Self-control

Self-control (컨트롤 / 自制): The Discipline of the Body in Unification Doctrine

컨트롤 · 自制 · Self-discipline, Mastery of the Body

What Is Self-control?

Self-control, in Unification doctrine, is the practical discipline by which a person trains the will to master the demands of the body—through fasting, prayer, and service—so that the conscience may govern the body rather than be governed by it. It is a method, not a state: the lifelong volitional labor that prepares and serves the achieved condition of self-dominion.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon names this discipline as the very first thing the religious life requires in a motto he set for himself at the outset of his course:

Before desiring to dominate the universe, first achieve dominion over the self.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 03/30/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong

I argue that self-control is neither an end in itself nor a merely psychological self-management, but a providential discipline: the volitional method by which the conscience is empowered to govern the body and to expel Satan from the post he holds within it. It works by two complementary techniques—weakening the body through fasting and sacrificial service and strengthening the conscience through prayer and devotion—and it targets the body’s three primal demands, which Rev. Moon identifies as sleep, food, and sexual desire.

And it is instrumental throughout: ordered beyond itself to the state of self-dominion, the zero point, and absolute self-denial, in which the self becomes the ideal object before God.

The Exposition of the Divine Principle supplies the structural setting in its account of the mind as subject and the body as object, and of the conflict between them that the human Fall introduced.

Self-control is the name for the disciplined human effort to restore the mind’s proper rule. The sections that follow defend each clause of the thesis, beginning with the distinction on which the whole entry turns: that self-control is a method, not the goal it serves.

Methodology Note

This entry reads the English Cheon Seong Gyeong as held in the project archive together with the Exposition of the Divine Principle, drawing principally on a cluster of dated speeches from 1990 to 1994 in which Rev. Moon set out the discipline of governing the body, and on Korean primary material supplied for this entry for the details of the three demands and the two methods. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification from within, not external evaluation. The local Korean speech archive was scanned at the title level to establish how the discipline is named across the corpus. The fasting, sacrifice, and bodily disciplines described here are presented as the spiritual practices the tradition teaches, in a confessional and historical register, not as health guidance. Where an official English edition exists for a passage, it is quoted from it directly.

Etymological Analysis

There is no single canonical term for self-control in Rev. Moon’s vocabulary, and this absence is itself instructive: the discipline is named less by a noun than by a cluster of verbs and a borrowed word.

In the speeches, Rev. Moon repeatedly reaches for the English loanword keonteurol (컨트롤, control)—to control the body, to control even the blinking of an eye—using a foreign word precisely because the act it names is foreign to the fallen condition.

The native Korean register supplies the surrounding family: jaje (自制, self-restraint), geukgi (克己, subduing the self), and suyang (修養, self-cultivation), none of which heads a sermon in the corpus, together with the concrete practices that do recur—geumsik (금식, fasting), gido (기도, prayer), bongsa (봉사, service), and jeongseong (정성, devotion).

The grammar of the cluster matters. Where self-dominion (자아주관) is a noun naming a settled state, having self-control is carried by verbs naming an ongoing activity, a doing. The discipline is what one does; the dominion is what one comes to have.

This is why the motto pairs them in a strict order: jaajugwan wanseonghara, "perfect your self-dominion," names the state to be reached, while the daily control of the body is the means by which it is reached. The next section establishes that order as the doctrinal heart of the term.

Self-control is a discipline, not a state: the method that serves self-dominion

The first thing to establish is that self-control and self-dominion are not the same thing, and that confusing them collapses a means into an end.

Self-control is the practice; self-dominion is the providential condition that the practice exists to bring about.

The goal can be stated precisely. Rev. Moon describes the state self-control serves as one in which the body no longer fights the conscience but answers it, like one prong of a tuning fork sounding when the other is struck:

Mind-body unity refers to the state in which the body resonates in harmony with the conscience.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 11/20/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

That resonance is the achieved state—self-dominion, mind-body unity—and it is not produced by a single act of will but by a discipline sustained until the body’s obedience becomes habitual.

Rev. Moon speaks of the practice having to be made habitual over a span of years before the body will reliably follow; the discipline is therefore lifelong and cumulative, not occasional. This is the sense in which self-control is ordered beyond itself. Every act of fasting or prayer is for the sake of a condition not yet secured, the condition in which the self has become an ideal object before God, returned to the zero point of absolute self-denial.

The discipline that forgets this and rests in itself has mistaken the road for the destination. With the end thus fixed, the next section identifies what the discipline must overcome.

What self-control fights: the body’s three demands and the lost rule of the conscience

If self-control is the method, its object must be named: this section establishes that what self-control contends against is the body’s demand for mastery, concentrated in three primal appetites, and that the contest is for the conscience’s rightful rule.

In Unification anthropology, the mind is meant to be subject and the body object, but the Fall reversed the order, so that the two now stand as rival claimants. Rev. Moon casts the body as the insurgent within:

A rebel inside your mind always challenges your conscience. That rebel is your physical desires.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 04/09/1990) Cheon Seong Gyeong

Rev. Moon concentrates the body’s rebellion into three demands, which he names the three great enemies: the desire for sleep, the desire for food, and sexual desire.

They are not evil in themselves—a person must eat and sleep—but in the fallen condition, they have become the channels through which the body seeks to rule, and so the discipline must learn to refuse them their sovereignty.

The conscience, for its part, is no mere faculty of caution; Rev. Moon calls it the second God, the base heaven established within the person to contest the body’s claim, a teacher standing in the place of parent and master.

Self-control is thus not the management of impulses for the sake of composure; it is the restoration of a displaced authority. How that authority is restored is the subject of the next section.

The two methods: weakening the body and strengthening the conscience

Having named the contest, the doctrine prescribes a precise strategy; this section establishes that self-control proceeds by exactly two complementary methods, and that their logic follows from the near-equality of the combatants.

Mind and body, Rev. Moon observes, are so evenly matched that they can fight at all—a champion does not wrestle a child—and so the discipline works to tip the balance. There are two ways to do this, and only two.

The first is to weaken the body, through fasting, austerity, and sacrificial service, so that the insurgent loses strength.

The second is to strengthen the conscience, pumping it with several times the body’s power through prayer and devotion, until it can drag the body where it will:

Once you endow more power to the conscience than to the body, the latter, however strong, would have to obey.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 11/07/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The two methods are not alternatives but partners, and their pairing explains why fasting and prayer travel together in the tradition (“Prayer”; “Jeongseong”).

Fasting and service drain the body’s surplus; prayer and devotion supply the conscience’s deficit; between them, the balance shifts until obedience becomes second nature and the body, once dragged, begins to follow of its accord.

What raises this two-handed discipline above ordinary willpower is the adversary it is finally aimed at, which the next section names.

Self-control as providential warfare: expelling Satan from the body

The deepest claim of the doctrine is that self-control is not private hygiene but a front in the providence; this section establishes that the body is, in Rev. Moon’s teaching, the post Satan holds within the person, so that to master the body is to evict its occupant.

The body, he says, is not merely weak but occupied—the palace of the satanic world within the self, the enemy’s forward outpost—while the conscience is heaven’s. The discipline, therefore, has a target beyond appetite:

Religion emerged for the purpose of subjugating the body and making it one with the mind.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 10/15/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong

This is why Rev. Moon can say the hardest enemy is not Satan in the abstract but one’s own body, and the most fearful adversary in all of history, one’s own self.

Restoration begins not in society but at this root, within the single person. Rev. Moon presents his youth as the pattern of the discipline, recounting that he refused the body its demands until he had mastered them:

When I was young, I did everything that I could to control my body.

— Sun Myung Moon (Cheon Seong Gyeong, 08/21/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong

When the discipline succeeds—when, in Rev. Moon’s image, the body is struck three times and the occupying power departs—Satan loses his lodging, and the body falls into place beside the conscience like iron to a magnet. Adam, on this reading, fell precisely because he failed to govern himself; the recovery of that failed governance is the work self-control performs.

This providential framing is what distinguishes the discipline from its nearest secular and religious neighbors, which the next section sets beside it.

Inter-Religious Resonance

A discipline that masters the body so that an inner authority may rule, and that orders self-mastery toward a wider governance, is among the most universal of religious themes; the resonances are accordingly close.

Each tradition’s own texts witness to such a discipline, while the Unification reading gives it a distinctive providential target and a distinctive ordering toward self-dominion.

Confucianism supplies the most exact structural parallel. The Great Learning makes the cultivation of the self the root from which all wider order grows, in a sequence that runs from person to family to state to world—the very shape of Rev. Moon’s motto:

Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.

The Confucian self-cultivation (修身) that must precede the governing of family and state mirrors the demand to perfect self-dominion before desiring to govern the universe.

Confucius also gives the discipline its classic verb, koegi bokrye"—subdue the self and return to propriety (Analects 12.1)—which underlies the Unification language of striking and subjugating the body.

The divergence is that the Confucian self is cultivated toward ritual propriety and social harmony, whereas the Unification self is disciplined toward the expulsion of Satan and union with God.

Christianity casts the discipline as an athlete’s training of the body. Paul, refusing to let the body rule, writes of subduing it deliberately:

I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection.

Paul names temperance among the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23 KJV) and joins prayer to fasting as the means of overcoming what mere effort cannot (Matt 17:21 KJV)—the same pairing of the two methods.

The divergence is the Unification reading of the body as Satan’s occupied outpost, which gives the subjection a providential rather than merely moral sense.

Judaism prizes the rule of the spirit over the self above any outward conquest. The proverb sets self-mastery higher than the taking of a city: “He that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city” (Prov 16:32 JPS), and the rabbinic tradition asks, “Who is mighty? He who subdues his inclination” (Pirkei Avot 4:1).

The note that ruling oneself exceeds ruling a city is precisely the motto’s claim that self-dominion must precede dominion over the universe.

Islam gives the discipline its great institution in the fast. The Qur’an prescribes fasting as a school of God-consciousness: “fasting is prescribed for you… that ye may ward off (evil)” (Q 2:183, Pickthall), and the tradition names the struggle against the lower self (nafs) the greater striving.

The resonance with the Unification weakening of the body through fasting is direct; the divergence is the Unification location of the enemy within the body as Satan’s post.

Buddhism teaches the restraint of the senses and the conquest of self as the heart of the path, while warning against extremes. The Dhammapada holds that self-conquest surpasses the conquest of others (Dhammapada 103-104) and commends the restraint of the eye, ear, and other senses (Dhammapada 360-361).

The shared conviction is that the decisive battle is fought within; the divergence is that the Buddhist discipline aims at the extinguishing of craving and release, whereas the Unification discipline aims at the body’s restored obedience and union in love.

What self-control shares with all five is the conviction that the body must be disciplined so that a higher authority may govern, and that mastery of the self is the root of every wider order.

What is distinctive is the convergence of three claims: the discipline is providential warfare, aimed at evicting Satan from his post in the body, not merely at composure or release; it proceeds by exactly two methods, weakening the body and strengthening the conscience; and it is strictly instrumental, ordered beyond itself to the state of self-dominion.

Analytical Synthesis

This entry has argued that self-control is a providential discipline—the two-handed method of weakening the body and strengthening the conscience, aimed at the body’s three demands and finally at the Satan who occupies the body, and ordered beyond itself to the state of self-dominion.

The body sections have tried to show that the texts require this reading together: the motto fixes the instrumental order; the tuning-fork image fixes the goal as the body’s resonance with the conscience; the figure of the body as a rebel fixes the object; the doctrine of two methods fixes the strategy; and the language of palace and outpost fixes the adversary.

The strongest internal alternative is the psychological reading: that self-control is simply willpower or self-management, the ordinary human capacity to restrain impulse for the sake of composure or success.

This reading captures something real—the discipline does involve the will refusing the appetites—but it stops short on two counts. It misses the adversary, for in Rev. Moon’s account, the body is not merely unruly but occupied, so that the contest is with Satan’s post and not with appetite alone; and it misses the ordering, for self-control is never resting in self-mastery but is always for the sake of a state beyond it.

A composure that congratulates itself has mistaken the method for the end. The psychological reading describes the surface of the discipline and misses both its depth and its direction.

A second alternative is the conflation of self-control with self-dominion: that the two are one thing under two names, so that to control oneself just is to have dominion over oneself.

This is the reading the entry most needs to resist, and the grammar resists it. Self-control is carried by verbs of ongoing activity—fasting, praying, refusing, and controlling—while self-dominion is a noun naming an achieved and settled state; the first is the doing, the second the having.

The motto itself keeps them apart by ordering them: one perfects self-dominion, in the imperative of a goal, by controlling the body, in the continuous labor of a means. To collapse the two is to lose the very order the motto exists to teach.

What the argument entails is that the discipline is essentially relational and teleological rather than self-enclosed: it is undertaken for God and toward a state of union, not for the sake of a strong will admired in itself.

What it does not entail is a hatred of the body as such; the body’s demands are good in their place, and the goal is not their destruction but their reordering, the resonance in which the body, struck with true love, sounds agreeing the conscience.

The reading defended here does not make self-control a synonym for asceticism in general; it identifies it as the specific, ordered, providential discipline by which the conscience recovers its rule and the self is made ready to become God’s ideal object.

Key Takeaway

• Self-control is the practical discipline of mastering the body’s demands so that the conscience may govern the body; it is a method, not the state it serves.
• It is ordered beyond itself to self-dominion (자아주관), the achieved state of mind-body unity, and ultimately to the zero point of absolute self-denial in which the self becomes God’s ideal object.
• It contends against the body’s three primal demands—sleep, food, and sexual desire—which the fallen body uses to claim a rule that belongs to the conscience.
• It proceeds by exactly two complementary methods: weakening the body through fasting and sacrificial service and strengthening the conscience through prayer and devotion.
• It is providential warfare, not private hygiene: the body is the post Satan holds within the person, and to master the body is to evict its occupant.
• It is lifelong and cumulative, sustained until the body’s obedience becomes habitual, and it follows the conscience of its accord.
• The discipline does not despise the body; its aim is the body’s reordering, the resonance in which body and conscience sound as one.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon.

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1982. “자아주관.” Sermon delivered December 5, 1982, vol. 123, sermon 2.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2004. “양심의 위대함.” Sermon delivered May 7, 2004, vol. 448, sermon 4.