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Chapter 2: How Has God Educated Humankind?
2.1 How God has tried to teach humankind
God endured four thousand years of walking a suffering course to make a worldwide Israelite foundation and to prepare the Israelites to inherit the will of Jesus. However, they created a hopeless situation for him. Although he had the authority of representing heaven, he could not find people whom he could work with; he had to create them himself. He had to reeducate people.
Don't you find it hard to educate your children? They inherited your flesh and blood. They shed tears with you over tragedies. You understand each other implicitly. Your children quickly sense your moods; yet it is still difficult to educate them, isn't it? We are not truly God's sons and daughters. We are totally oblivious of His bitter tears and utter dejection because of having been born of satanic blood. Instead, we celebrate while God is sad, and rejoice over the downfall of His other children. How hard must it be for God to guide such people and direct us to pioneer the way? With a heart of compassion for people from individuals to groups of ten thousand, God has not been able to get a good hold on the providence of restoration thus far.
The heart and mind of God in pursuing His providence until today has been one of knowing, "Without Me, they will be destroyed. Man's ruin and destruction are not in accord with the purpose of creation. Knowing what I know, how can I let them be destroyed?" That is how God sees it. He knows so well that we need Him absolutely. That's why He has been heedless of His own historical suffering that He had to undergo in striving to educate us. That is God's situation.
God has carried out His work in history with a heart of love to save humanity. Because His motivation to save us has been love, He had to educate people about love more than intellectual knowledge, external truth, the workings of society or the world. When God teaches us, He surely must do so focusing on what is most essential.
In the parent's position, what is the most essential thing that He could teach humanity? It is nothing but love.
When children are born, they are not born right away as brides and bridegrooms, but as children to be educated by their parents. What can parents teach their children? They should not just impart knowledge, but also teach them how to love. Can they teach this by quarreling in front of them? Love cannot be found in strife. Education should focus on unity.
We require education concerning God's love. What is its origin? Man is not its source. God being their Parent, Adam and Eve should have learned about love from Him. From where would Adam and Eve derive and develop their standard of value? It would be from God's education in love. Until when would they have learned about love? Until they could understand all the values God had to teach them. That means until they had reached maturity, they should have received and grown in parental love.
Did Adam and Eve, who were supposed to receive education in love from God, reach the requisite standard? If not, we cannot talk about God's ideal. The problem lies in defining the educational standard. Do you want to go to heaven? Descendants of the Fall, however, could not receive such education, except insofar as the restoration has progressed. You can only receive education on earth and live by it until you go to the spirit world. If you do not receive such an education on earth, you are in big trouble.
Since it is the parents who dispense education to their children, the latter are to follow the former wherever they may go and no matter how long it takes. Whether in scaling mountains, descending into valleys or even exploring caves, they should always be together. They should miss each other when they cannot. Could God bear to be separated from His son? Because God is absolute, He would absolutely miss His son if He could not see him. When God loves, He does so absolutely as an absolute being. Can you say, "I don't care whether God comes or not. I don't care where He is"? Do not have such an attitude, but be absolute.
God is like a mother's body existing for the life of the children. Isn't that so? As the mother of life, love and protection, God protects, raises and loves life. Where does happiness come from? Without protection, life would be endangered and love could not exist. When your life is at stake, how can you talk about love? You simply cannot. That is why protection is necessary. Who was supposed to provide protection at the time of Adam and Eve? It was the Archangel. Adam and Eve were in the midst of receiving education from God, the origin of life, while under the Archangel's protection.
If Adam and Eve had completed their education, what would God have done for them? "In the same way that I love you so much, Adam and Eve, you must love each other with much deeper love than My love for the two of you." That must have been how God commanded them. Then, how could Adam and Eve love each other more than God had ever loved them? They had to have reached full maturity to love each other. That is the only way.
God exists in one body. He exists as the subject of the dual characteristics. So, God's dual characteristics can love each other and may feel love, somewhat, as separate entities between the male, subject-partner aspect and the female, object-partner aspect within the one body of God. However, He could never receive the stimulation of love, the kind of love that is possible between a completely separate man and woman without a man and woman actually loving each other. Therefore, had Adam and Eve really loved each other, forgetting even God, He would not have felt bad at all. Why would that be so? God is the subject entity that could have felt joy had Adam and Eve created oneness. When Adam and Eve felt precious love, God would have felt happy as well. That is the primary law of love under which God created us. Therefore, without receiving education in love, we can never fulfill the purpose of creation.
Adam and Eve did not receive education in love from God. In contrast to that, Jesus came to the earth to teach his own parents how to live a life of love. However, they did not listen to him.
Jesus should have been able to expound on love based on fulfilling the ideal of the temple and the Mosaic Law. He came as father, bridegroom, elder brother and owner of love on God's behalf. Mary's family should have attended Jesus as God. Their relationship to him should have been such that he could just call out, "Hey, Joseph!" since Joseph was not his father, or "Hey Mary!" However, what was the real situation? Did the circumstances allow Jesus to educate his own family? From a human standpoint, Jesus was the son and Joseph was the father. However, God viewed Jesus as being in the subject-partner position, representing His love. Following the law of love, Jesus's entire family was in the position to receive education and guidance from him in how to live their lives. He should have been freely able to tell them what kind of bride would have been suitable for him. However, did he ever have the chance to do any of that? Is any of that recorded in the Bible? People are trying so hard to enter heaven by some side branches; they lack the essential trunk.
Jesus worked for three years with dull people such as Peter, James and John. Why did he tell them that he had come not to be served but to serve, and wash their feet? He taught as parent, yet they did not learn well. Essentially, filial children would be prepared to die together with their parents, and even in their stead. However, Jesus' disciples fled for their lives when he, their parent, was killed.
Your object partner assesses your value. A wife should cherish her husband even more than God. She should be able to confess, "I've never met God directly, but I've met Him through my husband. I never knew pure love existed in this world until I came to know pure love through him. I didn't know what true brotherly love was until I experienced a true fraternal relationship with him. He is the one who taught me all about love in life." That's what a man originally should be in being able to bring out the true mother, true bride and true sister in his wife.
This should be your life experience. You should feel stifled without this kind of education. Wherever you are, when you meet people, you should naturally feel that they are your grandfather or grandmother, father or mother, brother or sister. If such a heart becomes the basis of global culture, if we can create a world that sees itself as one great family, we would have the Kingdom of Heaven. People who live like that would be welcomed everywhere. They would not feel lonely wherever they went. They would never perish.
Knowing of the historicity of such people as the nation of Israel that had the calling of being God's chosen ones, we cannot deny His existence. What was their primary purpose? It was to demonstrate the utmost loyalty to God, surpassing all other nations in the fallen world, qualifying to form the central body of people that could govern the nations. To bring that about, God promised to send the Messiah and educated them accordingly.
Please know that God has striven to educate people, pulling them out of the rubbish heap to make them into princes and princesses of the heavenly nation. In order to go to the heavenly realm, you should be willing to sacrifice your own family for the sake of your nation, sacrifice your own nation for the sake of the world and sacrifice the world for the sake of the heavenly nation. That is the only way we can liberate hell. There's no doubt that the course for Unification Church members has to be full of tears.
Who is the highest being in the entire cosmos? God is. So, if God and man together create thunderous, explosive love, who would be able to separate God from us? There would be no way to separate us - no way to escape. Can you feel that intensity? The harmony of the entire universe centering on the flow of love is supposed to stimulate us and form the educational material of our daily life. Yet fallen evil people are so much in confusion, engendering endless conflagration and triggering off infernal wars. Only the Unification Church can solve all these problems. You know now why, for eternity, God can never let go of me.
From what point do religious leaders start their missions? They do not start from the horizontal level. Jesus did not say, "I'm going to trust my own father and start my mission." His mission was not based on his human father and mother. It started with God, surpassing his physical mother and father. That is what is so great about it. From this perspective, we should be able to discern between religions focused on ethics in life and those focused on the love between God and man. You should understand which is more important.
To redeem this world, God has been educating people through saints and religions. It is not easy to realize and practice goodness in the evil world. Holy righteous people were sacrificed for that reason. The road to truth is one of self-sacrifice, working your fingers to the bone. It is the way of giving unconditionally.
How has God carried out the providence for the restoration so far? He has been guiding us as a parent. He has also been educating ignorant people throughout history as a teacher.
Then what does God want from educating us as a parent and as a teacher? He wants to bequeath His position of parent and teacher to us. That is the ultimate purpose of salvation. That was the purpose of creation before the Fall. We were supposed to fulfill the role of parent and teacher on God's behalf.
When God created the cosmos, He loved us from the position of our parent. Then He wanted to educate us so that we could realize the ideal of love by learning the principled course. Had we become mature, God wanted to tell us, "You now become the masters of the cosmos in the role of parents and teachers forever." God originally wanted us to be the masters of the cosmos.
2.2 God's sorrow at humankind's ignorance
You must inherit the tradition that God has wanted to teach to parents, children, couples and siblings. That is the perfection of the four-position foundation. That is the purpose of creation. The completion of God's Will is the completion of the ideal of creation. The completion of God's ideal of creation is the completion of the four-position foundation. What is the completion of the four-position foundation? It is to have matured as children, parents, siblings and spouses in God's true love through education. God's sorrow stems from never having been able to teach people how to be mothers and fathers who have inherited His tradition, so we all should initiate His royal standard in our families. That is the way we can complete His Kingdom on earth!
What caused God's sorrow? It is the fact that He could not teach His children. He did not have the chance to educate really grown-up sons and daughters. There isn't any substitute for that education in this world. There is no educational principle. The original principle of education had love, the principle of the unified family and the perfection of mankind as its central focus. God's deepest sorrow resulted from not being able to educate His children - that Adam and Eve, as brother and sister, could not uphold that relationship.
God never really had a chance to educate His children. It is His hope to teach humanity through the Unification Church. People who are completely united with God's love can see others as true brothers and sisters. Adam and Eve were brother and sister. God never educated them. That is the work of the Unification Church. If only they had reached full maturity as a true brother and sister, they would have been qualified to be a married couple. No one has ever taught his or her children anything of what God wanted to teach.
Adam and Eve were God's children and, at the same time, brother and sister to each other. Eventually they should have been husband and wife and parents to their children in the place of God. It is the mission of the Unification Church to teach the world the standard of God's ideal, which God never had a chance to do.
What God's hope has been is to educate His sons and daughters centering on true love that embodies His ideal. It is His sorrow that He could not teach us true brotherly and sisterly relationships in His true family, with His love as the central focus.
It is His sorrow that He could not teach His children about His love in the family setting. There is no textbook on how to be true brothers and sisters, good husbands and wives, and good fathers and mother. Nor is there is a textbook on the traditional family of the heavenly nation with God as its central focus. Today, the Unification Church is seeking to create these.
What is God's hope? What hasn't He been able to teach? He could not educate His children centering on true love. He could not teach the right way for sons and daughters to behave. He could not actually educate His children to the official standard.
Children have brothers and sisters. God could not teach them how to be good brothers and sisters. Even more essentially, He could not teach people how to be good husbands and wives. Through people becoming husbands and wives, they become parents. God could not educate people to be true children, true brothers and sisters, and true husbands and wives in the family of His true love. That is why people have not experienced true parental love, true conjugal love, true fraternal love and true filial love. That is precisely what we must teach people.
Women had neither true brothers nor true husbands representing Adam's position. Why? No one has ever reached perfection or the standard of parents. We lost everything and need a true man to restore it.
What caused God's sorrow? He could not create the prototypical textbooks instructing on being heavenly children, heavenly siblings, heavenly spouses, and heavenly parents. His sorrow comes from never having been able to teach humanity with textbooks for guiding these four distinct and essential relationships. If He had been able to teach humanity and guide them at the right time, there would not be such misery in this world. When He sees the misery, He feels responsible and blames Himself for not having educated us. He has been longing for the day when He could teach people freely.
To be the people to create the new nation, we must attain that educational level. Unless you become such individuals, families, tribes, peoples and nations, you cannot be part of the new nation.
Hating your own brothers is like hating God and your own parents. It is destroying and denying your roots. It is driving away love. Not only God but also parents and even all things would abhor people that would do such a thing. They become enemies of God, True Parents and all creation. God could not educate Adam and Eve to live the heavenly way.
When you look at all things, you'll see that plus and minus exist. The plus symbolizes man and the minus symbolizes woman. Man represents heaven and woman represents earth. Man represents the front and woman represents the back. One cannot make a full circle without acknowledging and accepting the other. What it means is that God, man and all creatures hate it when one ignores the other. You must teach people thoroughly that everything should exist in reciprocal harmony. That is what God wanted to teach us.
A woman has God, parents and her husband. That woman is Eve. Adam stands in the opposite position. Before Adam, there is God, his parents and his wife, Eve. That is why Adam and Eve were supposed to give birth to children in place of God and parents. They were supposed to give birth to children not of themselves, but as representatives of the entire cosmos. You should educate your own children focusing on the principle of love, the three kinds of true love.
God's sorrow comes from not having been able to educate Adam and Eve to reach perfection. His sorrow comes from not having been able to educate them centering on the principle of education. Next, there was no textbook of education on the heavenly family. He could not teach people how to be brothers, good husbands or wives, and to live their lives on a daily basis. He could not teach people how a man representing heaven and a wife representing earth should form a union; how a man should be on the right and a woman on the left; how the east and the west should be connected; and how people should live in harmony as true brothers and sisters. Married couples could not be educated centering on God's love.
God could not educate people on the four different relationships. Those who have the right education should raise their children and train them in the right way. They should also be the leaders of their own tribes. So, when they enter the spirit world, the perfection of children, siblings, spouses and parents should be realized.
2.3 The general principles: tradition, education, practice
You should not only inherit the tradition but also you should be able to teach it. To whom? You should teach your children and your spouse. You should respect your spouse, "My husband is great." "My wife is great." With that kind of love and respect between husband and wife, parents must educate their children. Not only do they have to provide them with the right education but also they themselves must put it into practice. Those are the three essential points: tradition, education and practice. That is what we have to work on.
That is exactly what I try to do. I have stood on the front line to set up the tradition and to educate you. Even if my own children do not know it, the Unification Church members know it. My own children will grow to understand that what I have done is good. Because you will be the fences that protect my children, they will also learn and understand what I do naturally. Starting from the family level, you should expand to the tribal, national and global level. You should inherit the right traditions. You should inherit my tradition and God's tradition. We must practice what God has taught us. It is that simple.
What we should stress from now in the field of education is tradition, education and practice. You must know the tradition. You must respect our tradition. You must set the tradition of the new nation. You must educate focusing on the tradition. To educate people, you must know everything there is to know about Korea, Japan and America. Americans do not know Japanese or Korean traditions. Japanese also do not know Korean traditions.
The three goals of our church are tradition, education and practice. You cannot educate without tradition. What is tradition? Of course, you should educate about my course of indemnification. Moreover, you should create your own family tradition. I fought in the midst of persecution. You fought without the kind of persecution I experienced. Your history and mine should be unified. You must extol the fact that I fought under heavy persecution and that you expanded the influence nationwide, throughout Asia and the world. The two should be unified.
So, I tell you that you must create clubs of professionals that can influence the nation's administration and businesses focusing on the second and third generation. The most precious thing is words. Words can teach people how to behave spiritually and vertically. We should teach people with words. No matter how many horizontal-level regulations exist, they cannot be our focus. That may work in the fallen world, but this has nothing to do with the heavenly world.
You can only educate people when there is tradition. You can educate people to follow the tradition and expand their influence through practice. My basic teaching is tradition, education and practice. Practice enables the tradition to extend itself. What is the extension of tradition? Not me as a person. But in the tradition, you can find God's providence of restoration and providence of salvation. You should clearly understand this. You should educate people about it clearly.
Groups move by following orders or regulations. To make people follow orders, these people need the right training. What we should do is to keep the tradition, to educate and to practice. Tradition, education and practice. The tradition is God and True Parents' tradition. We must educate people with the tradition of True Parents. If people go through their education correctly, then they will reach the God of providential history.
Set up your own way to do it. No one can help you. Be independent. Help others. Don't die. No matter how hard things may be, add something good to your daily life. Invest step by step. God has been investing Himself and forgetting what He had already invested. That is His tradition.
Educate people, focusing on tradition and practice. "Tradition" means the tradition of God and True Parents. You must understand this point clearly. So you must understand it and practice the tradition. You should know and put into practice God and True Parents' tradition completely as a true object partner.
The heart of prelapsarian Adam and Eve was to be prince and princess. Blessed families should live by that standard. They should also teach it to their children. When you are a prince or princess of God, you establish His kingship.
2.4 True parent, true teacher, true owner
The Archangel could not raise Adam and Eve, who were God's son and daughter. The problem is how to raise people so that God needs. Do you want to be teachers? Don't you want to be exemplary? You want to work hard to be a representative of your nation, like the president. You also want to have the highest position in an administration or in some company. You have ambition to succeed in life. Don't you? Be true owners to do that.
Spouses should never quarrel, but love each other and their children, setting examples for the nation, and for heaven and earth, in loving heaven and earth, the world and the nation, and in being textbooks of the future.
What comes after education? You become the master of your household. Every family has a tradition. Be the first ancestors who set up the tradition and bequeath it to the next generation. Exist on behalf of True Parents and on behalf of your ancestors. Parents can be like teachers and owners. My concern is how to raise the Unification Church members and hand over ownership to them.
When you look at a nation, the president is in the position of a parent. All educators are in the position of teachers and the executive members of a government organization stand in the owner's position. The Kingdom of Heaven works the same way. In the spirit world, God teaches at the center. Everything works in a very similar way. Therefore, wherever you go, you should have the three-subject ideology. Centering on the teacher, the parent stands on the right and the owner on the left. The owner, the parent and the teacher are all one. That is the concept you should have.
What's more, to raise people to be owners, I should hand over ownership of the heart of parents, the heart of teachers and the heart of God. After you join the church, you should be born again and be educated to be perfect. If you grow up, you will understand everything. You will want to stand in the position of the owner. Owners should hand over everything. That's what they should do. That is subjectism. Wherever you go, you will meet true teachers or true parents in the heavenly nation.
Who is God? He is the best parent and the best teacher. There is nothing He does not know. In the position of a true parent, I have taught you the secret of the cosmos as a parent and as a teacher. God is the parent of parents, teacher of teachers, owner of owners, and king of kings.
What is the three-subject ideology? Who are the three ideal original entities? They are God... Who is God? He is everything people desire to be. He is the true parent of true parents and the true teacher of true teachers. What is the teacher's teaching? God already is the king of knowledge. However, He has not experienced true love; that is something He can never teach intellectually.
God wanted to experience love through Adam and Eve. However, He could not have a base for ideal love on a perfect foundation through Adam and Eve. It made Him the most miserable being. That is why He could not stand in the true parent's position. Our first ancestors should have given birth to true sons and daughters, raised them and given them their rightful positions. Parents give birth to children. Teachers raise them and owners give them positions. I am not talking about the world but about a family.
Parents are also teachers. Parents are in the position of king in a nation and teachers throughout your schooldays starting from elementary school. They're in the position of owner in relationship to various organizations.
The three-subject ideology is true love for the sake of others. You must understand that. True Love is investing and forgetting how much you have invested just as God does. Recovery means curing sick people. For recovery as restoration to the original, you need to apply the principle of creation.
Applying the Principle of Creation in restoration, we must invest, invest and forget what we have already invested just as God did when He created all things, including man. I have toiled assiduously throughout my three score years and ten, but I can't say that I have done enough. Even after my death, in the spirit world, I still have to work more and give more. For my earthly life, I have to condense some 100 million years of time into my short lifespan on earth. So I should save time from sleeping and eating. If I could earn a day by going out for an hour, I'd go even at midnight. Invest and forget: that is my motto.
Unification Church members must love the cosmos first, more than themselves. We should protect and raise objects of ideal love for the cosmos and the objects of ideal love for God.
You must understand the background from which the three-subject ideology emerged. Be parents and teachers on God's behalf. There are three different kinds of teachers: grandfathers, fathers and husbands. You must also be the master with the heart of a parent. Our parental responsibility does not end at giving birth to children, but continues in educating them. What should we educate our children about? It is to enable them to become citizens of the heavenly nation. That is why education is necessary. What kind of education? It is education in heavenly law. That is the best education.
The Fall destroyed the love relationship between God and man. It's truly heartrending. You will find out what I say is 100 percent true if you go to the spirit world. You must love people, all things and your central figure in the vertical sense. In schools, teachers stand in the central position for students. Within companies, presidents and department heads function as the central figures. Serve them as you would your parents. Serve your teachers as if they were your parents. Serve your company president as your parent and teacher.
The president is the nation's master, or owner. People should serve him as if they were serving their own parents or teachers. Only then do they deserve to be people of the nation. Therefore, serve the president of your nation as if you were serving your own parents or teachers, and you serve your parents as if you were serving your teachers or the president of your nation. When you serve your teachers, do so as if you were serving your own parents and the president of your nation. This forms part of the three-subject ideology of love, the three-subject ideology that has true love as its central focus.
The center of the three-subject ideology, the love of true parents, the love of true teachers, and the love of true owners is the same. It is parental love. I go home at night. The president of this nation goes home at night. The schools should be the place where people learn from teachers who have the heart of parents. Further, the president of the nation should govern it with parental love for his people.
What is the highest education? The original base to create the heavenly nation is the family. The highest education in the family lies in teaching filial piety. You should learn it from God, who is parent, teacher and king at the same time. Yet, we never had the chance of learning filial piety as God's children, being educated as children of true parents, of true teachers and of true kings, and being true brothers and sisters.
People teach princes or princesses to represent the nation and its entire people. However, Adam and Eve, who were destined to become God's true heirs, never received such education. Adam did not get to learn that he was in the position of bringing peace to the world, and in the eldest brother's position to all people.
In all nations, however many there are, exist grandparents, parents, siblings and spouses. These four groups also live in the spirit world. We learn the principle of how a family should be on earth, teaching children filial piety and learning to love all humankind by learning to love our brothers and sisters.
We must resolve the sorrow of God in not being able to educate Adam and Eve because of the Fall. We must infuse the three-subject ideology into our system of education. It is the principle to be practiced and a philosophy of life based on true love. By educating people in the three-subject ideology and practicing it, we can restore the elder-sonship, parentship and kingship. Because Adam and Eve did not receive education and could not realize the ideal family of creation, which was God's will, we must form families of unification by putting into practice the educational content for children, for brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and parents. That is the way we can create the ideal nation and the world.
In the future, the problem of education will be a very important issue. What is the principle of education? God could not educate His own children, Adam and Eve, in how to be good children. God could not educate them in how to be a good brother and sister. That caused God sorrow. God also could not educate His children in how to make a good couple as a husband and wife. He could not teach them how to love each other with His love as their central focus. God could not educate His children in how to be good parents. He failed to do all that. Were Adam and Eve God's children? Weren't they also brother and sister to each other? Were they also supposed to be a true husband and wife centering on God? Weren't they to be parents and to have their own children later? But God could not give any kind of education to them at all.
Because Adam and Eve failed to receive the right education from God, they could not complete the family of God's ideal of creation. So, we must educate people to create families centering on true love. We must teach people how to be God's children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and parents. That is the way we can build families - the foundation of the unification of the whole - and eventually create an ideal nation and ideal world. That is the essence of Head-wing Thought and Godism.
What is the fundamental unit in creating the heavenly kingdom on earth and in heaven? It is the family. In a family, there are grandparents, parents and children. Wherever you go in this world, you can always meet people like your children, like your brothers and sisters, like your parents or your grandparents. It is the official and universal shape of the world.
Then, what is a family? It is a model to follow in shaping the nation and the world. Then what is love in a family? It is the beginning of creating the world and the heavenly nation.
The relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters and husband and wife are created with love as their focus. Only because of love, do children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and parents live in families. Without love, they would all break apart.
However, what do people on earth most want? Some people think it is knowledge. You also think knowledge is important. Of course it is. Others think it is money. You need money to build schools. Yes, we need money. Then, what do people think they should have after they build a school? They would say that their school needs authority. What kind of authority? The kind of with power. Yes, we need all of those.
However, even if we have all the things mentioned above, we cannot have the ideal model to live by for all mankind. It is not money, knowledge or power that harmonizes and unifies children, elderly people, men and women all together. Love alone can do the magic. That is what you must understand.
What are teachers? They are a kind of parent. What are the leaders of a nation? They are a kind of teacher and parent. The nation's leaders should represent its parents, teachers and owners. We call it the three-subject ideology in the Unification Church.
The three-subject ideology is absolutely necessary. People should be educated in their homes, in their schools and in their nation. Looking at the world, there isn't any nation educating people in that way. The educational system has completely broken apart. Parents, teachers and nations all have different directions in teaching people. Even within a family, grandparents, parents and children go in all different directions. That is the present reality we live in.
2.5 Religion as God's means to teach mankind
Before the time of the Old Testament, people were in the servant of servant's position. In the time of the Old Testament, we came to be in the servant's position. No one could pioneer alone the path from the servant of servant position to the servant position. God Himself had to pioneer the course. He had to educate people who were more evil than the servant of servants. That was His situation.
However, God is invisible and could not appear to just anyone. He had to choose certain people as prophets. The prophets represented God on earth, but at the same time, representing humanity - they had to obey God and follow what He commanded.
Where does God start to realize the world of oneness, the unified world? This is the problem. God has no choice but to start with each of us, individuals. That is why God has had to educate us throughout history through religions. Religions have had the goal of educating us in how to be perfect.
When we look at the mind and body of an individual, which is more focused on God? It is the mind. Unless we are clear about whether the body should yield to the mind or the mind to the body, we can never find the center we need to live by. So far, evil has always been able to destroy the center; we should destroy evil by centering ourselves on the good. That is how we should have our body surrender to our mind. God had to educate us through our consciences. He has taught us to go the opposite direction of our physical desires by following our consciences.
God and Satan have fought, with people in the center. Satan draws people to do whatever their bodies feel like doing. On the other hand, God urges people to do what their consciences tell them to do. God could not let people be pulled by their physical desires. He has been teaching people not to do what their body finds comfortable. The tool He has been using to do this is religion.
God educates people through religion; but how does He do that? The mind and body struggle with each other. He has no choice but to surrender one side to the other. So, He teaches people to strike their bodies and to live centering on their consciences. All religions teach us to strike the body. Religions that do not teach that cannot be true religions. That is the first step in surrendering your body. What is the second? Our mind and body have just about the same amount of power. God knows how hard it is for people to strike their bodies. So, all He can do is to give two or three times more power to our minds.
If religious people cannot establish the age of peace centering on God, then there is no God. If that is the case, we can only conclude that religions have cheated us....That is why God taught people that they must absolutely believe in Him. God taught them to love Him with all their heart and mind. God taught them to love only Him. God will not pass everything to us until the Last Days. He absolutely has to teach people to make the tie between Himself and them. If you just see that God is asking you to love only Him with all your heart and soul, you may conclude that God might as well be the dictator of love. You should love God no matter what, even at the risk of you life, but love cannot be one-sided. When God asks us to love Him with all our heart and soul, it means that He will love us with all His heart and soul, too. God has educated us to survive to the end.
Religions are factories for repairing people. What sort of education is needed in these factories? Mind and body are struggling with each other. God cannot repair us if He leaves things as they are. So, what He teaches us to do is to strike our bodies and live by our minds, our consciences. The higher religions are, the more they focus on that kind of teaching. Jesus told us, "Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it." He taught us to go in the opposite direction of satisfying our physical desires. We must get rid of our arrogance and stop putting ourselves before others. God had to teach us to go the other way, the opposite way. He has had to teach us to strike our body and make sacrifices.
Any religion leading people to God teaches them to sacrifice and to serve others. That is to train people to be able to adjust to the heavenly nation's principle and to the habits and customs of the original hometown. We are wanderers. It is God's will to educate fallen people to adjust when they go to the original hometown. It is the principle of God's creation that a good world can only exists based on that principle. It is God's will for us to embody the principle.
What is the purpose of God's creating the organization, churches? In churches, God gathers all different races and trains them. Churches are training places. They are spiritual training places. They are training places for people of the future and the families of the future. Churches must teach families, tribes and peoples the right way to go. All the prophets in the past guided their kings, especially when they were on the wrong track. They judged those leaders and led them to God. God wants to create the families, tribes and peoples of the future through churches.
What is the reason that religious values have broken down? First, thanks to the development of science and technology and the growth of economy, people tend to pursue more materialistic goals. Second, atheistic, materialistic ideologies, including communism, have become widespread around the world. Third, with the separation between church and state, people excluded the teaching of religion from textbooks in schools in accord with their national educational policies. Fourth, communists are trying to destroy moral values as a part of their strategy to create one communist world. Fifth, religions cannot teach the essence of why people have to maintain religious values.
Religious teaching is the highest teaching. What does "the highest teaching" mean? Parents should teach their children, "No matter what you do, one thing you must never forget is that you must love God more than you love us, your parents, and that you must love the nation more than you love us." Their children must accept that their parents are people of the truth. "Not only am I teaching you to do this, but we will live that way, too. We will be examples for you to follow. Our last words will be the same as these. It was our way of life when you were born. It will always be so for the rest of our lives. If we go this way and if you follow us, the tradition will not change. You should be able to give your children the same legacy as your last words when you die. Any parents that can say that are righteous parents.
God has educated people through religions so that He could create the garden of true olive trees. On the foundations created by religions and centering on His love, God sent the Messiah, the true olive tree, to have us engrafted with him. That is the messianic belief. You can understand the rebirth written of in the Bible in this light.
Although religions transcend the norms or rules governing reality, you cannot underestimate reality entirely. Religions must take great interest in problems happening in reality and discover what God's will is toward solving those problems. You must be able to arouse new, God-centered changes in the hearts of the people who can actually solve the political, economic, social and educational problems. Religions should help those people to be renewed and be able to solve problems centering on God.
What are religions supposed to do? They are to educate people's minds. Religions should give more power to our minds and restrict our bodies. Why? Because we have to return to our original place. Therefore, higher religions do not restrict people's minds. They strengthen the mind so that the mind can bring the body into harmony and center it on God.
What was the reason for God's having sent saints and prophets to this earth? It was to show people examples of personal integrity and the true love of God that He wants to see in people. It was to teach the leaders of nations God's way so that they could create harmony between the world of the mind and the world of the body centering on His true love.
If God exists, He must fix humanity. Yet, everyone has different cultural, traditional and historical backgrounds. Therefore, God had to adjust to those and educate people to control their bodies and to live by their consciences. Religions have found the way for people to live their lives by their consciences. That is why religious education must restrict bodies. No religion can teach people to follow their physical desires. Never. Whatever links to our physical desires must be cut off. That is the problem that must be solved.
There are two things I've spoken of today: unity of mind and body and unity of husband and wife. Everything is fine once we are united with God. When we see it that way, world peace is not very difficult.
The family we live in is the foundation for the cosmic victory. If people are united centering on God, we do not need religion. There are many teachings from saints and patriots. However, we can all jump over those in an instant if we become completely one with God's teachings. Your nation is not the place where you become one with God. It is in the relationship between you and your spouse. That is the beginning point.
The goal of our unchanging God is to realize the ideal world of true love. The purpose of religion is to actualize true love and true family. If religions do not contribute to those goals and exist for only their own sakes, they have nothing to do with God no matter how well they speak about Him. Neither God nor the world exists for the sake of religion. Religions came about to realize God's will to restore the original world of true love and true family. That is what I have tried to achieve for the past forty years of my life through interreligious movements worldwide and in different areas of life: academic, educational, ideological, cultural, artistic, journalistic, scientific, technological and through various kinds of businesses.
The religion that God wants to lead the world with is the religion in the position of parents. God wants religion to teach the parental heart. I am teaching the True Parents' ideology and tradition. You must be true parents in your own families, and then in your tribes so that you can fulfill the responsibility of tribal messiahs. Only the religion of the true parental heart can realize God's will in a world full of struggles, hatred and sins. Religions despising or hating other religions are not useful for the realization of world peace and God's providence.
Without God's having invested and given, the cosmos could not have been born. The law of the cosmos is that the subject lives for the sake of the object. However, in the fallen world, the subject does not live for the sake of the object. Instead, the subject misuses the object for his own sake. That is why the world has no alternative but to decline in the end. I believe that religions must teach the heavenly principle that you are happy only when your object is happy. The Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace sees that religions must constructively work together for harmony between religions and for world peace. The Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace should function as the world's conscience. It must guide and give advice to the national leaders from around the world in the fields of politics, economics and education. Great religions were born and grew up in the soil of persecution and martyrdom. They stand on a foundation of the precious traditions of their founders. Therefore, we must not avoid the sacrificial course and must recover the original honor of our religions.
2.6 Nature is the best teacher
What is the sound of love that God makes? Pigeons go "Coo, coo, coo." What sound of love would God make? Ah- Ah- Ah-. That sound must have been the most profound. If all of our nerve cells get 100 percent together and make the sound Ah- Ah-, how great it would sound. So, think of nature as the cosmic museum of teaching about love. How wonderful it is! How beautiful it is. Do you understand now?
All things love one another. Animals, insects, plants and minerals all love one another. They sing, dance, fly and crawl for others. You should watch them and learn what they are doing. Nature is the museum where Adam was supposed to be educated. It was the living textbook to educate Adam.
As people grow older, men and women are more strongly attracted to each other. They do not know why, but they just want to touch each other. If they touch each other, they receive very strong stimulation, such as they have never before experienced. Adam and Eve must have felt something very strong toward each other. That was an undeniable fact. They watched male and female animals kissing each other. They saw and learned. Nature is supposed to educate people naturally. The world of creation has enough material to inspire Adam and Eve to feel stimulation for each other. It is an awesome thing.
The archangelic world was supposed to protect and educate our human ancestors, Adam and Eve. God put angels in the servants's position. Adam and Eve fell, though, during their growth period. God knew that there was the possibility of such a tragedy from when they reached the middle of their growing period until they reached the age of twenty. That was the reason God had to warn them not to make mistakes, not to fall.
Today's Christians say, "The mistake was that Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." If you ask them what the fruit was, they will tell you, "It was a literal fruit." The Fall was not originally intended. Having learned from nature, Adam and Eve were supposed to have grown up and naturally entered into a love relationship. All things were supposed to be their teachers.
Adam and Eve were born to be God's children and grow up under His protection. They grew bigger as they grew older. The more their intelligence grew, the more they learned about the world of creation. They were supposed to learn why God had created it. They were also supposed to learn from the world of creation. Everything that happened in the world of creation was supposed to be a chapter in a textbook for Adam and Eve to learn and to live by. It was supposed to be a museum and provide examples of ideal life for the perfected Adam and Eve.
What does God need? Love. He does not need anything else. Why did God create all things in the cosmos? For the sake of love. Everything in the animal and plant worlds exists in pairs. Then, why did God create all things in pairs? God built the natural world like a vast museum in order to teach love to humankind. Man is the most precious of all the things of creation.
If Adam and Eve had grown to maturity, they would not have regarded each other as brother or sister. Through observing the insect world and animal world, they would have understood that everything exists in couples; the males and females are fond of each other; insects and beasts alike move in pairs. They sing to court each other, to express their love to their mates, and they reproduce and rear their young, and are in harmony with the vast universe. Though naive and ignorant when young, Adam and Eve would have understood the birds and bees by the time they reached seven, eight or nine.
To find an object of love, God created the heaven and earth. Once He finds His object partner, He has to teach it, beginning from the smallest things, and raise it to become His ideal perfected object partner. Before becoming full-grown, the object must pass through much training and education, through many plus and minus reciprocal relationships. This is the growth process for any created being. All created things can thus be utilized as the textbook of the museum of love, in order to perfect the ideal love of Adam and Eve.
When we say that nature was created as the textbook to educate us based on love, how close are we to the things of creation? God made the Creation out of love for me. He made it as the textbook for showing me the path of love. Therefore, I have to learn to love all animals, all the things of creation.
Why were things created in a pair system? The creation is displayed as an exhibition hall or museum from which the ideal love of humanity can unfold. A pair of salmons is a loving couple, and is a true example whom all mankind can learn from. When we see the things of creation sacrificing their lives to protect their offspring, we can tell that nature is the textbook from which mankind can learn.
Looking at the things of creation and the natural garden of Eden, which was created as a pair system, Adam and Eve would have come to understand what they had to do when they grew up. Isn't the creation God's museum? They form a museum of love to teach Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve would have known this one day. They would have grown up looking at the male and female birds, male and female butterflies, and all things being born in pairs, falling in love, bringing forth their young and living. It would have dawned on them that a grown man is a prince of love who represents God's masculinity, and that a grown woman is a princess of love who represents God's femininity. The woman would tell herself, "That man is just the person I need!" and the man would think the woman is really important to him. I am sure you will understand what I am talking about, seeing as most of you here today are married and have your own children.
A subject and an object are created as pairs in the natural environment. This universe is a museum of pairs with love at its nucleus. We have to learn by watching birds loving each other, building their nests to lay their eggs, feeding their young. We have to do more than the birds for the sake of our own children, even hundreds of times more. Male and female insects mate with each other and bear their young. They risk their lives to raise them. This is how they teach us.
There is nothing which does not form a love relationship with humankind. They are all teaching humanity. Also, all males and females fit to their concave and convex parts when they make love. They are all created so that Adam and Eve can watch and learn.
If Adam and Eve had known nothing by the time they reached twenty, that would have been a grave problem. They should have known everything about how all living organisms move, beginning with tiny insects. If the chief director of a museum is ignorant, how can he demand that everything be modeled after his ideas. You have to govern all living things through love as their master, loving and teaching them. Becoming an ideal couple and a unified pair of owners, you can be qualified to be the lords of all creation.
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