Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 51
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 1: The Principles of True Peace
Speech 15: Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom, Pg 181-184
Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom
March 23, 2004
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, USA Coronation Ceremony for the King of Peace of the Third Israel and Ambassador for Peace Awards Ceremony
Respected members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, religious leaders from around the world, distinguished guests: I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your presence here this evening in such large numbers, in spite of your busy schedules.
Ladies and gentlemen, the starting point to unravel the problems humanity faces today is in knowing God, with certainty, as the Parent of all creation and on that foundation the building of true families that live in attendance to God. This calls for us to establish and attend God in our families, conceptually and as the substantial Parent of us all. To do this, we have to first clarify the relationship between God and humankind. God is the original entity of true love, true life, and true lineage, and God is the True Parent of all people.
Perfected human beings automatically go to heaven
If human beings had not fallen, we would have reached perfection in God’s true love as true children and lived in attendance to God as our Parent. God’s plan was for perfected human beings to bond as true husbands and wives, bear and raise true children so that they would live in the kingdom of heaven on earth, and then live together eternally in the heavenly world as families in the kingdom of heaven.
Think about it for a moment. If your father went to hell and only your mother went to heaven, what kind of heaven would that be? If your parents were to go to hell and only your children went to heaven, how could that be called heaven? The kingdom of heaven is where the whole family lives together in an eternal peace kingdom. On earth as well, God will reside where a whole family has established a kingdom of heaven. In such a family, the world of God’s original ideal, the kingdom of heaven on earth, takes root.
The path to realizing family heaven on earth
How, then, are we to bring about this family heaven on earth? First, each member of the family has to complete his or her individual character. Each person has to shed the fallen nature that has passed from the Fall down through the generations and achieve the perfection of his or her character. Each person has to become victorious in the struggle between mind and body. Then the world of harmony will bear fruit in each individual’s perfected character, a state of one heart, one body, and one thought. Fallen nature, which causes jealousy, envy, greed, hatred, and all other evils, will never again take root in a person who has achieved this state.
Shedding one’s fallen nature is not easy. The reality of fallen human beings is that we vacillate even when trying to break habits like smoking or drinking alcohol, which are formed during the relatively short span of a few years or decades. We cannot expect, then, that it will be easy to cast off fallen nature, which we inherit through lineage going back thousands, even tens of thousands of years.
This is impossible by human effort alone. We need to stand on the foundation of absolute faith and strive our entire life to establish God as our vertical axis. Even then, it is a difficult fight. We cannot think we will gain victory unless we enter a state of absolute love for God, loving God even more than we love our own parents and children, and attending God as our True Parent. We cannot hope to win this fight without a foundation of absolute obedience, following God even at the cost of laying down our lives. Herein lies the reason why religions consider practicing spiritual disciplines such as fasting, sexual abstinence, sacrifice, and penance to be of utmost importance. We can be born again, recast as new persons in whom Heaven can reside and with whom the spirit world can cooperate. In such a state, we will not have anything of which to be ashamed, even if our entire life and being is exposed before all of God’s creation. We need to be people of upright character, of “high noon settlement,” casting not even the slightest shadow. When we achieve this, Satan will flee from our presence for eternity.
Perfecting the four realms of heart leads us to the heavenly kingdom
Individuals who achieve maturity of character come together to form true families, and the members of these families work together to establish what I call the “four great realms of heart.” Such families resemble an individual who has accomplished the complete oneness of mind and body. The kingdom of heaven is a place we enter family by family. Not every family, however, is qualified to enter Heaven automatically. You need a foundation to be a true family and to complete the four great realms of heart. A true family that can enter the kingdom of heaven is composed of true individuals who have each engaged fully in the four great realms of heart and whose lineage centers on God.
What do I mean then by the four great realms of heart? I refer to the heart of parents, the heart between a husband and wife, the heart of children, and the heart of siblings. This is found in a true family bound by God’s original true love, true life, and true lineage through a pure three-generational lineage of grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren. Here, the love between parents and children establishes the vertical relationship between upper and lower, the love between the husband and wife establishes the horizontal relationship that brings left and right into definitive oneness, and the love between siblings establishes the relationship between front and back. In this way, God’s ideal of creation is no longer a mere concept or dream. It is perfected in reality through the completion of the four great realms of heart centered on true lineage, family by family.
The realm of parental heart is acquired naturally as parents go through the process of bearing children and then raising and educating them with true love. In other words, it is the heart that enables the parents to own true love with respect to the children. With no relationship to children, no one can own love as a parent.
Next, the realm of conjugal heart is the love relationship that extends true lineage. In this, husband and wife each are grateful for the other having established them as an owner of love, and each learns true love through giving and receiving with the other. They learn and experience true love when the husband lives for the sake of his wife, even if it means sacrificing his own life, and the wife attends her husband with the heart of attending God. The perfection of the husband-wife relationship is possible only on this basis.
The moment a bride and groom share love with God’s blessing on their wedding night, they inherit the palace of true love, true life, and true lineage. The wife, through her husband, receives God’s ideal son, who is also Heaven’s older brother, Heaven’s husband, and Heaven’s parent. The husband stands in the corresponding position in receiving his wife as Heaven’s older sister, Heaven’s wife, and Heaven’s parent. When the realm of conjugal heart is perfected, the relationship between the husband and wife also becomes absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, because God is absolute, unique, unchanging, and eternal. The notion of divorce will become obsolete. Theirs will be a life of happiness, filled with only blossoming flowers of mutual respect and love.
FFWPU, USA