Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 122
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 3: The Mission of Religion in Achieving God’s Ideal
Speech 9: The Fundamental Truth, pg 423-426
There is a saying to the effect, “When one’s home is harmonious, all goes well.” For one’s home to be harmonious and for everything to go well, the relationship between the grandfather and the grandmother needs to be ideal. The relationship between husband and wife and the relationships between siblings need to be ideal. It will not work if the grandfather and grandmother are happy only by themselves, or if the husband and wife or the siblings are happy only among themselves. Only when the grandfather, the grandmother, the parents and the sons and daughters are all in harmony vertically and horizontally, from front to back, and from left to right, can the home be harmonious.
It is difficult for the home to be harmonious. Why is this so? It is because the body and mind are fighting each other within our individual self. The thirty-eighth parallel is not the problem and the wars of the world are not the problem. After all, what is the cause of war? The origin of war is found within the self.
Religion requires a lifestyle of denying the desires of the body and following the dictates of the mind
Humankind consists of men and women. And each of them has two sides, mind and body. In believing in a religion, do you believe in it with your mind and body or with only your mind? It would be ideal for you to believe in it with your mind and body united. When they are not united, God centers first on the mind, which is the subject partner, in order to bring them into oneness.
When the mind is said to be upright, it means it is vertical. You must become completely one with God centering on the mind and then unite the body as one with the mind. This is the task today’s religious believers need to fulfill in the course of their lives. You need to live together with God and stand in a position where you know the Will of God. In other words, you need to live centering on the Will of God. However, the body does not follow willingly. Since the mind is in the plus position, how nice it would be if the body would just take the minus position. The body, however, tries to take the plus position. Because both are in the plus position, they can only repel each other.
Then how can they be brought into unity? There are two ways of doing so. First, find the fundamental truth, achieve an attitude of absoluteness with a strong faith and an unchanging mind, and thus weaken the body. In short, practice asceticism.
Is there anyone who likes to practice asceticism? Is there anyone in this world who enjoys carrying out ascetic practices? Out of the thousands and tens of thousands of practitioners, not one of them enjoys it. If there are millions of Buddhists, would there be even one among them who enjoys practicing asceticism? The answer is no.
This being the case, can the ideal possibly be realized by forcing people to perform an ascetic practice? This would be self-defeating. Since it is impossible to achieve the ideal by practicing asceticism even by force, the notion that you can reach perfection when being forced into it is absurd. At the same time, the life of religion is one of denying the body.
The second way is to center on the mind in the plus position. This places the body in the minus position, and once the body is in the minus position, there is no need to say they are to unite as one. When the body is returned to the minus position, the body and the mind can be brought into oneness.
There are some people who deny God. But what they are really doing is complaining that God failed to create human beings in such a way that we would not have to deny our body. Although we do not know the reason why, it is true that human beings are disordered. There are Buddhist monks who, no matter how much they cultivate their mind and recite Buddhist canons, cannot rid themselves of their lust for meat. That desire is alive in them. You have no idea how strong it is. No matter how much devotion they offer and how much they train their mind, it does not work out well. The path they tread, and their process of advancing toward that world, is set like a formula.
Then why do you need to make your body suffer through following a religion? It is to weaken it so it can be made to follow the conscience. You need to weaken your body and drag it around for about three years, until it becomes used to such treatment. This is for the purpose of emphasizing faith absolutely. You absolutely can’t think about anything else. Leaving behind your mother and father, siblings, the person you love and the miscellaneous things of the nation and the world, you have to try to train your body to be absolutely submissive before the standard of morality and thus find the point at which the mind and body can unite. All religions must teach this. Otherwise development cannot take place in the religious world, and a revolution of character cannot come about.
This is why you need to abstain from eating, practice other forms of asceticism, and go out into the society to be persecuted and receive opposition. In order to achieve the purpose of morality, no matter how much your body clamors, complaining that it is on the verge of death, you must to ignore it. The life of religion is a life of self-denial through which you make your body obedient before your mind and thus find your true self. Those religious people who have not achieved this are frauds. Based on this universally valid viewpoint, a person who says he or she will train his or her body to reach a level that is higher than what is taught by the scriptures, in order to bring his or her conscience and body into accord, is a true practitioner of that person’s religion.
I am sorry to say this, but if Buddhist monks were to marry and have sons and daughters, how difficult it would be for them to achieve a state of unity in the world of the mind while caring for their family! How difficult it would be for them to carry out all their family responsibilities! Don’t they renounce the world and leave their homes in order to reduce such problems?
What is to be done after one has renounced the world? After a man and a woman have fulfilled their goal and completely achieved the standard of morality, they can become one. This is why in the Last Days the era of the power achieved through asceticism will come to an end, and a time will come when all those who have achieved the moral standard will marry as a matter of course.
In the secular world, many problems arise because people marry in the wrong fashion. That world has become a nest of demons, a nest of devils, a nest of Satan. God will say to these people, “You accursed, you are following a path that goes against morality, centering on earth-bound ethics, and so you will come to ruin. In order to set you right, you need to have an example. Buddhist priests ought to marry, and priests and nuns ought to marry, to set an example for you.” Can such a thing be found in the scriptures? It is not in the scriptures.
The four great saints are all leaders of morality. They are the founders of religions. Centering on the founders of religions throughout the course of thousands of years of history, humanity has become gradually enlightened. Heaven, or God, is the Absolute God at the center of history and propels heavenly fortune. Since the intentions of the moral leaders were good, God established them and used them as models for the rest of us. Therefore, you cannot say, “Our moral leader is God!” It is a serious problem when you say your moral leader is the Absolute God.
FFWPU, USA