Cham Bumo Gyeong: Episode 305

Cham Bumo Gyeong
Book 11: Ecumenical Initiatives
Chapter 1: Ecumenical and Interfaith Initiatives
Section 1: The Meaning and Purpose of Religion, Paragraph 18
Section 2: Salvation and the Liberation of God, Paragraph 03

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.

19  You are divided 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.

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 mind, 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 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.

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 biggest 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 personal 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 cannot attain unity within myself, I would end up losing everything.

22  What kind of religion does the world need? It is one that presents the way to peace. It cannot be a religion that stands by while we regard ourselves as important, or 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 own subjective 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 own 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 own 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.

Section 2. Salvation and the Liberation of God

Saving all of humankind

The purpose of religion is to restore people to their original, unfallen condition, through the providence of salvation. For this purpose, True Parents have been working both in the Unification Church and in the wider religious world. In our church they have been raising up family members with love and truth. In the wider religious world they have been spreading the truth through interfaith initiatives.

1  What do human beings want most? If we have a certain desire, that desire should not be for the sake of ourselves. Once we have been engrafted to God, we should start anew with desires that are connected to God's desire. We should find what God desires and go forth on the path to fulfill what He desires. As we pursue absolute value, we should pursue it not from our own viewpoint, but from the viewpoint that arises in our relationship with God, the absolute Being who governs us.

Unless fallen human beings take this position, they cannot break free of their bond to the Fall. If we do not break free from that bond, however much we want to establish all the conditions of happiness, we will never be able to attain eternal happiness. With God we must become people who step forward more strongly than does the evil one who created the fallen environment. Unless we do so, there is no way to solve the human predicament.

All human beings are in this miserable position. Yet, God, in His compassion, has been taking responsibility for that, by carrying out the providence of salvation in every age of history and teaching people the path to salvation.

2  Ultimately, history has been pursuing the path of love. Because human beings began from God's love, God has purposed that human beings arrive at the world of love and unity. However, it is the ones who guide humankind on that path who determine success or failure. I know that this is the right path of life. Because I understand this, I confidently report to you the personal experiences of the struggles that I have carried out for this quest at the risk of my life.

When we look into the history of religion, we find that God's providence of salvation has been carried out in the midst of the many ups and downs of human history. Because the providence of salvation will continue up until the Last Days, there needs to be a mainstream of religious practice. Its final destination is to find the path of God's love and build the family of His love. Thereby, it is to establish the tribe of His love and then the nation of His love.

3  This fallen world is occupied by evil. How can good people be raised up in this kind of world? If the Lord who created heaven and earth exists, this must be a daunting challenge for Him. In fact, nurturing good people is what God has been doing as He carries out the providence of salvation on earth. God set up religions as His means of nurturing good people. Human beings have needed religions ever since the day they fell.

Even though human beings fell, they still have a mind of goodness deep within them. It is because God endowed them with an original mind that can pursue religion and believe in God. God established the standard of goodness within human beings before evil arose, and this is the standard by which they can fulfill God's purpose of creation.

This means that we all have an original nature through which God's purpose of creation can be realized. Our original nature always strives for God's purpose of goodness. It is innate and works naturally within us. The workings of conscience direct us in such a way that we will inevitably advance toward goodness.