Desire

Desire (Yokmang, 욕망): The God-Given Creative Nature Whose Infinitude Is Fulfilled Only in God’s Love

What Is Desire (Yokmang)?

Few words carry as much unexamined suspicion in the religious vocabulary of humanity as the word desire. Across many traditions, the spiritual life is imagined as a war against wanting: the passions are to be starved, the appetites mortified, the craving heart quieted until it wants nothing whatsoever.

Against this long inheritance, the teaching of Sun Myung Moon makes a claim that can sound almost scandalous on first hearing. Desire is not the enemy of the spiritual life. Desire is its engine. It is not a wound left by the Fall but a faculty planted by the Creator before the Fall, and a human being emptied of desire would not be holier but useless to the purpose of creation.

In this teaching, the Korean term is “yokmang” (욕망), which we may render as "desire," "longing," or “aspiration.” The definitional sentence that anchors the whole doctrine is stark: desire is the creative nature (창조본성, changjo bonseong) endowed in the human being by God. The reasoning runs in three short steps. The purpose of creation is that God receive joy through His creatures.

Joy arises when a desire is fulfilled. Therefore, any being made to seek joy must, of necessity, be a being that desires. Remove desire, and you have removed the very organ through which joy—and therefore the purpose of creation itself—becomes possible.

This entry traces that claim through its foundations in the Divine Principle, its elaboration across Rev. Moon’s spoken corpus, and its systematic articulation in Unification Thought, the movement’s philosophy.

What emerges is not a permission slip for appetite but a precise theology of longing: an account of why the human heart is built with an infinite reach, why that reach can never be filled by anything finite, and why the only object adequate to it is the love of God.

Methodology Note

This article draws on three layers of sources. The doctrinal spine is the Divine Principle, specifically its account of the Purpose of Creation, cited as (EDP 1996).

The confirming voice throughout is Rev. Moon’s own, quoted from the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong and attributed by date. The philosophical articulation is drawn from Unification Thought as published at uthought.org, the movement’s own systematic presentation.

A word on attestation is in order because it shapes what follows. A title-level scan of the sermon corpus finds the bare word “yokmang” in exactly one address title across the whole record—and that single instance is late and telling: “Become a Prince Who Can Even Fulfill God’s Desire” (2008-09-05).

The near-synonym yoksim (욕심, covetous wanting) titles no address at all. By contrast, the aspirational word sowon (소원, cherished wish) titles twenty-two. This is not an accident of vocabulary.

Rev. Moon treats yokmang less as a subject to be preached about than as an analytic instrument used inside almost every sermon on the human heart.

The concept is everywhere in the body of the teaching and almost nowhere in its headlines—which is precisely the signature of a load-bearing structural idea rather than a devotional theme.

Readers should also note a caution observed in preparing this entry. Where compilations attach a thematic label such as “Two Ways to Subjugate Satan” to a dated passage, that label is an editor’s subheading, not the canonical address title; the underlying sermon of 1990-01-01, for instance, is the God's Day address. Only verified address titles are cited below.

Etymology

The Sino-Korean yokmang (欲望) joins two characters: 欲, to want or crave, and 望, to gaze toward, to hope for, to look into the distance. The compound therefore already contains a tension the doctrine will exploit. To desire is not merely to grasp at what is near; it is to lift the eyes toward what is far and high. The very shape of the word points beyond the immediate object to a horizon.

The teaching sharpens this by distinguishing yokmang from its darker cousin yoksim (欲心), literally the wanting-mind, the word ordinarily translated as greed or covetousness.

In everyday speech, the two overlap, and Rev. Moon himself often uses them interchangeably. But the doctrine draws a line of direction rather than a line of kind. The same faculty that reaches for the highest good is yokmang; the same reach curved back upon the isolated self becomes yoksim.

Desire is not made evil by its intensity—the teaching insists the intensity is God-given and limitless—but by its object and its beneficiary.

The decisive coinage is changjo bonseong, creative nature. Bonseong (本性) is original nature, the constitution a thing has by its making rather than by its history. To call desire changjo bonseong is to locate it before the Fall, in the blueprint of the human being, on the side of what God intended rather than what Satan corrupted.

This single phrase does the heaviest lifting in the entire teaching, for it removes desire at one stroke from the ledger of sin and enters it on the ledger of creation.

Desire as Creative Nature, Not Sin

The Divine Principle grounds the whole account in the reason God created at all.

Genesis records that at each stage of creation God saw that it was good; the Principle reads this as God’s wish that His creatures become objects of goodness so that, beholding them, He might feel joy (EDP 1996).

Creation is not an overflow of power but a search for joy, and joy is relational—it requires an object partner who can respond.

The Three Blessings given to Adam and Eve, and the four-position foundation on which those blessings rest, are the architecture by which that responsive joy was to be realized (EDP 1996).

Into this architecture, desire fits as the necessary human contribution.

If God’s aim is joy through His creatures, then His creatures must be built to seek and to feel joy—and to seek joy is simply to desire. Moon states the linkage between purpose, joy, and creation directly:

Joy can be felt when a certain purpose is achieved. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 05/08/1960)

Joy, in other words, is not a free-floating mood but the felt signal of a fulfilled aim, and an aim one is driven to fulfill is a desire. The child who sits down and weeps for the sweet it is denied and beams the instant the sweet is given, is not exhibiting fallen appetite; it is exhibiting in miniature the whole logic of creation. Its joy is the completion of its wanting. To be a creature capable of giving God joy is to be a creature that wants—and that wants without ceasing.

The larger frame makes the same point at the scale of the cosmos:

God created this world to feel joy through the realization of love. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 05/15/1986)

If creation exists for joy, and joy comes through the realization of love, and love is something desired and pursued, then desire is woven into the loom on which the whole created order is meant to be woven.

The teaching’s conclusion is uncompromising: were the human being to have no desire, neither the purpose of creation nor the providence of restoration could be accomplished, and human society could neither sustain nor develop itself. Desire is not the evil disposition that makes a person fall. It is human nature as such.

The Infinite Pocket: Why Human Desire Cannot Be Satisfied

Having placed desire in the blueprint, the teaching turns to its most striking feature: its infinitude. Human desire, Moon observes again and again, has no ceiling.

The one who becomes president of his country will want to be president of the world; the one who gains the world will covet the treasures piled on the moon and stars; the one who conquers the moon and stars will not rest even then. The reach simply does not stop.

Moon dramatizes this with an image his listeners never forgot. However small a woman may be, he says, the pocket of her desire is infinite; you could pour the whole universe into it, and it would not be full.

The conscience and the desire share one bottomless pocket, and the question the teaching presses is: what could fill such a thing? Money cannot; a billion won only makes one crave ten billion.

Knowledge cannot; one doctorate only breeds hunger for another. Power cannot; the ladder of offices has no top rung. Every finite good, poured into the infinite pocket, vanishes without filling it.

The teaching answers that an infinite container betrays the size of its intended contents. The pocket is infinite because it was made to hold an infinite object, and there is only one such object.

The terminus of human desire—its true final station—is not to possess the world, nor even to possess God, but to possess the love of God. To seize God’s love is to inherit all that God owns, for love carries the right of inheritance; the one who wins the heart of the king wins the kingdom with it.

Human desire, the teaching concludes, is not a curse of endless dissatisfaction but a homing instinct set for the highest possible destination. It aches without rest precisely because it has not yet reached the only thing large enough to still it: true love, centered on God.

This reframes the ancient complaint that human wanting is a bottomless misery, the “sea of suffering” of which the sages spoke. The bottomlessness is real, but it is not a defect. It is a specification.

The heart was built to a divine scale so that nothing less than the divine could satisfy it, and this is mercy, not cruelty—for it forbids the heart to settle permanently into any idol smaller than God.

Two Desires: The Mind’s and the Body’s

If desire is good, why does it so reliably ruin people?

The teaching answers with a distinction it regards as one of the master keys of the moral life: within the single faculty of desire run two currents, the desire of the mind (마음적 욕심) and the desire of the body (몸적 욕심). Both are desires; neither is, in itself, evil. What matters is which one leads.

The mind, in this anthropology, inclines upward and inward toward the vertical relation with God; it is the nearer neighbor of the original nature and changes but slowly. The body inclines outward and downward toward the horizontal world of food, comfort, and sensation; it changes constantly and, left to lead, drags the whole person toward the self. Rev. Moon’s homely example is the man who wakes hungry at night, sees the bread-seller pass, and thinks to steal a loaf—until something inside slams on the brake and says, No. That breaks the mind. Its presence proves that the mind occupies the better ground and the body the more dangerous.

Here the teaching locates the true dividing line between good and evil, and it is not a line between desire and its absence. It is a line drawn through the middle of desire itself, according to whom the desire serves. “Let us love our country” is a good desire, but “let us serve our country so that I may be rewarded” is not patriotism at all, while “let us sacrifice ourselves to serve our country” is.

The identical energy of wanting becomes goodness when it reaches toward the whole and evil when it curves back toward the isolated self.

Evil demands that all things exist for me; goodness exists for others. The dividing point of good and evil, Rev. Moon says, is exactly here—not in the strength of the desire but in the direction of its self-giving.

This is why the body’s desires must be governed rather than obeyed. Ungoverned, the appetites for food, sleep, and sexual pleasure become what the teaching bluntly calls the three weapons of the adversary, and a person who follows the body wherever it wants will sink as surely as a whirlpool sinks—for the whirlpool has no upward motion in it. The body is not to be hated; it is to be commanded. And the faculty fit to command it is the mind, ruling in the name of God.

God’s Own Desire

The boldest turn in the whole teaching is its insistence that desire is not merely a human trait but a divine one.

If the creature resembles the Creator — if, as the teaching says, the effect contains the whole of its cause the way a single leaf-cell contains the whole flower—then the limitless desire found in the human being must first have existed, and existed without limit, in God. Moon is willing to press this to the edge of irreverence:

We should not be calling Him greedy, yet He is very greedy. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 10/24/1982)

The “greed” of God is holy because of its object and its direction. God desires not to take but to give, and to give without end:

What God desires is to fill up the limitless universe. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 07/14/1991)

The single sermon title in the whole corpus that names yokmang directly makes the same audacious point from the human side: the disciple is called to become a prince who can fulfill God’s desire (2008-09-05). This is the theological hinge on which the entire doctrine turns.

If desire were sin, God could not have it, and the summit of the religious life could not possibly be to satisfy it. But because desire is a creative nature, God possesses it in fullness, and the highest human vocation is not to extinguish the divine longing but to become its worthy object—the child in whose love the Father’s own infinite wanting at last comes to rest.

Human desire and divine desire are then revealed as two poles of a single sphere, and the drama of restoration is their meeting.

Internal Doctrinal Development

Within the movement’s own teaching, the doctrine of desire develops along a clear line from diagnosis to discipline to destination.

The diagnosis is the two-fold structure just described, and it grounds one of Moon’s earliest and most quoted maxims from the beginning of his course: before wishing to govern the cosmos, first complete the mastery of the self (천주주관 바라기 전에 자아주관 완성하라).

Self-mastery here means precisely the ordering of the two desires—teaching the body-desire for food, survival, and love to obey the mind rather than lead it.

The doctrine of desire is therefore inseparable from the doctrine of jaajugwan, self-dominion; one names the raw material, the other the task.

The destination is stated as the three great desires that gather every human longing. Asked what he most wants to become, a human being, once the surface answers are stripped away, wants three things: to be a true parent, a true teacher, and a true owner or king (참부모, 참스승, 참주인·참왕).

These are not three separate ambitions but one root longing wearing three faces, and their common root is true love—the will to invest oneself a hundredfold and then to invest again. The teaching identifies God Himself as the original True Parent, True Teacher, and True Owner, so that the three great desires are ultimately the desire to resemble God in His self-giving.

In this way the doctrine closes its circle: the infinite desire God planted in the human being is a desire to become, toward others, what God is toward all.

Between diagnosis and destination stands the developmental claim that the original nature does not change while the body does. Youth and age differ in conduct and even in the mind’s inclinations, but the bonseong beneath them is constant.

Restoration therefore does not manufacture a new desire; it liberates the original one from the distortion the Fall imposed, redirecting a wanting that was always there from the self back toward the whole.

Practical Dimension

The teaching’s account of desire issues directly in a practice, and the practice is the classic ascetic repertoire of the religions—but given a wholly non-dualist rationale.

Fasting, vigil, and sacrificial service are not attacks on the body as such, and still less denials that desire is good. They are techniques for shifting the balance of power between the two desires so that the mind can take command.

reduce the force of the physical body and make the body obey the spirit. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 04/09/1990)

The logic is explicitly one of counterweight. When the body cannot be struck directly, the mind is instead pumped full—given three times the body’s strength through devoted prayer—so that the balance tips toward the spirit.

Religion, the teaching says, works these two levers together: weakening the force of the body and reinforcing the power of the mind, and it ordinarily takes three to five years of such discipline to habituate a life centered on the spirit rather than the flesh.

The goal is never a person with no desire. It is a person whose desires are rightly ranked, in whom the body follows the mind as naturally as an object follows its subject.

Two practical cautions follow.

First, prayer offered from the self-centered desire moves nothing; Heaven does not answer the petition that seeks its advantage, only the one that seeks the whole.

Second, the ascetic disciplines are means and not ends. Their entire purpose is to restore the original unity of mind and body so that the person can at last love—can become the true parent, teacher, and owner in whom desire reaches its designed fulfillment.

Discipline that forgets this and makes a religion of self-denial for its own sake has mistaken the scaffolding for the building.

Inter-Religious Resonance

The Unification account of desire converges with, and quietly corrects, several of the great traditions’ treatments of longing.

Its deepest resonance lies with its own philosophical articulation in Unification Thought, which traces all desire to Heart (Shimjeong, 심정), defined as “the emotional impulse to seek joy through love” and named the very core of the Original Image. Because God’s creation is itself motivated by Heart, the human desire to seek joy through love is not a biological accident but a direct inheritance of the divine constitution. Desire, on this account, is Heart in motion—the creative nature reaching for its object.

The Christian tradition supplies the closest devotional parallel. Augustine’s confession that God has made us for Himself, so that our heart is restless until it rests in Him (Confessions I.1), states the doctrine of the infinite pocket in the language of prayer: the restlessness is not a flaw to be cured but a summons to be followed home. Pascal draws the same map of the heart, observing that in every person there remains the trace of a happiness now empty, an “infinite abyss” that, he concludes, “can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, God himself” (Pensées).

The Unification teaching would recognize both descriptions exactly, adding only that the object that fills the abyss is more precisely named—not merely God, but the love of God.

The contrast with the Buddhist analysis is equally illuminating, and here the paths genuinely diverge. The Dhammapada teaches that “from craving springs grief, from craving springs fear” and counsels the uprooting of tanha until the thirst is extinguished.

The Unification teaching agrees that self-centered craving is the root of suffering, yet parts ways on the remedy. Where one path seeks to end desire, the other seeks to reorient it; where one aims at the cessation of thirst, the other aims at the discovery of the one water that can slake it. The disagreement is not about the disease but about whether the cure is emptiness or fulfillment.

The Confucian tradition offers a middle note that the teaching can affirm without reservation. Mencius held that “to nourish the mind there is nothing better than to make the desires few” (Legge), and the Great Learning orders the moral life by rectifying the mind before the person, the family, and the state can be set right.

This is not the abolition of desire but its governance and its ranking—which is precisely the discipline of self-mastery the Unification teaching prescribes, now recognizable as an ancient and shared human wisdom.

Analytical Synthesis

The strongest internal challenge to this entry’s thesis comes not from outside the tradition but from within its own ascetic vocabulary. Rev. Moon speaks constantly of negating the body, of the body as the stage of the adversary, of denying the loves of husband, wife, and child, of fasting, and of striking the flesh.

A careful reader might reasonably conclude that the real doctrine here is the familiar one after all—that desire, or at least bodily desire, is the enemy, and that the talk of creative nature is a pious frame around a fundamentally world-renouncing practice.

This reading deserves a serious answer, and the teaching supplies one. The negation Rev. Moon preaches is never negation of desire as such but negation of a direction of desire—the self-ward curve the Fall imposed. The body is denied its sovereignty, not its existence; it is to obey the mind, not to be destroyed. The decisive evidence is theological rather than practical.

If bodily desire were evil in its nature, then God, who shares no evil, could not desire—yet the teaching insists at its highest pitch that God is “very greedy,” that what God desires is to fill the limitless universe, and that the summit of discipleship is to fulfill God’s desire. A doctrine that made desire evil could not say these things without blasphemy.

The only reading that holds them together is the one this entry has argued: desire is creative nature, good in its origin and infinite in its reach, and the whole labor of the spiritual life is not to kill it but to turn it around.

The point can be sharpened by attending to the telos the teaching assigns to desire. Its final direction is not acquisition but donation:

God has the desire to give again unceasingly. — Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 12/13/1970)

Here the ascetic and the affirmative readings are finally reconciled. The self-worn desire that grasps must indeed be broken, and the breaking is painful and real. But it is broken open, not shut down—cracked so that the same infinite energy can pour outward as the divine desire does, unceasingly giving.

Asceticism, on this account, is not desire’s execution but its conversion. The heart that once wanted to possess the world is taught instead to want to give itself to the world, and in that turning, the creative nature is not lost but at last fulfilled.

Key Takeaway

• Desire (yokmang, 욕망) is defined in the teaching as the creative nature (changjo bonseong) endowed by God, placed in the human being before the Fall and belonging to the ledger of creation rather than of sin.
• The doctrine rests on a three-step logic drawn from the Purpose of Creation: God created to receive joy; joy arises when desire is fulfilled; therefore, a creature made to give God joy must be a creature that desires (EDP 1996).
• Human desire is infinite by design; no finite good—money, knowledge, or power—can fill it, because it was built to hold an infinite object, the love of God.
• The moral question is never whether to desire but which desire leads (the mind’s or the body’s) and whom the desire serves (the whole or the isolated self); this is the true dividing point of good and evil.
• Desire is a divine trait before it is a human one: the teaching calls God “very greedy,” names His desire as the unceasing will to give, and sets the fulfilling of God’s desire as the summit of discipleship.
• Self-mastery (jaajugwan) is the discipline of ranking the two desires so the body obeys the mind; before governing the cosmos, one must first complete the government of oneself.
• Ascetic practice—fasting, vigil, sacrifice—does not abolish desire but shifts the balance of power to the mind, converting a grasping desire into a giving one.
• The three great desires—to be a true parent, true teacher, and true owner/king—are one root longing to resemble God’s self-giving, and mark the destination at which the creative nature reaches its designed fulfillment.

References

• Cheon Seong Gyeong (official English), Sun Myung Moon. Passages cited by date: 1960-05-08; 1970-12-13; 1982-10-24; 1986-05-15; 1990-04-09; 1991-07-14.
• Exposition of the Divine Principle (1996), “The Purpose of Creation” — the created world as the object of God’s joy, the Three Blessings, and the four-position foundation.
• Unification Thought, Theory of the Original Image, and Theory of the Original Human Nature, uthought.org: Heart (Shimjeong) as “the emotional impulse to seek joy through love,” the core of the Original Image and the motive of creation.
• Korean primary archive (representative, verified against index): 하나님의 욕망도 채워줄 수 있는 왕자가 되라 (2008-09-05, vol 597-3); 제23회 하나님의 날 말씀 (1990-01-01, vol 196-4); 사랑의 인연을 남겨라 (1989-11-15, vol 195-5).