Authors
Teaching about God
When True Father started his public providential course upon Korea gaining independence in 1945, he envisioned that based on religion, he would lead the providence of salvation and lead the world to peace.
Accordingly, he took great interest in the religious situation and the roles religion would play. As he worked unceasingly to realize harmony among religions, he would say that a true religion brings people to a strong awareness of God's existence and accurately teaches them about His nature and His being.
1. There are many religions throughout the world. What are these religions supposed to teach? The priority for any religion is to teach people properly about God. A religion that teaches about God vaguely or ambiguously leaves us uncertain.
If God truly exists, and He does, then a true religion must teach what kind of being God is, what His love is like, and so on. Among the world's religions, Christianity has emerged as one that has this deep, internal quality.
Christianity teaches that God is our Father. When Jesus appeared on earth, he proclaimed that he was the only-begotten Son of God and that in the world of human beings, he was the only one who had been born as God's Son.
Being born as the son of one's father means having received from birth his bone marrow, his flesh, and his blood. The connection between father and son is such that it cannot be severed by any rules or laws. It cannot be denied, even when one is standing in front of the most imposing authority.
From this perspective, when Jesus was on earth and called God his Father, he made clear to all creation that he came with the central mission to reign over the world with God's authority for eternity. (018-108, 1967/05/28)
2. The advanced material civilization of the 20th century was created by people pursuing only visible, material goods. Yet, pursuing material values alone by studying only the visible, material world is not the original desire of human beings. Religion teaches that God exists in the invisible, incorporeal world that transcends the material world.
The perspective of religion is that groups would emerge--and not only groups but peoples, nations, and even all humankind– that hope to stand in the presence of the incorporeal God and that desire to do only His Will. With such people, God will create a new world, one that will transcend the material civilization of the 20th century and whose values will be based on the invisible world of God.
As human beings continued to investigate the material world, they came to recognize that its first cause was energy. When they investigate further, they will arrive at the invisible world behind that energy. This is the invisible world that God governs.
The visible world and the invisible world exist in a correlative relationship. That is why if you pray hard and offer sincere devotion focused on the invisible world, you will come to experience the painful history that is hidden in the hearts of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. In this way, you will be able to discover all the truths of heaven. (002-238, 1957/06/02)
3. It is an absolute fact that religion is not merely about human beings. Religion teaches about God. God is the source of all religious teachings. Because God is the origin and root of religion, we cannot talk about religion apart from God.
That is why the four great saints who founded the world's great religions honored God's Will and introduced His heart. Those who live in the realm of religion and do likewise can reach the level of these saints.
Who made these religious founders saints? If people had elevated them to the position of saints, their teachings would have revolved around human beings. But in fact, we find that these teachings were God-centered.
Thus, we can recognize that it is God who raised and designated these people as saints. In this way, we can say that God created the world's religions and the cultural spheres that emerged from them. (038-183, 1971/01/03)
4. These days some religions put forth fanciful ideals and humanistic fictions about love. But a true religion must penetrate the essence of the human predicament. It must firmly plant an awareness of God, that no one who experiences it can ever deny.
This is what a true religion does. Its value is more precious than anything in the world. It cannot be exchanged for anything, not for all the great men and saints of history put together.
A true religion begins with a person who has a clear awareness of the existence and nature of God. From that point, he can become the beginning of a new history, which will then expand from the individual to the nation, world, and cosmos. In the Unification Church, we talk about the heart of God.
There is nothing higher than this. There are also issues other f heart that arise in our daily lives, in what we call the love of parents, the love of husband and wife, and the love of siblings.
But when it comes to the heart of God, we are talking about a different dimension. (033-231, 1970/08/16)
5. When looking at all the cultures of the world and their histories, we find that behind them and supporting them is religion. Human history and religion are connected and share a common destiny.
In different eras, religions have sometimes gotten ahead of history and sometimes fallen behind it, yet religions have continued to exist regardless. This is because religion is the foundation upon which God can achieve the ideal world and His ideal of the kingdom of heaven.
The key teaching of religion is God and His love. That is why religions teach human beings to love God. The original mind of human beings wants to seek and find God, who created them, and the cosmos. That is why religion must teach principles by which human beings can love God and receive His love.
In Korean, the word for religion The first Chinese character jong means “wooden floor.” The second character gyo means “teaching.” Hence, what we call religion is the teaching that helps human beings become a platform, or even the pillar that supports from beneath.
If this is the case, what could be more important than teaching about God's love? Is there any teaching greater than this? Human beings' most ardent desire is to possess the love of God.
Religion teaches us how to reach that summit. That is why the more it emphasizes God and the more it teaches His love, leading us to stand awed by the absolute Creator of the universe, the higher a religion it is. (023-126, 1969/05/18)
6. Does the absolute God exist? This is a crucial question. Finding the answer has been the quest of all humanity. Intellectuals and saints, past and present, have sought to answer this question. It has been the quest of people of all ages throughout history.
Some people take an ideological or philosophical approach to seeking God. Others take a theological approach. They may begin with an encounter with God. From that starting point, they develop their ideas about how people can live with God and find happiness with Him in this world.
Religion pursues a world where not only individuals live with God, but families, societies, nations, and the world also live with Him. However, to globalize the concept of living with God requires a religious teaching that affirms that all people must dwell together with God, and which at the same time embraces all the differences in people's cultures; including their different geographical regions, historical backgrounds, and customs.
Look at shamanism. The reason it became full of superstitions is that it does not present any teachings that can guide human beings to form a relationship with God.
Had it directed us to God, shamanism would have developed into a great religion, guiding people's lives on different levels from the individual to the family, people, nation, and world. (240-261, 1992/12/13)
7. Religion does not exist only based on truth. What people call “the Way” is not only truth.
Ideologies and philosophies are limited to truth, but religion has another component. Religion also connotes heart. Therein lies the difference. There is no room for heart in mere ideology or philosophy.
A parent and child love each other without even speaking about it. Something similar is embedded in religion. It includes something that transcends logic and moves beyond external conditions. In this, religion is different from ideology, which is based on an organizational framework rather than on the heart.
We are like marathon runners who are racing toward the finish line. To reach the goal, we must be equipped with knowledge about the course we are running. This means we must have a clear grasp of our actual circumstances in this era. Provided we understand the situation in which we are running, we will be able to keep going to the finish line.
Accordingly, as we move forward toward heaven, sometimes at the risk of our lives, we need to understand God's heart in history, in the present, and in the future.
If we can feel how hard God has been toiling to prepare the way and establish this path, then, regardless of what difficulties we may encounter, we will be able to continue and break through any barriers. (007-140, 1959/08/09)
8. If there is anything in the human world that goes beyond this physical world, connecting heaven and earth, it is religion. There are no human beliefs that are greater than religious beliefs.
Religious beliefs make it possible for us to have a relationship with the invisible Creator. They enable us to say He is our Father and we are His sons and daughters. The starting point of religion is that we exist in an inseparable parent-child relationship with God. This is the basis for our value as human beings.
It is also the reason a true religion does not remain merely on the national level as the faith of one people, but looks to the future of nations, the world, and the cosmos.
The Creator has been acting to become one with human beings and with the earth. The ideal of creation is the formation of a trinity comprised of God, humankind, and the Earth.
Religion is the very means to restore this relationship with Him. That is why religions initially emphasized the master-servant relationship. Over time, they established the correct order for relationships what is in front and what follows behind, what comes first, and what comes after. By doing so, they have clarified our relationship with heaven. (004-098, 1958/03/16)
9. There is only one set of True Parents for eternity. Adam and Eve, our first ancestors, were not to remain as two individuals but were to be a woman and a man joined as one.
Those ancestors of humankind were to have become the True Parents, but due to the Fall, instead, they became false parents.
Unless the position of the absolute Parents is recovered, God's ideal of creation can never be realized. By this logic, a religion is not a true religion unless its teachings lead us to build true families, true ideal nations, and a true ideal world centering on God's beloved Bride and Bridegroom.
As there had been no true parents, a true religion had to teach that we could not build true families until after True Parents had come. (257-131, 1994/03/14)
The repair shop
The mission of religion is to recover fallen human beings as children of God and to recover the original world of God's creation. Fallen people became like broken machines. True Father therefore said that religion must fulfill the mission of a repair shop that rebuilds broken down human beings.
10. Religion teaches us to follow moral principles that are in alignment with the fundamental principle by which God created heaven and earth. Religion teaches that one being, God, made all things of heaven and earth and that the one God has been steadily moving the providence toward realizing the world that fulfills His one purpose.
Accordingly, religion teaches that we too must move in that direction and holds that this requires us to renounce a life based on physical comfort. This is what both Buddhism and Christianity teach. The higher the level of a religion, the more strenuously it commands us to deny our bondage to the material world.
The Bible teaches this.
We have fallen human beings cannot become one with God just as we are. We first need to be completely liberated. We need to become new people, and this requires us to pursue the one purpose of God above all else. That is why we need religion.
We must not lead a religious life blindly. God always carries out His providence through a formula.
Hence, we must understand His formula. The Unification Church is where people can learn this. This formula course is defined by the Principle of Restoration.
The Unification Principle teaches how providential history has unfolded from the past to the present. This is a most important aspect of the Unification Church teachings. (016-118, 1966/01/02)
11. The role of religion is to re-create human beings. How does it do that? It guides us to resolve the seemingly endless conflict between mind and body and reach a state of peace where forevermore there is no struggle.
Religion also guides us to become God's counterparts, who are qualified to represent the Sovereign of the cosmos. It teaches us how we can manifest the character of God in our relations with others so that He will rejoice over us as people of eternal, unchanging value.
Religion guides us to strive to fulfill this task not by our human efforts alone, but in cooperation with God. (086-034, 1976/03/04)
12. God is the original Lord of human beings. He is the absolute Being in unity. Our original mind belongs to God, and therefore like a magnet, we are naturally pulled toward God, who is our subject partner.
This is why we human beings revere what is high and holy, and why we yearn for the absolute Being. Religion has taken responsibility in this arena. By the same token, the mission of religion is to keep the mind in the position of the subject partner and keep it stronger than the body so that it can completely subjugate the body. (085-310, 1976/03/04)
13. If only we had God's true love dwelling in us, our mind and body would naturally be in total oneness.
God established religions to save human beings based on this principle. The religious world is like a repair shop for mending human beings who are out of order. Religion produces new parts and fixes what is broken. Religious teachings pursue the goal of mind-body unity.
No matter how serious we are about religion, studying its teachings and practicing self-discipline, are all vain efforts unless we bring our mind and body into oneness. Unless we achieve mind-body unity, ten years of study and practice, even 1,000 years of study and practice, will be in vain.
How can we unite our mind and body?
None of the great religious founders could fully teach this. I say it is God's true love that enables us to attain mind-body unity. Therefore, the primary issue is understanding why we have been unable to fully abide in the true love of God. (199-343, 1990/02/21)
14. Human beings did not fulfill God's ideal of creation. While on the way to realizing the ideal world, they fell and became broken beings.
Human beings ever since have spent their lives wandering confused, not knowing where to go, whom to follow, or what kind of world they should strive to attain.
This condition describes present-day human society. Human beings have fallen to a position where their value is lower than that of God's servants and lower than the things of creation. We cannot recover our rightful position by acting randomly or blindly.
We need to repair fallen history through the principle of re-creation. Religion was established as the repair shop to rebuild broken human beings. It is to restore us fallen human beings to our original condition. We need to go to the repair shop and be created anew. (101-139, 1978/10/29)
15. The fact is you are all broken people. When a radio is broken, you get static or no sound at all.
Likewise, when a person is broken, he or she cannot go where his or her heart wants to go. If God exists, He will have the know-how to fix broken people. If He does not have such a plan, He may as well not exist.
However, questions arise: Why did God end up having to establish a repair shop to fix broken people? Why must God send technicians, and can they make these repairs? The repair shop is a religion. Immediately after the Fall, religions began to develop, beginning with shamanistic faiths.
Starting from those small repair shops, the higher religions emerged and were established as world-level repair centers. (039-277, 1971/01/15)
16. The world's cultural spheres are realms that were established by religious thought and developed first as religious cultural spheres. Religion is the fountainhead of all civilizations.
Civilizations emerge on the foundation of religion. That is why the cultural spheres of the four major world religions cover the entire world.
Religions have taken the role and responsibility of repair shops. However, no existing religion can repair the whole person. It is as if the repair shop of one religion only manufactures legs, another only manufactures arms, another neck, and another head, yet they remain to be assembled.
Therefore, we need a factory that can assemble all these parts and make people whole. That factory is the Unification Church. Given the current circumstances, it is remarkable that we have emerged and put up a sign stating that we will unite all religions.
This is why people who used to believe in Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism, as well as non-believers, are joining the Unification Church. It is because the Unification Church is a religion of synthesis. It performs a comprehensive assembly of the whole person. It is a comprehensive repair center in name and reality. (039-278, 1971/01/15)
Dominion over oneself
True Parents teach that the conflicts and disputes among human beings arise from the struggle between their mind and body, which became divided due to the Human Fall.
Thus, the True Father lived by the personal motto, “Before you seek to have dominion over the universe, you must first gain dominion over yourself' The body, which seeks its comfort and pleasure, must be subordinate to the mind, which is connected to God and His ideal.
Accordingly, religion teaches that mind-body unity, where the focus of the mind is the higher purpose, is the necessary foundation for a life of true love, which comes through service to others and self-sacrifice. The body's unity with the mind is the necessary first step on the path to actualizing the final goal of one world under God.
17. “You must achieve mind-body unity.” People have shouted this throughout history, regarding it as the gospel of gospels. If you cannot reach this state, even your love will be in vain. Without it, you have no basis to say anything about what it means to be a human being.
Whatever your line of argument, if it is not based on that fundamental foundation within yourself, it has nothing to do with reality. For this reason, you have to be able to state that you have attained complete mind-body unity. But can any of you say that with confidence?
God teaches us that the way to bring our mind and body into unity is through true love. God abides in total oneness of mind and body because, abiding in love, His mind, and body live for the sake of each other.
God exists perpetually because His mind and body invest in something beyond themselves the body for the sake of the mind, and the mind for the sake of the body. This is the logical basis of eternal life. It originates in the reality of beings investing in one another and then investing more. (210-239, 1990/12/23)
18. “Before you seek to have dominion over the universe, you must first gain dominion over yourself.”
This is what Christians and other people of faith need to understand. Everyone wants to be admired as great, but what does it mean to be great? The shortcut to having others regard you as great is first to straighten yourself out.
Your mind and body are fighting every day, unable to make a truce. This is a condition that has continued and will continue from generation to generation from your grandparents to your parents, from your parents to you, then from you to your sons and daughters, then to your grandchildren, and on and on.
Countless saints and sages have come and gone without being able to solve this problem. I, however, have solved it. I can enter the realm where my mind and body are in resonance, united in true love. Once I am there, even without engaging in the path of discipline I can understand everything.
There were circumstances where I was driven out and persecuted, but I survived amid those whirlpools. How? It is because I understood the path I had to follow. When I enter that state of resonance, I stand directly under God's perpendicular line.
Hence, I understand what measures to take. Because I understand this, I can keep going on my destined path regardless of any outcry against me. This is why I have not come to ruin despite people saying I would. (248-277, 1993/10/03)
19. You are divided into individuals. Your mind and body are divided. Your mind, standing in the position of Abel, has been sacrificing for your body. It has been working your whole life, investing and forgetting, investing again and forgetting.
Now it is time for your body in the position of Cain to unite with your mind. When the two become one, in that state God will be with you.
On that victorious foundation, you next stand in a Cain-Abel relationship as husband and wife. Again, when the two of you become one, God will descend and dwell with you.
Until you restore the Cain-Abel relationship and establish their oneness based on love, you cannot advance to the next level. We have to establish the victorious foundation of Cain-Abel unity from the individual level to the levels of family, tribe, people, and nation.
Only then can we bring about the liberation of God, as well as the liberation of Adam and Eve and their children. (207-318, 1990/11/11)
20. Religion does two things: First, it stimulates your mind and strengthens its power. If you have religious faith, your mind will be stimulated to such an extent that its purpose becomes your sole focus.
When faith impacts your mind so strongly that you forget everything about your body, then for the first time you will realize that God truly exists. Then you must again apply that strong power to every part of your min so that you make an absolute determination, “My lord is God alone.
My body will submit only to God, not to the Devil.” When you feel the conflict between your mind and body, it is because the power of your mind and the power of your body are almost equal. But if you strengthen your faith to infuse your mind with three to five times more power than it has now, your mind can be victorious over your body.
The second thing religion does is to give you the power to strike your body and keep your body under control. Striking the body and supplying strong power to the mind are the two works of religion. As well as making your mind stronger, you need to make your body obey your mind. Do this for three years.
Since the power of your mind and the power of your body are about the same, you need to make your body suffer until it just surrenders. That is why religion tells you, “Do a fast. Be meek and humble.” By saying things like “be meek and humble” and “sacrifice,” religion brings the body to submit to the mind.
For the same reason, religion teaches you to accept suffering.
(085-310, 1976/03/04)
21. Mind and body must become one, as subject partner and object partner. This is what caused me to suffer the most while I was putting myself through spiritual discipline. The mind and body do not become one easily.
The greatest challenges are sleeping and eating. If I felt hungry, my mind got confused. If I felt sleepy, my eyes would not listen to me. Next, as a man, I had to overcome my physical desire for women.
These are the three great enemies of all human beings. So unless you overcome them, you cannot go to God's kingdom. Because we are all confronted with those kinds of difficulties, my motto has been, “Before you seek to have dominion over the universe, you must first have dominion over yourself.”
Even if I were able to unite and command the universe, if I could not attain unity within myself, I would end up losing everything. (232-123, 1992/07/03)
22. What kind of religion does the world need? It presents the way to peace. It cannot be a religion that stands by us while we regard ourselves as important, that endorses a concept of self-centered ownership, or teaches that we can act based on selfish desires.
If that were the case, we would never be able to escape the circumstances where people are dominated by their objective concepts of what is right for them, their people, and their native land. We have to overcome this. Therefore, religion teaches us to sacrifice ourselves. As long as the world continues its history of people pursuing their benefit, it can never get away from war.
Heaven knows this, and tells us, “Sacrifice yourself! Deny yourself!” In addition, heaven tells us that when we stand in the position of a subject partner, we must not pursue our benefit as a subject partner. Instead, we must choose the path that will benefit our object partner.
We must take the path of a religion that emphasizes the ways of sacrifice, service to others, and self-denial. (172-143, 1988/01/10)
Sun Myung Moon