Why are people born?
If we ask, “Which came first, life or love?” the answer can be argued either way. However, which do you think came first? Love came first.
The fundamental core of the universe must disseminate love before originating existence. Otherwise, there would be no value to the things of existence.
When we examine the origin of life, we must ask whether life or love came first. Until now, we have not been able to discern this. But now we know it could not have been life that came first. It was love.
What comes second must fall in line behind what comes first. Naturally, we offer our lives for the sake of love. This is how we ought to understand it.
Therefore, let us understand how to live our lives in a truly inclusive way, that since love gave birth to life, we must walk the way of love and die for love. The purpose of human life is to establish a love that can be welcomed by the macrocosm, not just the microcosm.
It is to be born, to love, and to die amid the great universal love that is acknowledged by God, creation, our parents, and the angelic world. Human beings do not choose to be born.
Then, are we born by our parents’ desire? No. We are born by God’s desire. We are born through the love of our parents, which represents God’s love.
Each of us was created as a new life using the love of our parents, representing God’s love. Love has the power to create the whole. Each of us was born as a central being of the entire universe, with the capacity to receive all the love in the universe.
The highest purpose of life is to be born through love, to be raised in love, to live by love, and to leave a legacy of love when we die. Nothing can be of greater value than to live out our natural life within our family as a life of love that is the center of the universe.
Then what makes love so great? It is because love is the fountainhead of life.
You were born amid your parents’ love. You were not born from your parents’ desire for monetary profit or pursuit of knowledge. Because you were born in love this way, you ought to bear fruit in love. This is why you need to have children.
A husband and wife become complete when they become as one with each other and come to have sons and daughters as their partners. Human beings cannot exist apart from love. So we can say that each of us lives on the foundation of love.
Sun Myung Moon
Everything in creation has its origin of existence in God’s love. Since all things exist with love as their foundation, it is undeniable that human beings, as the center of the created universe, also must have begun in love. Since human beings begin in love and mature through love, we are beings that cannot live apart from the standard of love.
The love-centered original vision for human life
What is the cause of human existence? The cause originated in love. Then what do you think the purpose of human existence is?
The purpose of our existence is to fulfill the ideal of love. Human beings came into being through love, so our purpose is to perfect love by forming a foundation of love and then expanding and connecting it so that it becomes complete.
Because our origin is love, our purpose must also be reached through love. For this, a man and a woman in a partner relationship must become as one in love and connect front and back, right and left, and higher and lower.
We live for the sake of a certain purpose. When we achieve this purpose, something new comes into being that is greater than the original existence itself. What is this? What is most precious for a man or a woman? It is love.
Only love can connect us to happiness and joy. No matter how lofty our purpose may be, if we do not establish the authority of love in the subject position over our purpose, we will have to pursue a different purpose.
The limit of purpose is that it cannot stand above love. What are you living for? There will be some who say that they live to eat. Others will say that they live to work, and still others will say that they live without a purpose.
What do human beings live for?
If someone says that he lives for the sake of love, what a wonderful answer that would be. Human beings are born as the fruit of love, give love during their lives, and eventually return to the eternal love of God’s bosom. This is the original vision of human life and the purpose of our creation.
We are born in love and raised in love. We then connect to a love of a higher dimension, meaning that we leave the love of our parents and seek the love of a partner.
We can say that the love we experience as children is formation-stage love and that conjugal love is growth-stage love. No matter how much a couple may be in love, they cannot see the completion of their love until they have children.
This is why they want to have children. This is completion-stage love. So the process of going through children’s love, conjugal love, and parental love is the fundamental basis for how we lead our lives, and the necessary path leading to the love ideal as God created it.
Love gives birth to life. We are born of love, raised in love by the love of our parents, meet a loving spouse whom we can love, and then die in that love. This is the course of human life. In the original vision for human life there was no concept of sorrow or pain.
Sun Myung Moon
Originally, the universe was meant to operate under a standard of love by which everything would converge simultaneously in a comprehensive union that would encompass both the vertical and horizontal.
Children’s love, conjugal love, and parental love would combine and create such a union. This would become the focal point of the entire universe, the directional orientation of all cells in the universe. All the spirits in the spirit world would be focused on this point.
Moreover, they would protect this position so that no one could invade it. If this place were to be destroyed, it would be catastrophic. For true love to be protected and preserved, it would need to take on some kind of structure. In the teachings of the Unification Church, this structure is called the four-position foundation.
Love, the nutrient for eternal life
When you were a fetus in your mother’s womb, you did not receive only nutrients from your mother. You also received love. Similarly, people living on Earth do not receive merely physical nutrients from the natural universe.
We also receive love, an essential element of life, from God. Plants absorb sunlight as an element of life, and similarly, love is an element of life for people.
Our earnest desire is for the kingdom of heaven on earth and the kingdom of heaven in heaven to be places where we can eternally relate to one another with true love.
The life path for both men and women exists because of love and for the sake of love. We each have a path to travel, and it is a path of love. We go this way to obtain love, to protect love, and to form an environment filled with love.
When a woman puts on makeup to make herself beautiful, it is because of love.
When we want something and work to get it, it is also because of love. We endure hardship and move forward to obtain precious love.
From the moment we are born, we receive parental love. For as long as our parents are alive, they will love us at each stage of our lives, through childhood, young adulthood, and middle age.
If we grow up receiving parental love, then eventually the horizontal love of husband and wife will take form within each of us.
What is marriage?
It can be compared to a school that men and women enter so that the men can learn things they did not know about women, and the women can learn things they did not know about men.
When all the grades are A+, then the husband will be pleased, and the wife will be pleased. You bear sons and daughters as a way to learn how to love the world. Without them, you cannot be connected to the future.
Your sons and daughters' art is given to you as educational materials so that you can be connected to the future world.
Sun Myung Moon
Acts of filial piety toward your ancestors, or your grandfather and grandmother, enable you to be educated by the spirit world. All these things are connected, with love at the center.
The grandfather and grandmother, husband and wife, and sons and daughters are all connected, with love at the center. Just as blood cells circulate throughout the human body, our ancestors in the spirit world, going back even to the ten thousandth generation, can circulate up and down and communicate with their distant descendants.
It is important to know that this is how the spirit world and the entire universe are structured. True love will take dominion over everything. We can say that becoming a servant, even a slave, to true love is the greatest happiness.
What is God’s love like?
You need to learn about God’s love. How can we characterize God’s love?
It can be compared to an environment of a warm spring day.
White clouds gently float in the sky, waves of warm air shimmer up from the ground, insects fly around, ants crawl in and out of their nest to see the world, willow blossoms are in bloom down by the stream, frogs sing new songs of spring, bees swarm, and butterflies flutter.
You feel intoxicated by these surroundings. You feel that you are about to doze off; however, in reality, you are awake and feel so good that you want to remain in this state forever.
This is how God feels when He finds His ideal partner. It is as if He is in a beautiful flower garden, with butterflies and bees flying around.
Does it make you feel good to think of this, or does it make you feel bad?
These dull-witted men over here may not understand this. It feels good.
When you run into someone whom you are pleased to see, you hold his hand firmly and shake hands. When someone joyfully says, “Wow, it’s been a long time!” and holds your hand firmly, does it make you feel good or bad?
When you are glad to see someone, do you hold hands tightly or not? Do you like it when someone grasps your hand firmly? [Audience: “Yes, we do.”] You mean, you want to like it. How can you say you like it?
You have to know the person to like them. If you don’t know the person, how can you like it when he grabs your hand? If it is someone you like, then once you grasp each other’s hands, you cannot let go.
What about these young ladies here? Think of how it will be when you are married and your husband loves you. Will you feel good or bad?
People need to be straightforward. If your husband loves you, you will feel as though there is nothing in the world you would rather have. You want to live your whole life just staying by his side.
It is nice to watch as a man with hands like the front hooves of a cow gently takes the hand of a woman. Those are the kind of movies that are nice to watch. If the woman were to say to the man, “Oh, you have such pretty hands,” the man would be offended. This is how it is.
Love is eternal. Love is not two; it is one. You become as one. When a man and a woman become a couple and love each other, they are bonded together. Of course, this does not happen literally; yet in heart, they reach a level even higher than this.
That is God’s love. If you live with such love, will you become one or not?
Think about it. You are destined to become one. When a man and a woman fall in love, all sorts of strange things happen, don’t they? But if you find a way to taste God’s love, you will see that it cannot be compared to anything in this world.
Sun Myung Moon
Once you have tasted this kind of love, no amount of difficulty or sorrow can defeat you. Such a realm of absolute liberation does exist. The question is how to find it.
God’s love can be divided into three major forms. These are children’s love, conjugal love, and parental love. The center where these three forms converge into one is God’s love.
God’s blessing to inherit love and joy
A glorious new morning will dawn when God assumes a physical body. Even more glorious will be the moment when He has a couple, husband and wife, whom He can love. Still, more glorious will be the moment when God can love His grandchildren; that moment will be more thrilling than when He first loved His son and daughter.
How do you think God would have pleased to let Adam know how happy He felt when He created him? God would have had to teach Adam, saying, “Here, this is how happy I was.”
We learn about God’s happiness only when we have our sons and daughters. When children are young, they can’t comprehend parental love, yet they come to understand it later when they marry and have their babies.
Then they say, “So this is how my parents loved me when they were raising me.” The day when your child takes a spouse is a day of glory, and the day when your child becomes a parent is also a glorious day.
We need to know God’s love. We need to have experienced children’s love and be able to serve our parents. We need to have experienced conjugal love and to know how to serve our spouse.
We need to have experienced parental love and to know how to care for our children. We ought not just order them around; we have to understand and serve them as well. Only then can we understand God’s love. Without children, we are incomplete. We cannot fully understand God’s love.
Until now, we have had no idea how much God has loved human beings, His children. Without the experience of being a husband, a man cannot know what it is like to have a wife, and without the experience of being a wife, a woman cannot know what it is like to have a husband.
Children do not know what parents’ love is like until they become parents. So, without sons and daughters, none of us can become true parents.
Parents want their children to be married because they want to teach them and pass on to them all their parental love. When parents die, they leave behind their substantial selves to their descendants. This is why we need descendants.
Love continues forever. Since love is the highest human desire, everyone has his or her arms outstretched in a desire to inherit it. When parents pass on their love to their descendants, they can stand proudly before God when they enter the spirit world.
It is only through the family that such love can be perfected. Going to the heavenly kingdom through the family means that the realm of oneness of love has been realized. People must follow rules and principles.
When spring comes, seeds are sown; in summer, plants develop fully, and in autumn, they bear fruit. In winter, we need to put things in order and carry the essence of the seed of life deep within our hearts.
Only then will we have new seeds to plant when spring returns. This means that we are meant to become parents, to bear sons and daughters who resemble us. It means we need to raise our sons and daughters to be like us.
Why do people feel sad when they do not have sons and daughters? It is because they cannot form a circle. When you see birds feeding their young, you can recognize the deep love of the mother bird.
Sun Myung Moon
Western people may not know that in the East, people like children more than adults. People show polite respect to adults, yet they show the utmost love for children. You can realize how much your parents loved you when you have your sons and daughters and raise them.
Everyone ought to get married, have children, and raise them. This is the only way they can know both children’s love and parental love. It appears that Western people are not like this. Many avoided having and raising sons and daughters.
They hesitate to have children because children may limit their freedom to marry and divorce. However, when people do not establish the four-position foundation, they cannot go to the kingdom of heaven because they do not know God’s heart of love for human beings.
Living searching for the center of love
We are born in love, are raised in the love of our parents, and mature as we broaden our love horizontally.
The first stage of horizontal love is completed when we meet a partner of the opposite sex and grow together to a point where we can represent the love of heaven and earth, and then bear children as the fruits of that love.
Children are born from the heart’s core as a result of love. A child born from a man and woman who share love based on the heart creates a path for the parents to the central point of love.
If you go through this center and follow the path, you will meet God. By having children as fruits of love, you come to experience deeply the love by which God created all things, including you.
When parents love their children with the same love they received as they grew up, they come to have a profound understanding of the parental heart. The love that parents pour out to their children is essential, not a love based on material things.
Even though everything else in heaven and earth may change with the eras of history, the love that parents give their children will never change. By becoming parents and loving our children, we come to understand much more deeply how God has loved human beings.
We can confirm this through our experiences. By becoming parents and loving our children, we can feel how much our parents loved us and come to a profound realization about this.
This is why we honor and attend to our parents more in their old age and willingly fulfill the duties of filial piety with love. If you cannot do this, you are not qualified to be parents, and your love toward your children can be considered only hypocritical.
We need to realize and feel how much God has loved us by becoming parents ourselves and loving our children. This will let us love God with even greater sincerity.
A person ought to love their aged parents more than they love their children, and love God more than they love their parents, knowing that this is the order and law of love.
When we are born, we are born in love. After birth, we receive love and grow through our childhood years. Once we grow to a certain level, our parents’ love alone is not enough for us, and we begin to expand our love horizontally to include love among siblings and love within the clan.
In other words, we mature as we receive all the love that exists in heaven and earth. In particular, as we enter the years of adolescence, we begin to crave the love of the opposite gender.
Sun Myung Moon
It is by giving and receiving love with a person of the opposite gender that we can enter a realm of love that is much more comprehensive; then, for the first time, we can set out searching for the center of love.
Because heaven and earth have a spherical shape, when we begin to rotate through giving and receiving horizontal love, we can form a circular shape.
When we find our partner of the opposite gender and begin to interact in love, our love bears fruit in our children. Then, as we give and receive love with our children, we fulfill vertical love in addition to horizontal love. This creates a spherical shape and enables us, at the same time, to establish the center of love.
The center of love that emerges through this movement of love is the core of existence for the entire world of creation. The Earth exists because it continues to engage in motion around a center of love.
At the center of love, an unlimited force sustains this movement. The center of this sphere of love is the place where God dwells.
All created beings in the world originate and exist by God’s love, and seek the center of God’s love. God is a furnace of love.
The three eras of the human course
Everyone is born after a time spent in our mother’s womb. We live on Earth for a certain time, and then we die. Before birth, the fetus spends about ten months in the mother's womb.
While in the womb, the fetus has limited freedom. It develops by receiving nutrients from the mother through the umbilical cord. About all it can do is bend its fingers, open and close its mouth, and wriggle its feet.
Nevertheless, for the fetus, the mother's womb is a world of freedom representing the entirety of the realm of life. After about ten months, the fetus is born into the world and begins to grow. A child is born into this earthly world, where we all live. This is human society.
Why are people born?
We are born for the sake of love. This is the reason that a child, firmly rooted in parental love, will develop in the mother’s womb, the bosom of the parents’ protection and love. After the child is born, he or she won’t know any better and may wet the bed, but loving parents will not blame the child for this.
Their love is such that they do not recognize ugliness as being ugly. Their love lets them digest everything with joy. When a child reaches maturity, at around twenty years of age, he or she would meet an eternal partner in love and be engrafted in a love whereby each lives for the sake of the other, according to the principle of Heaven.
As we follow this life course, we need to experience the greatness of God’s love, so that the substantial realm of God’s love for all of His object partners can be fulfilled. Therefore, we, as parents, need to have children and give our love to them.
After being born into the world, our lives can still be compared to the life of a fetus in our mother’s womb. In other words, we live in the womb of our mother universe for about a hundred years.
Just as the fetus is ignorant of the world outside the womb, people living in the earthly world today are ignorant of the reality of the incorporeal world that comes after death.
Sun Myung Moon
We have only a vague sense that a world after death may exist, just as we did not know about the human world while in our mother’s womb. However, the spirit world exists in reality, regardless of our beliefs or feelings about it.
Because the world after death cannot be perceived by our five physical senses, we must overcome our disbelief through religious faith.
There are three stages of our life course as human beings: the water stage, the land stage, and the air stage. Everything, even the animals, exists in the realm of these three stages.
To stand as the lords of creation and be qualified to have dominion over all other creatures, we must go through these three stages – in water, on land, and in the air – in a more complete form than any other being, to prove ourselves superior to all other creatures.
So we must go through an air stage. However, we have no wings. How can we fly without wings? We ought to be able to fly higher and farther than any bird or insect. Then what can we do? This cannot happen in our physical body. No matter how high we may try to jump, it is no use.
Because human beings are the lords of creation, and because God is a spiritual being, we must have the same stage of operation as God if we are to stand in a realm of dominion in a reciprocal relationship with Him.
Today, people speak of the speed of electricity or light, and we know that the speed of light is three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Human beings, however, are capable of an even faster speed. We attain this in the realm of the human spirit.
We live in this world, but it is not everything. There is the spirit world, the place where our spirits are meant to live for eternity. It is an eternal world filled with the air of love. Our physical lives are a time of preparation for entering the eternal world of spirit.
Training to be in rhythm with the spirit world
I have a depth of spiritual experience. The spirit world is a place enveloped in the elements of love. On the earth, we breathe air, while in the spirit world, people live by inhaling love.
The love you give and receive in the spirit world is not secular human love. It is true love. When you go to the spirit world, this is what you will find. Those who have abundant love for their parents, brothers and sisters, spouse and children, that is, those who have experienced deep love in their family life, will enjoy great freedom.
They can go anywhere without restriction. On the other hand, those who have not experienced love are narrow-minded, and even in the spirit world, they find themselves isolated and with no freedom whatsoever.
The love between parent and child is a vertical relationship, the love between husband and wife is a horizontal relationship, and the love among siblings is a relationship that circles and surrounds.
These three relationships differ from one another. Therefore, only when you experience deep love through these three mutually distinct interactions on earth can you circulate freely – vertically, horizontally, and in a circle.
For example, a person who has not tasted parental love because the parents died early is in a rather tragic position because he is missing an important experience of love.
Likewise, those who have not experienced the conjugal love relationship of husband and wife, as well as love in the family, become poor people in the spirit world because they lack a crucial experience of life.
Those who have no brothers and sisters will also be in a poor position in the spirit world because they lack this experience. Why do you need to get married? We marry so that we can experience parental love, conjugal love, and children’s love.
Then why are these necessary?
The spirit world is filled with the air of such love. You need to have a family to train yourself to be in rhythm with the spirit world. Those who go to the spirit world without these experiences of love cannot follow the rhythm there. It will be as if they were without a nose to breathe in this air of love.
You are born from your father and mother. On a more fundamental level, God gave birth to you using your father’s seed and your mother’s womb.
You come to find the True Parent, God, after going through the universe as your parent and then through your natural parents.
Your natural parents are transient ones, so the moment of your death needs to be a jubilant time when you go to meet the True Parent. In that place, there is the true love of the True Parent. We call this place the kingdom of heaven in heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is composed of love, and it is filled with the love of the Heavenly Parent. This is not love for oneself; rather, it is love that can connect to every direction, enabling us to go anywhere without any problem, through the principle of service and sacrifice.
To pass the test for this, you need to love the universe and love humanity. Life on Earth is the training ground for you to cultivate such love.
Do you know how important your life on earth is?
You live it only once. It is a brief moment that comes only once. When compared to eternal life, earthly life is only a point. It is too short a moment.
However, it is currently that we must go beyond our physical lives and prepare ourselves for the spirit world.
Sun Myung Moon