennial kingdom overflowing with eternal true love and true happiness. I have promoted true family values because the family formed by a union between a true man and true woman where God can dwell is the center of the Realm of the Cosmic Sabbath. Accordingly, we must realize on earth the Garden of Eden mentioned in the Bible.

The new millennium is the time to complete the 6,000-year history of the providence for human salvation and build the original heavenly kingdom centered on the ideal of creation. It is the Completed Testament Age, when the promises of the Old and New Testaments are to be fulfilled. This means a new heaven and new earth, where "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, and neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more." (Revelation 21:4) It means a time of unconditional true love, when all people will be able to drink the water of life that is as clear as crystal without payment, and when the spiritual and physical worlds will be open to each other, and God's Kingdom is established in both. The living God's direct dominion is to begin through the restored rights of the firstborn, parents, and king, opening a new era of God's all-immanence, all-transcendence, supreme authority, and omnipotence.

As I have already mentioned, the earth is the hometown of all humankind and the spirit world is the eternal homeland where all humanity will eventually arrive. Finally, the time has come for the global family ideal to be realized on earth centered on the Heavenly Parent, moving us beyond 'One Nation under God' to 'One Cosmos under God.' Accordingly, I request that you bear in mind that the fundamental relationship between God and humanity is that of parent and child, and upon that foundation, that you play an active role in transforming the cosmos, that is, the spiritual and physical worlds, into our Hometown and Homeland.

Once again, I thank all of you distinguished world leaders for your presence here. I would like to conclude by expressing God's desire that all fellow members of the global community will come to live as true brothers and sisters and build a new millennial kingdom overflowing with love, peace, freedom, and justice.

May God's blessing be with your families and nation. Thank you.