We Come From One Root

"The root of the individual, the root of the family, the root of the clan, and the root of the nation are all the same. What this means is that if you look from the world's viewpoint, and you trace the root up or down, we all come back to the same root." 

This is true for the nation, the clan, the family, and even the individual. 


All countries eventually can trace back to one root.  The root is all the same.  Through this one root, all families, nations and even the world must be connected.  Since there is only one root for all, then we have only one trunk and a unity of branches.  There aren't different trunks or different roots.

When we accomplish this connection and unity in deed, the world will come into unity. 

If we were to ask people of different nations where their root lies, they would give many different answers.  Their answers may only be local.  For example, if you ask an American this question, they would say, "My root is Washington".  This does not apply to the whole world.

Does God think that the root of mankind is Washington?

Japanese people would say they trace their root to the goddess Amaterasu Omino Kami.    But now we know that everyone can be traced to the same root.

There is only one root, but humanity has not been able to see the root of it all.  Since no one can identify the true root, the Messiah returns to identify where the false root of division began.  Also to reveal what we think our roots are and then present the true root.



The Root is True Love

What is the completion of the ideal of creation?

The Messiah clearly defines God's will in simple terms.  God's will is to accomplish the ideal of creation.  Period.  Simple isn't it?  God is an absolute God.

Since He is absolute, does he have two different ideas or just one?  Absolutely one ideal.  Even if peace seems impossible to humanity, God has never wavered away from His dream of accomplishing Heaven on Earth.  This is the logical conclusion.

When we complete the four-position foundation (parents' love, siblings' love, childrens' love, each centered on God's love) then the completion of the ideal of true love is accomplished.  Everything important is there.



Creating True Love

The amazing fact is that the Family Federation has achieved these.

All of the thinking, teaching and action of the Unification Church is founded on these consistent lines: True Love, the four-position foundation and the ideal of creation.

The ideal of creation is to create the four-position foundation(sibling, parent, conjugal and God's love).  Then we must understand deeply the descriptions of all relationships of creation and the importance of the main ideas.

Even though it begins from a concept, it is reality. If you open up your spiritual eyes, you can go ask a big tree, "What is your purpose in life?

To accomplish this idea, first, we perfect heaven on earth and through this, heaven in spirit world will automatically appear.  Currently, there is only Paradise in which Jesus spoke.

We cannot enter heaven alone without our family.

As we discussed before, what wife would enjoy heaven while her husband spent eternity in hell?  When we catch a hold of God's True Love, then wherever we go and what we do will be connected to God.  This is reality and not just a concept.

What about a big rock, and belongs to the mineral kingdom? If you were to ask why does it exist, it  would answer you, "I exist for the sake of love."

Why did you come into existence or why do you breathe?

You exist for the sake of love.  Even a large rock that belongs to the mineral kingdom and doesn't seem to have much value would answer and say, "I exist for the sake of love".  Even the atomic kingdom, electrons and neutrons would answer the same way.  There is no way to deny it.  This is the reason all things were created in pairs: it is for love.

Love is the Beginning

Because of True Love and starting from True Love, the whole world came into being.  True love was the beginning of the concept of the universe.

We can even extend this and say that God came into existence for the purpose of love.  If love did not come into existence, then God, too wouldn't have a reason to exist.  Before thinking of the universe, we can think of True Love.

Before we can understand the deep meaning of True Love, we can see the concept of the male and female or the subject and object concept conveyed in all of creation, even at the subatomic level.  Everything in existence has that dual characteristic.  Take time to think of one exception, but you will find none.

Scientists maintain that the universe is held together by a force or a power, but they stop there.  They do not bring into account the logical steps that force only comes about because there was first an action that brought it about.

Without action, there is no force.

Which is first:  force takes place because of action or action takes place because of force?

Which one is first?


Reverend Sun Myung Moon gives an example to answer this question:

"When a man grows up, real love power does not act upon him. He has no involvement in love action. He grows up by the energy of man. With that he grows, but love is yet to come. His mind and body have to take action and then he grows, becoming older and older.

When he meets his spouse, a tremendous power takes place. Before that, there is action, but even before the action something else must exist first. That is subject and object relationship. In a man, he gets power when his mind and body come into unity.

He has two eyes instead of one, and two nostrils; everything comes in two. We see that subject and object relationship is everywhere and it exists for the sake of love.

We see development in this order: love between subject and object, then love action gives rise to the force. That is the order."SMM



Love Creates Joy

As soon as a husband and wife who exhibit True Love and their eyes meet, they are attracted to one another and nothing can stop them.  When all of the five senses meet each other, nothing will stop them.  Embodied with this love power, the couple can go through fire, water, anywhere.  That is the power of True Love.

This cannot be exchanged or converted into any value of money.  Even if the woman has millions and billions of dollars and is the wealthiest woman on earth, once she is captured in love then all things don't matter anymore.  God will be filled with joy and laughter at the sight of such a scene.  This is how we feel, too.

God invests His whole being and forgets, then He invests again and forgets all too willingly and happily because of love.  Without this kind of heart of not looking to receive, He would not be able to continue to do so.

For the man of love, the more he adds to this pool of love, the happier he becomes until later he can fly.  He will cruise the universe like the world of stars.  If you embrace a star while enraptured in love, it will start to dance and God will dance, also.  This is the power of love.



Do we Value Love?

How much do we value this love of God?

Imagine a kid that is in grammar school -  a boy or girl who receives a large chunk of a diamond but they do not know that it is a diamond or know its worth.  How will they treat this diamond?  This is the problem we see in the world situation today.

On the other hand, one who works hard and experiences the pain of dying to obtain this object, then you readily learn and understand the value of that diamond.  The only way that we can understand this is through suffering and sacrifice.  Nobody likes this, just as no student likes the act of studying to get the top grades.



Love Creates Peace

Love has the power to purchase, sell or unite a nation.  It is that powerful.  You have heard of the political marriages they used to perform centuries ago.  Two countries united in exchanged marriages between royalty of either country.  King Edward forsook the throne for a marriage to Wallace Simpson.

People get excited and laugh at the jokes and commentary of entertainers whenever they speak about the topic of love.  Other topics do not capture laughter from the bottom of the audiences hearts as much as the topic of love.

"No other church ever talks about love so much as the topic of this sermon."

It becomes a very legitimate statement that anyone or any minister whose sermon centers on love and makes everybody elated, happy and laughing, would become the source of peace and happiness.

When a teaching focuses it center on love, it can be the source of peace.  Peace will come from that.  Politicians, philosophers, economists and people from all different walks of life would come together for the topic of love because it is the root of their lives.



'Love Me' is False Love

We hear all talks about love and different kinds of love, but have we heard about love for the sake of other people?

People say, "Love me.".  This kind of person wants to draw love from other people.  There are even books and advice columns on how to attract love from others.  This is not the kind of love we have been talking about.

We are only talking about how to give love, that is what makes it different.

All these divided things now move toward being united because of this teaching and the knowledge of how to love for the sake of others.

From True Love, new hope, a new idea, and a new starting point have appeared.

Love was destroyed and divided.  The history of humankind has turned into a history of self-centered love away from God's original ideal.  How can we realize a peaceful world when all the broken situations are surrounding us.  We can only go this path through True Love that has the power to mend the past.

God's viewpoint of True Love is that the root comes from True Parents (restored fallen parents Adam and Eve).  Now that we have entered the age of True Parents or Enlightenment, brothers and sisters are being taught a new kind of love in which we live for the sake of others.




Free Sex and Drugs

Man needs to constantly be satisfied.

He has a spiritual antenna that communicates with the high level of the spirit world.  Man cannot live without the love, emotion and enlightenment that this antenna picks up.

Now all communication has been cut off from the spirit world and man does not know where to get that fulfillment.  So, what do they do instead?

They do drugs, drink alcohol and indulge in risky behavior to maintain an equivalent high to excite the body.

We as the human race have lost our emotional attachment to True Love on the vertical plane(spiritual) and can only find it through the horizontal way(physical) to compensate for this lack of communication with spirit.  Every family and nation have been touched by this tragedy.

It is called free sex.  Teens and even adults find out too late that when they indulge in sex without any connection to God and outside of a God-defined marriage that it never fully satisfies them as they had expected.

Sometimes leaving a bigger hole in which they were trying to fill in the beginning.  Then they turn to drugs to try to forget about this pain.  But everyone knows that the drug world is also a bottomless pit that will never fulfill our human desire for God's love.
         



The Universe Protects Love

What Father is pointing out is that everything that comes into power, everything that is subject and object in the pair system, is protected by the universe.

If there is an imbalance, the universe eliminates it.

Man and woman are a pair.  They become a pair at the universal level embracing point.  The nation's center it the president or the king as a plus and the people are a minus.

They combine into one and then they attend the world which is the next level up.  Then as a whole, they embrace the larger heavenly fate or destiny.

Americans should change their direction from the individualistic way toward this true standard way of living.  If the presidential administration and the American people do not change, the heavenly fate will chase them out.  No matter how rich or how strong America is, they will immediately break down.
Don't we see that this is already the case?



Individualism is Hell


Individualism has made a great nation of America into a small one that is full of bickering and complaints.  It can be compared to the nation's symbol of the great eagle.  It was created to spread its wings and explore the great plains around cliffs to capture its food supply.

But if you were to catch the eagle and just give him the bare minimum of rations so it could live, how great would the eagle be?

This is what individualism, living for oneself, has done to a once prosperous nation.  Are people exploding with happiness here in  America or unhappy?  They are miserable.  They are living like in the dungeons of hell even with such prosperity surrounding them in their daily lives.

On the other hand, how happy would an eagle be that had once been captured and now is finally released from its cage and is liberated?



True Love is Eternal

No matter how old the earth becomes, the principles of True Love continues.  The direction and action of True Love will remain the same throughout history and into the future.  Even before creation, this concept of True Love existed.

After Adam and Eve were created and after the fallen world came into being, the same concept of absolute pure love was the center of hope for all of the surrounding things to be taken away and cleaned up.


Then they can be connected to the new world.



The Church Restores True Love


Why was the Family Federation formerly known as the Unification Church founded?  It was so all that was lost through the actions of the first human parents can be restored and to bring liberation to God when the ideal is completed.

This is the church's mainstream thought.  In order for restoration to take place, all ideals should be realized centering on True Love.

Should people reject or welcome such a movement?  This is God's ideal and the tool which He brought the Messiah as the Second Advent.  It is to make the four-position foundation of the family centered on God with True Love as the core.

That is the purpose of the Unification Movement.

Return for Tomorrow's Post: We Come From One Root

This text was rewritten and taken from the speech: The Establishment of the Unification Church and the Mainstream Thought of the Dispensational History," the sermon given on May 1, 1993, at the Belvedere, International Training Center.

Principles of True Love

Welcome to a new week, and the last week of posts for the year of 2012, the Chinese symbol of the Dragon. Let's get started!  Does anyone think that love has rules or principles that are absolute?

True love happens in relationship with others. Even God required an “other” to fulfill His love. He created human beings as love partners, to whom to share the glory of His creation. He needed an object—someone to share with. He needed a relationship in order to experience love fully.

True Love Is Principled
 

Modern cultural notions have it that love is a spontaneous feeling in one person’s heart toward another. Yet, in fact, ethics weighs prominently that in successful and loving relationships. Examination reveals that ethics and morals enable true love.

Love based on feelings alone can be dangerous.

A man may feel he has fallen in love with another woman and desert his wife and children for her, leaving emotional devastation in his wake. A teacher may feel aromantic attraction toward a young student and wind up psychologically damaging the student for life with sexual approaches.

Psychologist M. Scott Peck points out, “Many, many people possessing a feeling of love and even acting in response to that feeling act in all manner of unloving and destructive ways."

In order to benefit the other, true love adheres to ethical principles.

Based upon principles, a truly loving person will behave benevolently toward a person he or she does not feel benevolent toward in the moment. To be kind to a spouse even when the spouse is being surly means a person believes in kindness, even when the other is not evoking it. It means a person believes in preserving and protecting marriage itself. To help the homeless man on the street means a person believes in treating one’s fellow human beings with compassion, even when that fellow human being is disreputable. To love those who have done a person harm means belief in the ultimate redemption of all, including the reprobate.

 

Ethics Enable a Life of True Love
 

Principles help stiffen the will to love the unlovable. They provide the impetus to enact the prodding of the conscience, which tells a person to act caringly even at his or her own expense. Mother Teresa could not have overcome her natural revulsion at the sights and smells of the diseased and dying in Calcutta had she not believed that the image of Christ was alive in each person. When she saw filthy people being gnawed on by rats in the gutters, it did not cause her to turn away, leaving them to the trash pile. Instead, she saw them as Jesus in a “distressing disguise” and asserted their eternal value as children of God. Adherence to a strong belief system enables a life of true love.

The necessity for ethical principles in love may be noted in the visceral reactions people have to violations of right and wrong in their relationships. For instance, learning that a spouse has been unfaithful is always an occasion for great anguish and pain. Marital love is bound up with expectations of loyalty, and these expectations are not just culturally conditioned. The emotional pain—the rage and hurt—that adultery causes is testimony enough to the deep affective content of the principle of fidelity in married love.

 

All other forms of love depend upon principles, too. You may have sensed these principles even in relationship with your friends.  In the love between friends, ethical violations are felt keenly as personal betrayals. The friend who lies, the friend who talks behind one’s back, the friend who passes one over in favor of another,the friend who is always willing to let the other pay the check - all of these kinds of ethical shortcomings cause friendships to flounder.

Ethical expectations accompany every human interaction and relationship—even fleeting ones. A person expects the clerk in the store to be polite and helpful. A driver expects fellow motorists to drive in a safety-conscious way in order to prevent injuries. Passengers on buses expect other passengers to make a minimum of noise, to say “Excuse me” when brushing past, and to move their things out of the way when the seat is needed.

The other-centeredness of these ethical expectations is clearly discernible. In fact, all virtues may be seen to be other-centered in perspective; all vices may be seen to be self-centered. It may be said, therefore, that “living for the sake of others” is the most all-embracing and all-encompassing moral principle.

 

True Love Is Serving and Sacrificial

True love is active. It involves enacting through willpower the promptings of beliefs and principles. Author and Christian philosopher C. S. Lewis noted that the more one feels without acting, eventually the less one is able to feel. This echoes the Book of James:

 

If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his own face in a mirror, he sees himself, then goes off and promptly forgets what he looked like.

 

But the one who peers into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, such a one shall be blessedin what he does.

Many faith and ethical traditions emphasize service and self-sacrifice.   The great disciplines require fasting, prayer vigils, caring for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, working to bring others into the light of truth, lengthy periods of silence and contemplation, and the giving up of worldly goods and pleasures in order to direct the mind toward God and others. It is as if in order for love to come down from Heaven, service and sacrifice must create a vacuum on earth.
 

Sacrifice in service to others creates a pocket in the usual maelstrom of selfishness—an empty space where God may dwell. As Reverend Moon has said, “God is creator and the originator of the two basic principles of service and sacrifice,” and when those principles are put into effect, God’s true love moves in.

The touching story of Shay shows how sacrifice and service to others creates an open place for heavenly love to come down to earth. Shay was a young, learning-disabled boy. He and his father were walking past a park where some boys were playing baseball.

Shay wanted to play, and his father reluctantly approached one of the boys on the field. The boy said, “Well, we’re losing by six runs, and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team.”

Oddly enough, Shay’s team started to score until they had a chance to win the game. But Shay was up next. Knowing it meant they would lose, Shay’s team still gave him the bat. He didn’t even know how to hold it. Thoughtfully, the opposing pitcher moved forward to throw Shay easy soft pitches. When Shay managed to hit a grounder, the pitcher instead of throwing it to the first baseman, lobbed it in a high arc out into right field. Everyone started yelling,

“Shay, run to first!” Startled, eyes wide, Shay ran to first and past it.

The right fielder then deliberately threw the ball way over the second baseman’s head, and once again, everyone shouted for Shay to run to the next base. The shortstop from the other team even turned him in the right direction. Another wild throw over the third baseman’s head had boys from both teams shouting, “Run home, Shay!” Shay ran home and was cheered by all as the hero who had hit the winning home run.

“That day,” the father said, with tears rolling down his face, “The boys from both teams helped bring a piece of the Divine Plan into this world.” They did so by their willingness to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of a little boy who needed a win more than they did, and who would always remembers the day other created a special space for him to belong.

It is hard to give things up that are in a person’s own self-interest.  Yet when a person does so to serve others, a window seems to open in the heart. It is a window through which the warm sunlight, gentle breezes, and the pure oxygen of the love of God may be seen and felt. For a moment, heaven comes to earth, and the whole world breathes a little easier.


Return for Tomorrow's Post: Second Chance at First Love

Photos courtesy of : freedigitalphotos.net

Today's text was taken from Textbook: Educating for True Love, Explaining Rev. Moon's Thought on Morality, Family, and Society.

World Peace Through Family

Scan any television station and you are sure to run into a reality show giving us a fly-on-the-wall view of a celebrity or non-celebrity's everyday interactions. 

The fad is so great that we can't stop watching non-celebrities with their multiple children and such.  If we completely followed how these families lived, would it bring a world of peace? 

Unfortunately, not to judge, but many of the lives we follow, real or fictional on television, are not the best example to realize a world of peace.  Our family example as well.  Teen mothers, angry housewives, bored celebrity kids may be cool to emanate, but the results they yield their followers is a life different than the ideal life God had imagined during creation. 

I don't know many children who wish they live without their parents, or any wife that wishes she could lose her husband to another woman.  I also don't know of any family that wishes for problems arising every time they communicate.  It is not in our nature.  Humans were created for one purpose - true love.  If we don't experience this with everyone in our lives - TRUE love - then how can we hope to see it on a global scale?


God's Only Institution


God created one institution as a way humans can learn to love, and learn how to relate to others based on this love - The Family.  The family is supposed to be the school of love.

Religion as its basis is God's primary means of education by which to instruct and love humankind.  We were supposed to be mature and raised up in God's true love and become parents that teach children what the world and God likes.

The family is the workshop based upon which one meets the qualifications to graduate from primary and secondary school, on to university -- even to earn a doctorate. Furthermore, the family expands into the world.

When the world was in the planning stage God had planned for the world to be a kingdom of love.  This is His will.  The family was set up as an instituion of this love on different levels equivalent to primary school on to the university and obtaining a doctorate.  Then this family that has graduated into a higher love interacting through four positions: Sibiling to Sibling, Parent to Child, Parent to God, Child to God.

This family then would expand from clan to nation to a worldwide family.

 If there was a family that was absolute or true it would be a place where the husband loves and serves his wife as he would his own mother and sister and his wife serves and loves the husbad as she would her father and brother.  They would love and respect one another as they would respect God Himself.

If we have a true family such as this all over he earth then World Peace happens automatically.  This type of world would be the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

In this this type of family we can find happiness not depression.  However happiness will not arise in an family with many emotional difficulties or in a family that does not have love. 


Where does misfortune come about in a family?

It begins when love disappears. Parents serve as a protective fence around the house as they attend God obeying heavenly laws as husband and wife and pass this on through their children.


A family such as this, a true family does not just sprout from anywhere.  A family starts with a couple, and a couple begin with two separate individuals each working to perfect their character. 

Majority of us stop growing our spiritual self along the way onto a path toward God and start a family before we are mature.  Then our children inherit the parent's immature spirit, mess and all.

What is this path that God leads us?  The path is the standard of absolute sexual purity. 

The first stage is to maintain absolute sexual purity before getting married.  We grow through different stages of our lives from childhood to adolescence.  Adolescence signals a start of a new dynamic life on a new level relating to others around us and things of creation.

Adolescence is the time where we begin to travel the path to becoming an absolute human being -internally.  In our time and all through history no one or any law has required us to become our absolute true self, but it is absolutely a requirement that every human should fulfill no matter what position - how high or low a level they live in society, we should fulfill this standard. 

We see in our current situations of family how living away from the standard of God has led to a society of broken families.

God gave to us a responsibility of maintaining purity in order to fulfill His ideal of creation.  This is the model of absolute sexual morality for us as humans.   This path leads us toward perfecting the model of absoluteness in conjugal love - love between husband and wife. 

Remember the warning God gave the first ancestors from which we were born?  He said, do not eat for in the day you eat, you will die.  He gave them the responsibility to maintain absolute sexual purity until God's approval of marriage. 

Our first family on earth failed in so many ways because it started otuside of God's realm.  It was intended to be a marriage approved by God, instead started outside of God's realm.  The first family on earth - the model we followed - was a family begun outside of God's ideal and multiplied now millions of families later.  This is why today we experience families that are far from the true ideal family.

What would have happened if Adam and Eve followed God's direction?  What if they chose to follow the commandment instead of being tempted away by satan?

They would have perfected their character and stood together with God as His equal, then their marriage would have been blessed by God.  Then they would bore True Children and this is a True Family. 

Secondly, we would see how can we preserve our purity before marriage and keep from following the wrong path.

Right now our American lives are leading a life toward self-destruction because we are children of the first family that follows the path outside of God.  Purity is the greatest blessing of Heaven given to humanity and without maintaining purity, our path toward a perfected individual or spiritual maturity is closed.  So, when Adam and Eve had eaten it was pertaining to wait to have sexual relations once they had matured in God's love.  Instead, our historical parents had lost their purity and left direct relationship with God.

This truth in God's commandment for Adam and Eve has lain hidden throughout human history, but this is what God truly told Adam and Eve - to keep their purity.  If they had obtained purity and conjugal relations they would have attained complete oneness with Him and then had children of goodness.

Can we say that we follow the path of God so completely and have children of goodness?  All of the world's problems stems from the hidden fact in history.  Humanity started from a family outside of God's protective realm.

One Global Family of Peace

Here is a word we probably never seen - True Families, True Children.

We think it is not possible with the climate of marriage these days.  No matter how far humanity strays from the ideal it is still God's mandate to experience a True Family.

Family members means there must be a family.  Then if there is a family then there are brothers and sisters and siblings means there are parents.
In religion, we call others "members" or "believers".  But when have religious members called each other on the global level "family member"? 

When we talk about world peace we also may say Global Family.  A great family will require parents - a father and mother for this great family.  This parent is none other than the one to come who opens the gateway to World Peace - the returned Messiah.  Even though there will be many brothers and sisters there will be only one set of parents or one head of the family.

How will one who is a "family member" in this heavenly family look?


This is the question.  

These True Parents will not be self-centered or have anything to do with evil.  They will be the center of this family and these parents will have God as their center.

So, a true family will be realized only when the Savior, Messiah becomes one with God as our parent on earth.  Then those who join with the Returned Messiah they will become true Children and true brothers and sisters.

You will become brothers and sisters to those you are not related and follow parents who are not your physical parents.  A world of peace will be able to go past the emotions and affections of the flesh and blood, transcend race, and nation creating a new culture based on heart.

How will this come about?  How will it be possible for unrelated people to love one another as their own flesh and blood?  By force?  Through law?  It is only possible through God's love.

Return for tomorrow's post: You Can Save the World

Photos courtesy of: freedigitalphotos.net


Note:

These words are taken from a combination of 8 textbooks and speeches taught by Dr. Reverend Sun Myung Moon and rewritten in a conversational tone. 

To find out more about the Freedom Society and Unification Movement - the fastest growing global community please visit www.familyfed.org