Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 72
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 2: God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom
Speech 6: God’s True Love and Restoring His Relationship with Heaven, Earth and Humankind, pg 247-249
The goal of religion is the re-creation of human beings
We can say that a religious life is a course for remaking people. If there had been no Fall, religion would have been unnecessary. A religious life transforms people whose minds and bodies are in conflict due to the Fall into peaceful people who live in harmony and who will be God’s substantial object partners for eternity. It is the course that enables fallen people to change into original people of true character, resembling God.
When we look at our mind and body, the body is largely the base of the evil spirit Satan, and the conscience is the base of God. Generally speaking, the body directs the mind. Religions provide ways to weaken the body’s control over the mind. Religions teach that we need to deny our body. Thus, religions urge us to fast, to serve, to sacrifice ourselves, to go the way of suffering and even to offer our lives for the sake of righteousness. This is the logic behind the seemingly paradoxical teaching of the Bible, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) If you live only according to the desires of your body, you will go the way of death into hell; however, if you deny your body and enter the realm of a liberated conscience, you will have eternal life and be welcomed in the kingdom of heaven.
The person who is unable to bring his or her mind and body into oneness, and who allows this struggle to continue, will be unable to adjust to God’s ideal world of love, where there are no boundaries. Usually people say that in order to go to heaven or paradise, you have to believe in their particular religion. I tell you that heaven is the place for God’s children whose mind and body have become one centered on His love.
The love of the fallen world is usually a love centered on the self, a love fixed not on the mind but on the body. The body is the devil’s nightclub. Originally, your mind is supposed to take the subject position, representing God, but instead your body has become a stronger subject and plays with your original mind as with a puppet. This is what you have to change. Religion is the repair shop that God made to fix this. It is the repair shop that remakes people into completed individuals of true character, whose mind and body are one for eternity.
Religion teaches us not to rest but to pray unceasingly. The devil doesn’t rest; he uses the body as his horizontal stage twenty-four hours a day. As God is in the vertical position, He can only work through the vertical mind.
In order for your horizontal body not to be controlled by the devil, you need prayer and devotion to make your mind stand in the vertical position. By doing this you can receive power from God three or four times greater than the power of your body. And if you live a life of sincere prayer and devotion for three to five years, you can liberate your mind from the body’s horizontal and habitual influence.
Religion is the means to fulfill the providence of restoration
Respected leaders, ladies and gentlemen, leading a religious life is not something you can prefer to do or not to do. Fallen men and women were born with a connection to fallen parents through fallen love that is centered on Satan. Therefore, without exception all people absolutely need to pass through the repair shop of religion, meet the True Parents and establish a connection of true love and true life with them.
There is one important point you need to know. When you go to the repair shop, you cannot stay there forever. You need to come out reborn. While the religious life is the required course for all humankind, it is not the basic purpose or whole purpose of life. The ultimate purpose of human life is to graduate from the religious life, a life of restoration, and live as a men and women of the original world of creation.
Religion came about only because of the Fall. Hence, does it make sense to say that the sole purpose of life is to live buried in a religion? If there had been no Fall, how would men and women originally have lived? Human beings are originally the children of God. Thus, we are destined to live with true love, realize a true family and establish one world of freedom, peace, unity and happiness. We are supposed to live in the kingdom of heaven on earth.
God did not originally create men and women to have them break down so that He could repair them as His children reborn through religion. Do any parents want to see their children suffer in conflict, while endlessly repenting of their sins? Do you think the original Will of God the Father, the omniscient and omnipotent Lord of creation, was that His children suffer in sin?
This fallen world is not the world God originally planned. The first ancestors’ disobedience prevented God from realizing the world He had originally planned. However, God is absolute, and His Will is also absolute. Thus God will realize His Will as He had intended in the beginning. This Will is for complete recovery to the original state. This is why God’s providence of salvation is the providence of restoration, the providence of re-creation. Religion is the central means for the providence of restoration, however, people are not just supposed to meet True Parents and go through the course of a religious life. They are supposed to become God’s children, establish a Parent-child relationship with Him, attend God, and build a world where the values of faith are inherent in their daily life. No one in history revealed this precious truth, namely, that people must graduate from religious life. Knowing this truth from an early age, I did not want to create another sect or denomination.
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