Authors
1.We need to live a life of attendance to the True Parents such that we are always prepared to offer them something. Although every day we wait for them with a heart of attendance, we know they cannot come to visit.
Therefore, we should yearn to receive Heaven's sons and daughters in our home in their stead. From morning until night, we should make preparations to receive these beloved children. Heaven will bless those who follow this lifestyle.
Korean noblemen in the past used to prepare a comfortable guest room in the annex of the main house and invite travelers to stay there overnight. This custom was unique to Korea. This implementation of heavenly conduct in the history of Satan's world also symbolically demonstrated in advance our proper attitude of attendance. (26-299, 1969.11.10)
Proper conduct in the family
2. We've been living and speaking carelessly in our family life, but from now on, we should establish rules in the family. Parents should not beat their children in anger.
They should not berate them with curse words as are commonly spoken in the world. We all must now become one body. Our words, our attitude, and our way of life should be as members of one body, with God as the center.
(28-252, 1970.01.22)
3. The family of the firstborn son in a clan can thrive when the members of his family willingly accept the traditional family laws and propriety passed down from their ancestors and practice them. If any of them have the attitude, “Those rules have nothing to do with me,” he or she can't be the offspring of that family.
Especially the firstborn son cannot be the heir of the family, even though he was born as its eldest son. We, on the other hand, have to become descendants who surpass all our ancestors and succeed in accomplishing countless responsibilities. Unification Church members must become such descendants.
(21-252, 1968.11.24)
4. In the past, when the family of a loyal subject of the king acquired something valuable, the head of the family would offer it first to the king of the nation. That was a loyal subject's way of life in Korea. From that perspective, Korean propriety reflects the central norms of the heavenly kingdom, which cannot be found in any other nation.
Confucianists follow the teachings of Confucius, and quite a few proprieties prescribed in Confucian teachings are close to heavenly law. You should educate your children to conduct an offering ceremony for you in the future when you pass away. Norms and rituals for holding a funeral based on the Principle have not yet been established.
However, once the rules of propriety are established, you should not live a casual life, doing things as you please. From now on, you should believe that God is always with you in every situation.
With that faith, you should be able to cultivate the life force that will enable you to grow, sinking deep roots so you can overcome any obstacle in any situation, regardless of what kind of storm arises. (31-292, 1970.06.04)
5. When something good happens in their life, people of filial piety think of their parents first. In the fallen world, people typically think of their spouse first. However, you should not buy something of value for your spouse unless you have first offered something precious to your parents.
A husband should first buy clothes for his parents before doing so for his wife. Furthermore, until the husband has a chance to offer clothes to his parents, his wife should not say, “I like this dress; buy it for me if you love me.”
Moreover, a husband should first purchase clothes for his parents and his wife before he buys any for himself. It is the same with food. Whether husband or wife, they must offer food to their parents first, then to their spouse, and should sit down for meals together with their parents. (26-298, 1969.11.10)
6. Your family should not get accustomed to worldly habits. Nor should you think, “Although things are bad now, they will get better in the future.” You must make things perfect now. The issue is the present. When the past and the present are perfect, the future will also be perfect.
The fact that there has never been even one perfect day such as that existed in the Garden of Eden is evidence of the Fall. The ideal place is where the past, the present, and the future are in accord.
Hence, you should be able to offer the present moment. God desires to see whether you can establish eternal stepping-stones on earth now. Now is the culminating point of history. (21-077, 1968.10.20)
7. The time is coming when new laws will be enacted, and the most serious among them will be those regarding violations of love. If you committed such infractions in the past, now is the time to sincerely repent.
Every time you listen to the Principal, you must feel mortified. You should feel angry with yourself and bitterly ashamed of your transgressions. You should exclaim, “I already feel so bitterly distraught that I'm a descendant of the Fall; moreover, I repeated it too!”
You should feel deeply repentant, saying, “God, if You will only forgive me, I will never be able to express enough gratitude.” The moment you sin violating love, it will be hopeless for your ancestors. (67-059, 1973.05.20)
8. One mind, one body, one thought, and oneness in harmony! Thereafter, we have true love, true life, and true lineage to build a true family. Until we reach harmony and oneness in mind and body, we shouldn't have a partner.
The four-position foundation is fulfilled only when a man and a woman, who were created from the separation of God's dual characteristics, unite and give birth to children. This is an ironclad principle. It is not a theory I cleverly fabricated on my own. We must understand that the four-position foundation is Heaven's law. It is the structure of the spirit world as well. If you don't meet what it requires, problems will arise.
The law of love must remain absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal even after hundreds of millions of years. When we recognize that the universe exists within the realm of the ideal partnership of love, we can understand that our love also must be absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal.
Only then can we stand without shame before the entire universe. Then we can be confident and have conviction that the universe will attend to us and our families as its owners. (397-322, 2002.12.01)
9. You have family members, so you should become people who can share love as brothers and sisters and support one another. You should become a model member of your family.
And as members of the Unification Church, you should become men and women who can be recognized by all members of the church. From now on, we should cut off what needs to be cut off and separate from what we need to separate from. You should not just live as you please.
The Unification Church must establish the kingdom of heaven. Hence, rather than merely recovering ourselves, we have to recover the family. Those who can't become exemplary in their family life will be accused by the world, even by the cosmos. (030-230, 1970.03.23)
10. The value of the Blessing can be recognized only when you fulfill your responsibility. Therefore, Your blessed members should not speak offensively, in a worldly way. There should be something different about you.
The family is a small church. Hence, your family should be, as the agency of God, a family that God would like to visit. At least three families must unite as one family. What I would like to say in particular is, first, that your family should be one that many people visit.
Harmony among people is most important. Second, Heaven's families should build solidarity with one another. At the very least, the families in your Blessing Trinity should be completely united with one another. (15-271, 1965.10.24)
11. We are not focused on the individual but on the family. Yet, it does not mean we are only trying to clean up all the problems in our family. Rather, we should connect to all. Hence, our previous efforts to cultivate our spirituality while living alone are now not enough.
We must be determined and resolute to make a much greater effort than before. A life of challenging evil is very difficult. We can get tired and easily give up instantly. When we have a family, we should work much harder than when we were single. The family is where we can secure our center.
The family is where we cannot avoid dealing with reality in all relationships. In our family, we should establish relationships between front and back, left and right, above and below.
We shouldn't just maintain the kind of faith we practiced in the past; the one-sided life of faith we had before will not work. The Blessing is the point that determines whether we live or die. (27-085, 1969.11.26)
12. Developing good personal faith hinges mostly on relating to a good leader. However, to develop a good family, each of you must become a leader to one another. We need to ask for whom and for what the members of the family exist.
When you were single, you could pray and everything would come to pass. However, once you have a family, if someone in it opposes you, you have to bear the cross and persevere until your relationship with that person reaches the original standard.
A single person is like one car in a train, but the family is like a locomotive. It is simple to restore an individual's mistake. But if something goes wrong in the family, it affects everyone, even bringing them to ruin. (27-085, 1969.11.26)
13. What should you do to receive love from your parents? You should love everything that your parents love. That way you can receive their love. In a family, if a son wants his parents to love him, he needs to understand that the way to receive love from them is to love all that they love.
The son shouldn't aspire to receive their love otherwise. If a child wants to claim everything his parents cherish simply because he wants to, he cannot be loved by them. (133-026, 1984.07.01)
14. God and parents stand in the position to care for others before anyone else does. God thinks of you before you do. And your parents think of you before you do. This is why you love them. This is why they stand in the position of subject partner to you.
When two people live together, each should think, “If my partner does not do what he or she is supposed to do, I will do it.” This is the kind of being God is. The person who thinks this way becomes the center. The person who lives for the sake of others surely becomes the center. (103-139, 1979.02.18)
15. You need to be more altruistic. The most altruistic person becomes the leader. In a group of ten people, the one who becomes the central person is the one who lives for the group and loves the other nine the most.
The others will seek that person out. Thus far, people have thought that living for others was bad for them. Yet living for the sake of others is the way to become a central person, to become a leader, and to inherit everything.
This is a natural law. This is why I am telling you that living for the sake of others is not bad. It does not incur any loss. No business bears better fruit than such a lifestyle. (132-276, 1984.06.20)
16. We need to awaken to the fact that we live in a different era and that our speech, attitude, and lifestyle need to change. This is what the spirit world desires from us. The spirit world is already charging forward in unison, but the earth is in a state of confusion, full of complexities, and cannot determine its clear objective.
Therefore, to anchor ourselves on solid ground we need to offer conditions of devotion. Otherwise, we will be swept away. We are now living in a time when we can no longer live casually. Some of you follow me around everywhere I go. You want to do that rather than wear your mission.
Further, you prepare my rallies as if they were your rallies. You must not do so. You must not act that way at all. You need to raise your family to be a family that can actualize God's Will. For this, the father and mother must change first.
In establishing a tradition, senior Unification Church members ought to set the standard first, before their sons and daughters. You should establish the tradition by becoming trustworthy parents, trustworthy siblings, and trustworthy sons and daughters. Everything begins within the family. (462-298, 2004.07.29)
The proper conduct between a man and a woman
17. In the Western Hemisphere, sex education begins in elementary school. That is not good. Children need to learn about sex naturally. Did God give sex education to Adam and Eve? Children shouldn't know about sex at an early age.
When they reach the age when they begin to learn about it, we need to teach them how fearful the outcome of sex can be, but at the same time how precious it can be. When I was going to school, there were no co-ed schools. Yet nowadays, young men and women dance by rubbing their bodies together.
We therefore must establish educational institutions that can resist this trend, teaching people that losing one's sexual purity is the most fearful thing that can happen. It is worse than murder.
Murder takes away a person's life, but when a person loses his or her purity it dooms thousands of generations of descendants. It can victimize scores, hundreds, even many thousands of people.
Henceforth, infractions against sexual purity must be treated with greater seriousness than the crime of murder. We must educate our youth to the extent that they could not even imagine falling. (66-225, 1973.05.12)
18. Young people these days go against their parents and destroy their families. Their behavior is evil because it wreaks havoc on the order of love. It destroys families, societies, and nations. It brings destruction even to all humankind. You cannot deny it is evil.
Adolescents sometimes want to imitate certain thrilling scenes from movies. Young people may ask, “What's wrong with that?” You must tell them, “It's wrong because such irresponsible actions lead to a licentious lifestyle, which will bring destruction to your surroundings, your family, and society.
You must refrain from such activities. When you have developed your intellect, have gained experience in society and can control yourself in any circumstances, then you are free to act as you please, but not now'' (117-184, 1982.03.01)
19. Do you women like flower buds before they bloom, or do you prefer flowers in full bloom? I like flowers that have fully bloomed. When you bloom, you should blossom to your fullest. Don't rely on someone else, but blossom radiantly according to your nature.
This means you should grow naturally, go through adolescence naturally, and blossom in due course, and only then find a spouse whom you want to love. Don't be crushed before you bloom.
Don't be a flower whose petals have fallen off and whose pollen has been shaken out. It's the same for men. Men should also blossom to their fullest.
(47-088, 1971.08.19)
20. As buds that have yet to blossom, you must not engage in foolish activities such as sending love letters and having love relationships. You should blossom to the fullest naturally at the appropriate time.
When God sees you, He should be able to exclaim, “Wow! You have blossomed purely and naturally. When I smell your fragrance, I can tell you're a pure virgin.” God feels so much hope when this happens. Does God want someone pure or someone damaged?
What about you then?
Do you want someone pure or someone damaged? Even fallen human beings want to have someone pure. Would God not value your purity even more? For this reason, I hope you can blossom fully in pure heart and love.
I hope you will become people of value who can rise above the trends of today's fallen world and not become trapped in its valley of sorrow. (47-088, 1971.08.19)
21. Think how many millennia it has taken to restore the mistake committed by Adam and Eve. Countless people toiled arduously, even paying the price of being sacrificed, to reach this point today.
Are you still going to commit the same mistake? It might have been possible for you to err when you were ignorant of these facts, but after learning the Principle you must not do such things anymore. We all know the monumental losses that result from losing one's purity.
Hence, there should be no question about overcoming sexual temptation. Because we clearly understand the astronomical damage caused by sexual licentiousness, we should never lose our purity, regardless of who tempts us to engage in such an act.
Further, once we understand the incredible damage caused by Adam and Eve's one mistake of illicit love, we will recognize the fatal harm that will come to us if we do the same; therefore we will abstain.
However, because people in general do not know this, they don't know how to overcome their sexual desire. (66-223, 1973.05.12)
22. For a woman, the most dangerous person is a man, and for a man, the most dangerous person is a woman. That's why it's best to avoid situations in which a man and a woman are close to each other. All you men, if a woman approaches you, avoid her and walk away.
These days I see single men and women sitting together under a tree and making conversation. You should not do such a thing. If you wish to converse with someone of the opposite sex, gather as a group of at least three people. In a group of three,e you will be all right.
The archangel and Eve fell because the two were alone together. Had Adam been present, would they have fallen? Adam and Eve fell because only the two of them spent time together.
Had they invited God into their presence, would they have fallen? For this reason, if you want to meet, make sure at least three people are present. This is not coercion; rather, it is a practical precaution to avoid a potential problem that could happen at any time.
The principled thing to do is to take a position in which Adam and Eve could never Fall. We want to prevent anything from going wrong as well as to clean up what went wrong. This is why I am asking you to meet in group settings, with at least three people together. (66-225, 1973.05.12)
23. Even when witnessing to people, women must never be alone. If a sister goes out to witnessing activity, have an old grandfather or grandmother accompany her, even if he or she needs a walking stick. If they are not available, the sister can take a primary school student with her.
I'm not telling you to avoid engaging in witnessing activity. I'm telling you to take precautions against potential dangers. Every precaution must be taken against even the slightest chance of falling. If three people are together, you'll be fine.
We love one another by preventing each other from falling. That is love. Even leaders must take this precaution. (66-226, 1973.05.12)
24. The likelihood of falling increases when a man and woman are alone together. Would you light a match next to a gas pump or light a cigarette near a gasoline drum? Just one mistake is all it takes to shatter everything. You can never cast off that mistake for eternity.
Especially once you know the Principle and still fall, there is no way for you to cast it off. The Principle states it, and the Principle works by systematic logic. Hence, once you are caught, there is no way for you to escape from it. Neither can you have any basis to deny it. (67-058, 1973.05.20)
A life maintaining purity, pure lineage, and pure love
25. Parents need to educate their children about how to practice true love. Everything I'm saying relates to the family. Husband and wife should maintain purity of mind and body and attain oneness of heart. Then they must educate their children about true love by their example.
Will children obey a father who is a drunkard and physically abuses their mother? Will children obey a mother who habitually deceives and lies to their father? Parents need to educate their children about true love through their actions.
It's not just education but education by example. I'm saying the way to educate your children about true love is by practicing it first. Educate by example. Write this as your family motto, frame it, and mount it on the wall. Write it with a heart of profound devotion. (333-234, 2000.09.26)
26. Purity, pure lineage, and pure love are followed by a pure heart. Without a pure heart, there can't be a pure lineage. Heaven's lineage has been passed down to us on the foundation of tens of thousands of years of pure hearts.
The way to pass on the lineage to our descendants for thousands and even tens of thousands of years should be through fidelity to one's one and only spouse. Therefore, there must be no divorce. With divorce comes threefold greater indemnity. (476-263, 2004.11.21)
27. God is the first generation, True Parents are the second generation and you are the third generation. However, you need to understand that the original tradition of the Blessing should have been: God as the first generation, you as the second generation,n and your children as the third generation.
You would have been pure men and women, like unblemished white jade. When you're united as a couple, upholding the ideal of the four-position foundation, you would have bequeathed pure love, pure life, and pure lineage to countless generations of descendants. (380-318, 2002.06.10)
28. You are a young person approaching your twenties who has carefully protected and preserved your pure heart. Where will you take your clean, spotless, and holy pure heart? You should place your pure heart on the altar that will give Heaven the greatest delight, bringing tremendous joy to God.
There is a young man who has preserved his pure heart and a young woman who also has preserved her pure heart should meet and rejoice together. It is the place where they meet as bridegroom and bride, bound together by God on the sacred foundation of a pure heart. (064-085, 1972.10.24)
29. Your body is precious. Don't defile it; fulfill your filial duty instead. You need to escape from Satan's realm of death and carry out your responsibility to serve Heaven with a body whose purity God approves.
This is the highest goal and the standard that human beings should have. According to the Principle of Creation, you must be that way. (15-202, 1965.10.09)
30. A divine son or daughter is a person who loves heaven and earth. A divine son or daughter loves his or her nation from God's viewpoint and upholds God's sovereignty in heaven and on earth.
Furthermore, a divine son or daughter knows all the laws of the royal court in the heavenly kingdom and all the laws of his or her nation on earth and endeavors to love both worlds, while abiding by all their laws. (565-064, 2007.06.07)
31. God invested His whole heart when creating Adam and Eve. What Adam and Eve received was the seed of His true love, true life, and true lineage. Therefore, we must return to that original state. It is God who sowed the seed, and it is we who must return the fruits. No one wants weeds and other rubbish.
When we ascend to the spirit world, everything about our past will be disclosed; therefore we must clean up everything before we pass away. Although our outward body will return to dust, we will still carry what is inside us.
This is the problem. It would have been better if there were nothing inside us that we needed to eliminate, but because we still carry scars in our hearts, scars formed by the pangs of conscience, we need to clean them up. (382-071, 2002.06.19)
32. One mind, one body, one thought, and then comes oneness at the core. This oneness derives from a pure mind and body, a pure lineage, and pure love. However, before pure love, we need pure sex. The issue is sex.
Even in sex, there are three stages formation, growth, and completion. However, these stages came into existence only after the Fall. Originally, once Adam and Eve made love under God's Blessing, there would have been no issue.
When they had sexual relations for the first time it would have been perfected. Instead, we had to go through restoration in the Old Testament Age, the New Testament Age and the Completed Testament Age to realize purity, pure lineage, and pure sexuality. A man must unite his mind and body and keep them both pure.
He must not violate this purity before marriage, and it is the same for a woman. With purity of mind and body and a pure lineage, there can be purity in sexual relations. A man and a woman must maintain their purity.
Then, when the time comes for them to marry, they unite to form one core. In this way, they become perfect as men and women and can finally stand as God's object partners. (489-219, 2005.03.02)
33. Oneness in mind, oneness in body, oneness in thought, and oneness in sexual relations for mind and body need to be united. When do the mind and body fully unite as one? A fallen person's mind and body cannot become one.
However, through marriage, a man, and a woman can finally attain oneness at the core. What comes after oneness in mind, body, and thought, and oneness at the core?
That is when the purity of mind and body, pure lineage, purity of sexual relations, and pure love all become one. All these should be in harmony. You and your spouse should realize harmonious oneness. Then, whatever happens, you will remain one eternally. (489-219, 2005.03.02)
34. You have to abide by centering on your original mind, your mind that is one with God's mind. Should you not abide where the universe reaches perfection? To be of one mind with God's mind means your mind is unified, that a peaceful, unified mind is within you.
Then on this foundation of one mind, you should become one body with God. Thereafter, you should arrive at oneness in thought. Then you and your spouse can have sexual relations, pure in mind and body. A man and a woman who are striving to become one mind, one body, and one thought one at the core with God finally can become one through a sexual relationship.
Then they become one at the core. Looking at a sphere, we find two poles: plus and minus. It also has hemispheres, upper and lower, right and left, and front and back. The core of your couple must be the same. Men and women differ in mind and heart.
Nonetheless, when they unite as one and stand before God as His object partners, in the position of body with God in the position of mind, they can discover the origin of conjugal love by becoming one body in God's presence. Then they can form a family of oneness that can serve God.
The realm of oneness in love that they experience through their bodies will expand throughout their lives, leading to complete unity and harmony. They will achieve eternal, unchanging unity and settle in peace. (489-220, 2005.03.02)
Sun Myung Moon