Three Stages of Creation

Ladies and gentlemen, God created human beings as his children. As the original absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal being, God created people by breathing His love into them to endow them with a soul. If not for the Fall, we would have been able to perfect ourselves as God is perfect, to fulfill the way of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and to attain eternal life.

But unfortunately, human beings are living as descendants of the Fall. In order to live a perfect life, all people without exception must receive life through the blessing from True Parents in the three stages of rebirth, resurrection and eternal life. Rebirth, in this context, refers to an individual attaining new life. Resurrection is when a family and nation attains new life, and eternal life refers to all of humankind attaining perfection and living forever in God's homeland after establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth and in the spirit world by attending True Parents, the King and Queen of Peace.

Your ancestors who are in the spirit world shall now return to this earth according to the time of the True Parents who directly govern all life and all things as the substantial entity of God who exists without form. They will go through the three-stage blessings of rebirth, resurrection and eternal life and complete the Original Divine Principle education -- the education on absolute marital fidelity -- organized by True Parents. Only then can they take part in the original authority of Seunghwa -- ascension and liberation -- and attain the qualifications to become citizens of Cheon Il Guk.

We can easily see that each person's life goes through three stages. Everyone is conceived through the grace of God and the love of his or her parents. The first stage of life is the long (yet short) nine months spent in the mother's womb. No one is exempt from this! Whether we are conscious of it or not at the time, all of us without exception spend nine months in our mother's womb. Even though a woman's womb is smaller than some rice cookers, from the perspective of a fetus, it is larger than the entire universe.

What about our birth into the second stage of our lives, which occurs on earth? How could we find words adequate to describe the struggle of a newborn baby as it is faced with a completely unfamiliar, new world? The first lonely cry of a newborn as it experiences the large and wide world that it finds upon exiting the womb represents the promise of a one-hundred-year future, the blessing and celebration of entering a new time and space.

We have all received the blessing of birth that enabled us to live in the second stage of our lives. Although a hundred years is much longer than the nine months we spend in the womb, please do not forget that there is still a course we must follow to a higher end. Although we have all forgotten the standard of consciousness that we possessed in our mother's womb, and though you may think that we are now enjoying our lives fully in this big, wide world with a higher standard of consciousness, there is yet one final stage of our lives, which is the way toward eternal life.

That third stage occurs in the world of eternal life, the spirit world, which we enter upon ending our life on this earth. We were originally meant to enter the spirit world having first perfected our spirits during our life on earth. It is a world that cannot be imagined by people descended from the Fall, a world in which we transcend time and space. Just as the fetus in his or her mother's womb cannot imagine life on earth, we, as people living and breathing air in this earthly world, cannot easily understand the spirit world, where we will be reborn in our spiritual bodies, living and breathing true love.

Ladies and gentlemen, as people face death, they may tremble in fear and terror if they do not understand the true meaning of passing on. Although human history has continued for more than six thousand years, no one, unfortunately, has clearly taught the truth regarding death. Now, in the Last Days of history, I have been able to reveal this truth, this heavenly secret, as the True Parent of humankind.

Ladies and gentlemen, the word "death" is sacred. It is not a synonym for "sadness and suffering." True Parents have created the term Seunghwa [ascension] to explain the true significance of death. The moment we enter the spirit world should be a time that we enter a world of joy and victory with the fruits born of our lives on earth. It is a time for those of us remaining on earth to send off the departed with joy. It should be a time for great celebration. We should be shedding tears of joy instead of tears of sadness. That is the way of the sacred and noble Seunghwa Ceremony. The Seunghwa Ceremony is the first step the spirit of the departed takes toward enjoying eternal life in attendance of God, within His embrace. At the moment of death, our spirits should feel more excited and thrilled than a newlywed bride feels when she goes to her groom's home for the first time.

In order to open the door for all people to experience this kind of precious eternal life, I held a Seunghwa Ceremony at the United Nations headquarters in New York on March 18 in honor of world leaders who had recently passed into the next world. The following are the names of those commemorated on that occasion:

General Alexander Haig, a former U.S. secretary of state, who with the UN forces saved my life by leading the bombing of the North Korean Hungnam Special Labor Camp where I was imprisoned during the Korean War;

Mr. Kim Dae-jung, a former South Korean president, who won the Nobel Peace Prize;

Mr. Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat and head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, who died in the 2010 Haitian earthquake; the one hundred UN workers who died alongside Mr. Annabi;

Mr. Rodrigo Carazo Odio, a former president of Costa Rica, who is known internationally as "the Peace President";

Mr. Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president of Indonesia, who gave his entire life for the sake of his great nation;

Mr. Steingrimur Hermannsson, a former prime minister of Iceland, who helped host the meeting of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and United States President Ronald Reagan, which accelerated the end of the Cold War;

Shaykh Hassan Cissé of Senegal, who is respected as a great scholar of Islamic authority; and

Mr. Laxmi Mall Singhvi of India, who is praised as the "Ambassador of Reconciliation and Peace" by India's 1.1 billion people.

There are other people whom we would especially like to remember through this ceremony and send to the spirit world with the Seunghwa Blessing. I'm sure you have already heard about the recent sinking of the ship Cheonan in Korea where 46 sailors suddenly lost their lives in the course of duty. During my four-city speaking tour in Korea in April, my wife and I bestowed the grace of the Seunghwa Blessing on these unfortunate seamen who died.

Later, during another event at Las Vegas, USA, I bestowed the Seunghwa Blessing on one Dr. Reiko Kawasaki, a 17th-generation descendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the last shogun in Japanese history, who united the Japanese archipelago in the 17th century. She was a medical doctor from Las Vegas, and recently passed away after living a life of continuous service to others. Before her passing, she played an important role for the sake of the realization of world peace by setting a foundation for the future resolution of various issues in Korea, Japan and the United States, including political and economic issues. Thus, I have included her in the list of those who will receive this sacred Seunghwa Blessing.

Distinguished leaders, although the lives of the people whose names I mentioned were altruistic and philanthropic, none of them can be guaranteed entry into the world of eternal life without receiving the marriage blessing and the Seunghwa Blessing of the True Parent [Rev. Moon] in this world today, in which the parent-child relationship between God and humankind was severed due to the Fall of the first ancestors. Please take this point seriously.

Ladies and gentlemen, this era, when God has introduced the heavenly calendar, is a serious one. It is now the time in which all 6.5 billion of the world's people must understand my teachings, which I bequeath as the True Parent who is responsible to give eternal life to all of humankind. Now is a time that you can share the good news of the coming of the True Parents throughout the entire world. The time has come to honor and inherit the tradition and spirit of the Korean people, from which the True Parents emerged, establish the heavenly tradition, and bring about world peace by uniting all 6.5 billion people of the world with the United Nations. With the start of the heavenly calendar, please do not forget that the Seunghwa Blessing Ceremony is a sacred rite in which anyone can inherit the worldview of a holy citizen of the kingdom of heaven and celebrate God's liberation and all humankind's liberation.

In this way, the ideal of a family based on true love can be completed, and God and all people, the heavenly spirit world and the earthly physical world, can be completely united to usher in a reign of peace over the world. Please take this time to express your gratitude to God and True Parents for giving the keys of the Blessing Ceremony and Seunghwa Ceremony to all the worlds' nations, allowing for the establishment of the traditions of God's kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, through True Parents.

Please join me in giving a round of applause to our Heavenly Father for His benevolence, through which we can receive the grace of precious life without Him asking for anything in return.

(@lovintp)

[From the Twitter account of International President Hyung Jin Nim and Yeon Ah Nim on September 5, 2012. Tongil Foundation]