Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 188
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 4: The True Family Movement
Speech 14: True Families: Gateway to Heaven, pg 663-666
Chapter 2: The Human Course Centered on Love
Section 6: Living in search of the center of love
Section 7: The three eras of the human course
Section 6. Living in search of the center of love
We are born in love, are raised in the love of our parents, and mature as we broaden our love horizontally. The first stage of horizontal love is completed when we meet a partner of the opposite sex and grow together to a point where we can represent the love of heaven and earth and then bear children as the fruits of that love. Children are born from the heart’s core as a result of love.
A child born from a man and woman who share love based on heart creates a path for the parents to the central point of love. If you go through this center and follow the path, you will meet God. By having children as fruits of love, you come to experience deeply the love by which God created all things, including you. When parents love their children with the same love they received as they grew up, they come to have a deep understanding of the parental heart. The love that parents pour out to their children is an essential love, not a love based on material things.
Even though everything else in heaven and earth may change with the eras of history, the love that parents give their children will never change. By becoming parents and loving our children, we come to understand much more deeply how God has loved human beings. We can confirm this through our experiences. By becoming parents and loving our children, we can feel how much our parents loved us and come to a deep realization about this.
This is why we honor and attend our parents more in their old age and willingly fulfill the duties of filial piety with love. If you are not able to do this, you are not qualified to be parents, and your love toward your children can be considered only hypocritical.
We need to realize and feel how much God has loved us by becoming parents ourselves and loving our children. This will let us love God with even greater sincerity. A person ought to love their aged parents more than they love their children, and love God more than they love their parents, knowing that this is the order and law of love.
When we are born, we are born in love. After birth, we receive love and grow through our childhood years. Once we grow to a certain level, our parents’ love alone is not enough for us, and we begin to expand our love horizontally to include love among siblings and love within the clan.
In other words, we mature as we receive all the love that exists in heaven and earth. In particular, as we enter the years of adolescence, we begin to crave the love of the opposite gender. It is by giving and receiving love with a person of the opposite gender that we are able to enter a realm of love that is much more comprehensive; then, for the first time, we are able to set out in search of the center of love. Because heaven and earth have a spherical shape, when we begin to rotate through giving and receiving horizontal love, we are able to form a circular shape.
When we find our partner of the opposite gender and begin to interact in love, our love bears fruit in our children. Then, as we give and receive love with our children, we fulfill vertical love in addition to horizontal love. This creates a spherical shape and enables us, at the same time, to establish the center of love.
The center of love that emerges through this movement of love is the core of existence for the entire world of creation. The earth exists because it continues to engage in motion around a center of love. At the center of love, an unlimited force sustains this movement. The center of this sphere of love is the place where God dwells.
All created beings in the world originate and exist by virtue of God’s love, and seek the center of God’s love. God is a furnace of love.
Section 7. The three eras of the human course
Everyone is born after a time spent in our mother’s womb. We live on earth for a certain time, and then we die. Prior to birth, the fetus spends about ten months in the mother’s womb. While in the womb, the fetus has limited freedom. It develops by receiving nutrients from the mother through the umbilical cord. About all it can do is bend its fingers, open and close its mouth, and wriggle its feet.
Nevertheless, for the fetus, the mother’s womb is a world of freedom representing the entirety of the realm of life. After about ten months, the fetus is born into the world and begins to grow. A child is born into this earthly world where we all live. This is human society.
Why are people born? We are born for the sake of love. This is the reason that a child, firmly rooted in parental love, will develop in the mother’s womb, the bosom of the parents’ protection and love. After the child is born, he or she won’t know any better and may wet the bed, but loving parents will not blame the child for this. Their love is such that they do not recognize ugliness as being ugly. Their love lets them digest everything in joy. When a child reaches maturity, at around twenty years of age, he or she would meet an eternal partner in love and be engrafted onto a love whereby each lives for the sake of the other, according to the principle of Heaven.
As we follow this life course, we need to experience the greatness of God’s love, so that the substantial realm of God’s love for all of His object partners can be fulfilled. Therefore we, as parents, need to have children and give our love to them.
After being born into the world, our lives can still be compared to the life of a fetus in our mother’s womb. In other words, we live in the womb of our mother universe for about a hundred years. Just as the fetus is ignorant of the world outside the womb, people living in the earthly world today are ignorant of the reality of the incorporeal world that comes after death.
We have only a vague sense that a world after death may exist, just as we did not know about the human world while in our mother’s womb. However, the spirit world exists in reality, regardless of our beliefs or feelings about it. Because the world after death cannot be perceived by our five physical senses, we must overcome our disbelief through religious faith.
There are three stages of our life course as human beings: the water stage, the land stage and the air stage. Everything, even the animals, exists in the realm of these three stages. In order to stand as the lords of creation and be qualified to have dominion over all other creatures, we must go through these three stages—in water, on land and in the air—in a more complete form than any other being, to prove ourselves superior to all other creatures. So we must go through an air stage.
However, we have no wings. How can we fly without wings? We ought to be able to fly higher and farther than any bird or insect. Then what can we do? This cannot happen in our physical body. No matter how high we may try to jump, it is no use.
Because human beings are the lords of creation, and because God is a spiritual being, we must have the same stage of operation as God if we are to stand in a realm of dominion in a reciprocal relationship with Him.
Today people speak of the speed of electricity or light, and we know that the speed of light is three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Human beings, however, are capable of a speed that is even faster. We attain this in the realm of the human spirit.
We live in this world, but it is not everything. There is the spirit world, the place where our spirits are meant to live for eternity. It is an eternal world filled with the air of love. Our physical lives are a time of preparation for entering the eternal world of spirit.
FFWPU, USA