Four Worlds of Heart in Family

All the evidence from the previous posts show that there is something important for human development in the very structure of the family.

Reverend Sun Myung Moon summarizes that roles in the family create a certain 'realm of heart'. This heart fostered between the relationships between mother-father, parents-children, siblings, and God and family becomes a school for love.

People learn about love through being sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers.

“The family teaches by its form,” as educator Gabriel Moran explains it.

Each realm of heart reflects an aspect of God's love.

God is the Parent of all parents. He has the absolute love that surpasses the love of even model parents. With that love He can embrace all the parents of the world. In fact, God created man from His parental love.

Without that love from God, we die.

God is always ready to give the type of love that is best suited for the person who is seeking a relationship with Him.

If we are ready for parental love from God, He is prepared to give it. If we want brotherly love, conjugal love, or the love of a friend from Him, He is ready with these.

It is so amazing and wonderful that God who is a God of love protects us in every possible relationship

When we fulfill each realm of heart (children's realm, siblings realm conjugal realm, and the parent's realm) we grow to resemble God's many-faceted love.

Each type of love that is exhibited in the family forms a world of experiences and responsibilities that becomes a matrix for the growth of heart.

Lessons in Loving Others

The family works to school people to have other-centered love through providing crucial relationships to learn from. Each realm of heart involves relating to significant others or partners in love.

In the child's ream of heart, the parents become their most significant other. The sibling's realms of heart, their brothers/sisters and peers are increasingly significant. Within the spouse's realms of heart, one has a relationship with the opposite sex who are emotionally and physically committed for the rest of one's life.

Children are the significant other in the parent's realm of heart.

True love begins with the infant responding to a parent in the child’s realm of love.

A baby is not alone in the universe. He or she is compelled to bond with others by all the forces within.

Many theorists conclude that a baby's attachment to their parent is a necessary building block of relating to others with empathy for the rest of their life.

The quality of the interactions between a parent and child is an essential love relationship that gives each a lifelong perspective on others.

When brothers and sisters interact with their siblings, this realm of heart offers a new territory where the growing child must accommodate others. He or she now shares the parents' universe with their sibilings.

One learns they must not hurt their sibling but must wait their turn and share.

In turn, the relationship of brother and sister in the family can offer joy of companionship and expand each child's love into new dimensions.

When a child must cooperate with their playmates or children at school, issues of fair play, justice, and honesty come to the foreground as he or she learns that there are yet others who need respect and accommodations.

Through experiencing the sibling's realm of heart, a child begins to relate to the world of their peers. The repertoire they obtain through these relationship expand dramatically, as well as their heart for others in society as they mature.

Maturity brings the world of the opposite sex into sharp focus.

A newlywed couple often feel that they are the only two people in the world.

This is how rich the world or realm they occupy together. It is an exclusive, intensely exciting, deeply affecting circle of relationships in which each will learn to love someone who is truly their 'other'. 

They will experience a different emotion and mental make-up than with others they encounter.

When one becomes a parent, he or she enters a realm of relationship with a child that opens up a whole new world of loving and caring.

The parent's realm of love is perhaps the most transformative relationship that resembles the heart and love of God the most closely.

With their children, parents have a dependent 'other' who needs and demands more than anyone else has demanded in a lifetime. They must be attendant to their growth. As a parent, rewards and blessings are enormous as well as anxieties and emotional taxes.

The heart grows here earnestly through other-centered love.

Grandparent's love is an extension of the parent's realm of heart. This love has its own special gifts to bestow and receive from the grandparents.

When we grow and understand the inner workings of the family through experiencing these four realms of heart, we grow to appreciate the brilliantly designed vehicle of emotional, moral and spiritual growth.

The impact of your family does not stop within its own relationships either. The lessons one learns from their interactions in the family is profound and far-reaching. It extrapolates into a person's orientation toward the rest of the world.

Ethicist James Q. Wilson said, “The family is a continuing locus of reciprocal obligations that constitute an unending school for moral instruction . . . . We learn to cope with the people of this world because we learn to cope with the members of our family.”

Photos courtesy of : freedigitalphotos.net 

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This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon's philosophy.

God's Dream: World Peace

If you are an advent reader of Achieve World Peace, then you know by now that the world that we are living in and accepted as the only way to live, was not the original world God planned when He was creating the world.

God's ideal was that the first parents of humanity would grow to spiritual and physical maturity in perfection, then unite with Him.

Then they would for a True Family laying a tradition centering on God.

God's Will through Adam and Eve

Many believers have prayed and talked about this will, God's will, God's ideal for creation, His wish for what was to be.

The words are simple, but it is difficult to articulate exactly what God's will is.

We are currently leading lives of faith in order to accomplish His will.  But it is a contradiction to live a life of faith and praying that God accomplishes His will if you do not exactly know what His will is in the first place.

What do you think God wants most to be done in these Last Days?

As stated above, God's will is to see the completion of the original idea he had for creation.  The purpose He made this universe.  Then what is the center of that purpose?

Did God create for His own pleasure?  Did He create humanity to worship His power?

God created the heavens, the earth and all of creation for Adam and Eve.

The substance of this ideal is a family that was absolutely centered on God.  This is only realized when Adam and Eve become completely united that they cannot separate themselves from His realm of love.

Currently, as people of faith, we must pray, meditate, and constantly pay indemnity in order to unite with God's word.

If Adam and Eve had followed God and loved centered on Him in the beginning, then unity with God would have been automatic without the need for prayer, religion or a Messiah.

Adam and Eve become an ideal husband and wife through giving birth to children forming the four-position foundation with God in the center.

An ideal family would have formed with the union of an ideal man and an ideal woman who were individually perfected.

In order to realize the ideal family, you need more than a man or a woman.  A family is an unit after all.  A family represents the true union of a husband and wife.

It is the relationship of parents and children with the love of God at the center.  This family would therefore pass on the tradition of loving God to the next generation without ceasing.

This is God's will.

What is God's purpose of creation?

God did not create Adam and Eve to stare at them for eternity or so they would just grow old and die by themselves.  He wanted them to mature with Him at the core of their being and at the core of their love for each other.

He created them so they could build a love nest centering on God.  Then establish the true Kingdom of Heaven on Earth for humanity.

Instead, as we currently live today, the opposite world was created when they were unable to unite with God's will and purpose.

Adam represents heaven, Eve represents earth in a heavenly union.  Even though they are two separate people, when they are horizontally connected, heaven and earth are united.

When they unite based on God's love, the cosmos unite automatically.

Therefore, since the first parents did not unite based on God, heaven and earth, spirit world and physical world separated.  Heaven and earth will unite with the coming of True Parents who reverse the mistake of the fall.

God's Absolute Requirements

What was God's reason for creating the universe when He could have stayed alone?

Like an artist wants to enjoy his masterpiece and share it with others, God wanted to feel joy through the created world.

Even though God is an absolute being, He is not able to feel joy when He is by Himself.  Joy can only be experienced with an object partner.

God does not require knowledge, money or power.

God is absolute and almighty, so He does not need such things as humans desire and fight for.

No matter how advanced science and technology becomes, they will never be equal or surpass what God has created.

The universe has a certain hierarchy and is in accordance with the law of nature.  God's creation of the universe is far beyond our understanding or the research and science of human beings.

Since God is all-knowing in every area, then we can say that He is the absolute scientist.

God is everlasting, unchanging and self-existing.

Then when we consider this, if God had a wish, what would He ultimately wish for?

Would He want money or power?

The main issue is what does God desire?  Even though God is all-knowing and all-powerful and absolute, there is only one thing that humans and even He requires.  That something is none other than love.

Some people will say that God can receive joy and love all by Himself.  This is not so.  God requires an object partner with whom to share love.

If God is absolute, the question arises: Why would such an absolute being create human beings if it wasn't for power or money?

He created human beings because that was the only way He could reciprocate love.  The relationship between God, the Father and us as His sons and daughters forms an axis line.

If the two lines had been connected, then would it have been possible for human beings and God to separate their relationship of love?

If a man and woman had truly tasted God's original love, would they have been able to separate from it?  Even when bees get a taste of nectar in the springtime he cannot be separated from it.

The union of an individually perfected man and woman can form a family centered on true love once the foundation to operate the universe connecting to the axis of love is formed.  On the basis of this love, a tribe, people and world would form expanding from this couple.

God's Eternal Partner in Love

Since God created the world, you can ask Him why did He create the world.  He would tell you because He thought it was good.  He felt joy from it, and wanted to receive more joy from it.

How do you receive joy from something?

You receive joy in the form of love.  This is how we come to the conclusion that God created the world to feel joy through the realization of love.

God created the universe to feel joy through human beings and the creation becoming one and thus establishing a harmonious world of love.

God feels joy once He sees and becomes one in love with human beings, thus forming a true relationship of husband and wife.  Then they establish a family, tribe, nation and world of true love.

This was God's ideal of creation.  This was God's only dream: to realize the true ideal of love.

The problem is that such things as love, happiness and joy cannot be realized through only one being.  They cannot be realized without an object partner.  God's object of love is none other than human beings.

When humankind matures into perfected love, they can appear before God as the true object of love.  Then God becomes the God of happiness.  He is the God who has fulfilled the ideal of joy.  

We have come to believe that because God is almighty, and is the Creator of all things that He does not need human beings.  But God needs human beings in order to perfect His love.

Did you know God's love involves human beings liking each other eternally?

More importantly, it involves God liking human beings eternally.

In this way, human beings are God's eternal objects of love.  God desired to love Adam and Eve as the object partner from the first day He created them.

He would wish to look at them forever, be with them over and over again, and live with them over and over again.  Having such an object partner is God's ideal of creation.

Return for Tomorrow's Post: Family is Training Ground of Heart

This Post was rewritten and derived from, True Family Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 4 Chapter 1