Cheon Seong Gyeong: Episode 71

Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 3: True Love
Chapter 2: The Realms of True Love
Section 1: Grandparent's Love, 08
Section 2.  Parents' Love, 10

 

Forgetfulness is natural in the elderly

(8) You should not ignore your mother and father when they become forgetful. You should not scorn your forgetful mother and father, who are to go to the heavenly world without remembering all the extraneous details of their life on earth. Their original heart right now is to build a bridge and construct a road for their descendants to follow. Parents represent God. Our first ancestor is God. We have to attend four generations of ancestors on earth: our great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. If you attend these ancestors more than you do your own spouse and children, your family will prosper for tens of thousands of years.

(9) People are born through love and become the substance of love; they have to begin in love and end in love. They meet the one they love and have children, love those children, become a child again themselves and then go to the spirit world.  Forgetfulness is not a bad thing. We should not view it as a bad thing. When parents become old, it is a good time for the children to give back, without reserve, based on their obligation to their parents for having raised them.

(10 A grandfather and grandmother wish to love their grandchildren more than they do their own children. When they raised their own children, they were too busy and had no spare time to love them, but this is not the case when they become a grandfather and grandmother. They are preparing to go to the spirit world. They become forgetful in order to become friends with children. They themselves return to being pure and childlike. They become pure and childlike, forgetting father and mother and brothers and sisters.

(11) When you grow old, you have to become friends with babies. Your grandchildren become your friends. You have to return to the kingdom of heaven as a pure person with no desires. Children naturally grow, but grandmothers and grandfathers are slowly closing down, day by day. They came from zero and return to zero. That means returning to the origin. Since we begin life without character, pride or desire, we have to return to that place in order to connect to Heaven. In the same way that parents raise children, the family and the country have to take care of their grandparents and help them return to the heavenly world.

(12) Why do the elderly become forgetful? It is because they have to move from the visible world to the invisible world. To prepare to cross that barrier, they become forgetful. They become simple. As a baby is born to meet a flat plane at high noon, the elderly become like newborn babies to meet the three-dimensional God. That means they move from the flat world to the three-dimensional world. When they die, they are reborn with concrete hope. Man and woman unite and advance toward the three-dimensional world. Then they walk into the spirit world.  Representing the dual characteristics, they march toward the high noon of love centered on God, the multidimensional subject partner with dual characteristics.  From there they embark on a new time of youth.

(13) When love is your center, the gap between the spirit world and the physical world breaks down and you are liberated from the fear of death. Death is not a fearful thing. You know where you are going. This is why most of the elderly people who are forgetful become more and more interested in the spirit world. They know in advance, "Yes, I will have to go sometime soon. It's time to prepare.” This means they forget everything on earth, arrange everything neatly and cleanly and then go.  Please do not look down on those who are forgetful. Neglecting the present gives people time to correct everything in their past and clean up the sins of their ancestors.

(14) When you become sixty and then seventy, your spiritual awareness develops.  This is so you can prepare to go to the spirit world. This is why you don't remember practical things and become forgetful. Throughout our life, what we most enjoy, remember and store in our consciousness is loving and eating. Therefore elderly grandfathers and grandmothers are fond of looking for things to eat, and when they miss people, they cry. This is human instinct. Life is sustained by eating. The paramount value of life and love is revealed by the fact that the elderly miss those they love and miss eating certain foods. This is inevitable. It is an instinctive desire, perfectly in accord with the principle of creation.

Section 2.  Parents' Love

(1) Children are the substantial manifestation of their parents' love and investment.  They are an extension of their parents' life and the embodiment of their parents' ideals. Those who have given birth to children and loved them know this. They say to their beloved children, "You are the embodiment of my love, the extension of my life and the realization of my ideals. You are a second me." Because children are born on the basis of the parents' love, life and ideals, the more the parents see their children, the more they find them lovable, the more vibrant their lives become and the more they discover in their children their ideal object partners.

Unchanging parental love

(2) The love of a father and mother is vertical. It is the model of love and the basis for tradition. It is vertical love, and that which is vertical is unchanging. Because conjugal love involves the connection of vertical love to the horizontal plane, divorce is possible, but severing the parent-child relationship is impossible. This is heavenly law, and it is so because it is vertical love. That which is horizontal has four directions and can move throughout 360 degrees, but that which is vertical occupies only one point. It cannot be moved.

(3) The most precious love of all is parental love. This is because true love travels by the most direct route. Parental love is the vertical expression of true love. Vertical love occupies only one point and cannot be divided. If you change that position, you are turning heaven and earth upside down. No matter how capable you are, no matter how skillful you are, if you shift the position of vertical love, you make heaven and earth grow dark; you turn it into hell. Since love travels along the shortest route, it intersects the horizontal plane at a perpendicular angle.  You cannot damage this love; you can't put it aside. It is only one. It is absolute.  Because the parent-child relationship is vertical and perpendicular, no power can sever it.

(4) Parents are unique, unchanging and eternal. Who your parents are cannot change. Because of this, parental love is unaffected by social or political revolutions. No matter how many of those come and go, parental love is not affected; it lasts forever. Parents, as subject partners of love, need their object partners absolutely. They need them uniquely, unchangingly and eternally.

(5) A mother and father do not keep accounts of their sacrifices for their children, how much they worked at night to feed them and send them to school. They don't calculate their investment or expect a return, saying, "I have spent this amount on you; in ten years it will be worth this much, including interest." Instead, they invest everything without keeping track of it and forget what they have invested. The principle of creation tells us that only in sacrifice can you find true love. This is why parents are good. Parental love is the best thing. People without parents are called orphans. Being an orphan is very sad. An orphan has no roots and so cannot set his or her direction in place.

(6) When parents raise their children, specifically, while a mother feeds her baby, she does not say, "Later, when you understand things, you'd better remember that I am the one who raised you." A parent like that would not be normal. If you want to be that way, I suggest you raise a cow and ask it to help you with your work. No parent would request of his or her child, "I have loved you this much, so you have to repay me more than that amount." You sacrifice for a person you love. You give and give and still feel it is not enough; you want to give and give and keep on giving more. This way of love continuously brings us to feel ultimate value and provides constant hope for the future.

(7) Even in this fallen world, a mother who loves her children invests in them and then repeatedly forgets how much she has given; she serves and sacrifices for their sake, hoping they will do well. Even Though her child fails to attain success, until her dying moment she wants to continue to invest. This is the love of a mother. That is how it is even in this fallen world. When children come to know their mother was like this, they will go to her grave and tearfully ask her to forgive their unfilial behavior. Even Though it is too late, they will repent, resolving to turn around 180 degrees and fulfill their duty to her. This filial piety is not a way of clever strategies or methods. This is the way of love, of truly sacrificing and offering one's flesh and blood.

(8) Parents' love toward their children does not appear just on the basis of routine, everyday interactions. It is a love that springs from the very marrow of the parents' bones. The parents have a heart of love that, beyond their own will, they can never forget or cut off. Therefore parents love their children as long as they live. When parents feel that their lives are connected with their children, a loving heart toward their children naturally springs up. Parents don't make a conscious choice in saying, "I am going to love that child because he is my son," as if they could do otherwise. They share heart and connection. The life force that connects them guarantees they cannot help loving their children.

(9) What is true love? This is love for the sake of others; it gives and gives for a thousand years and wants to forget how much it has given. It does not remember.  In the world of love, the output is greater than input. Parents will say to their son when he leaves the house, "Son, watch for cars when you cross the road today," even if he is seventy. Even at ninety years of age, parents will never tire of this; they will continue to say It every day, even to eternity. This is love. Knowing that parental love is like this even in our fallen world, do you think you would get tired of loving when you are in the original world of God's love? This is the first step in establishing our life's realm as God's true object partner. When we come to know that God's love is eternal and unchanging, from our experience with human love we can deduce the logic of eternal life. We conclude that by centering on true love, we live for eternity.

(10) In loving their children, parents do not announce, "Parents should be like this" and love their children according to certain theories. Parents do not assert themselves but deny themselves. That is, they love their children without regard for position. In other words, parents do not love their children based upon their authority as parents, and always and only from this imposing position. Instead, they take a higher stance by loving their children without a hit of concern for their status of authority. This is the heart with which parents love their children.