The Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace
Founder's Address
REV. DR. SUN MYUNG MOON
IIFWP Convocation
"God and World Peace"
December 27, 2002
Sheraton National Hotel
Arlington, Virginia
Present and former heads of state from around the world, eminent religious leaders, peace ambassadors from various nations, representatives of all aspects of society, respected ladies and gentlemen:
I would like to thank you for participating in this profoundly significant conference, where we will explore fundamental issues regarding the realization of a world of peace, which is a common ideal shared by all humanity.
At this time when the need for peace and security is more acute and critical than ever before, we who are leaders in our various fields share a grave responsibility to resolve issues related to discord and war and to the evil and unhappiness derived from the world that holds God at a distance.
The God of True Love
In accordance with Heaven's will, I have offered my life over the years to investigate the difficult issues facing humanity and offer a plan for implementing fundamental solutions. Today I would like to speak about a portion of this plan. The words I speak do not come from theological research or from any books. I speak rather of fundamental principles that I have learned through experience, as I overcame all manner of difficulties and communed directly with God and spirit world.
The path of following Heaven's will in a state of empathy with God is not one that many people can find through common sense. I would like to tell you, however, that one who opens his or her original mind and exercises keen insight can discover a new consciousness by which to perceive the spirit world and the will of God, who lives and carries out His work in the world of reality.
This conference will not analyze the afflictions and despair of modern humanity nor the symptoms of crisis in the modern age, but rather will investigate the foundation for the ideal of peace. We can identify and treat the root of the disease. For this, we should know the original relationship between God and ourselves, a relationship that lies at the foundation of the universe, and enlighten ourselves as to the will of God who lives and carries out His providence in history.
God is the original entity of true love. True love has the attribute of unconditional giving and giving again, of investing and not remembering the investment and then investing again, and of living for the sake of others time and time again. The reason righteous people and evil people alike are allowed to breathe the same air within the atmosphere God created is that God, though He is all powerful, is the original entity of true love. This is also the reason that good people and sinners alike are able to carry on their lives by tilling the fields and enjoying the blessings of nature.
Exercising His almighty and absolute power, God at any time could carry out a summary judgment on sinful humanity, but He has embraced the world of sin with true love these long years, enduring the pain and waiting for us to repent. God, our Creator and Father, has been subjected to all manner of insults from those who refuse to believe in Him, who betray Him, and who go so far as to claim that He does not exist or is dead. In spite of all this, He has endured with an unchanging heart. Since God knew that love is perfected only with a partner, He has been working to build a world of love through His love partner.
Respected leaders, have any of you ever heard God complain? Have you ever met a God who gave excuses? In the beginning, God established true love as the absolute standard, and He took the lead in demonstrating absolute obedience to that ideal as He created and carried out His providence. Just as the ocean takes in all manner of sewage and garbage and then cleanses itself, God as the original entity of absolute true love cleanses the human world that deviated from the principles of His creation and works to bring this world to complete goodness.
God is the absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher, and absolute True Owner centering on true love. So God needed an object partner to whom He could give His true love. This was His motivation for creating. God's creation was a necessary act. The creative ideal of true love cannot be realized by a being existing alone. This ideal exists so that God can share with human beings the joy of His exalted and righteous will. When we understand the God of true love correctly, it is self-evident that this unhappy world of sin and strife was not His original plan.
God's Ideal of Creation
God carried out His creative act with the utmost sincerity, dedication and investment. He established the standard of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and then invested absolutely. All created beings are the object partner entities of love that God created by investing with ultimate sincerity.
Among these, God created human beings, the most precious of all beings, to have the closest relationship with Him, the relationship of child and parent. God is our incorporeal True Parent and we are His sons and daughters, or His substantial object partners.
In the world of true love, there is no difference in value between large and small or high and low. To be one in true love is to generously form a single harmonious entity with no bad feelings over the distinctions of upper and lower or among different strata. The unity that results between true subject and object partners will exist forever without interruption. So in true love, subject and object partners share a common value, common participation and common residence, and there is the right of inheritance between them. Thus human beings achieve completion within God's love and inherit His position as absolute parents, absolute teachers and absolute owners.
In this way, God's plan is to have His children, human beings, perfect the true love ideal and become one with Him, residing with Him and inheriting all that is His. True freedom and equality, true peace and unification, and true ideals and happiness can exist eternally only within true love. So true love is the fountainhead from which springs the power and life of all beings in creation, and it is the fountainhead of joy and happiness. True love is the absolute element that brings happiness, hope and peace.
Often, the relationship between God and humanity is viewed from the perspective of majesty and holiness, and it is concluded that God and humanity will exist in dramatically different dimensions for all time. Certainly, the Creator occupies a level that differs from His creation. And yet the original relationship that is most central and meaningful is the true love relationship between parent and child. True love makes unity possible in the relationship between internal character and external form and between male and female. Human beings were created to become one in heart with God, to share the same rank as God in true love, and to experience an inseparable parent-child bond with God that enables us to relate with Him through our strongest emotions in daily life. God's ideal of creation entails His being perfected along with human beings, who would become His partners in love as His sons and daughters. This apotheosis is the accomplishment of the ideal of true love.
To summarize, God's purpose in creating the human ancestors Adam and Eve was for them to establish a family of goodness that would bring to ripeness the fruit of God's true love, true life and true lineage. With the family as their foundation, Adam and Eve were to nurture the heart of the children, heart of siblings, heart of husband and wife, and heart of parents. In the process, as discrete projections of God's dual characteristics of masculinity and femininity they were to master God's love step-by-step and bring it to safe settlement and perfection.
If the true love ideal centering on God had been created in this manner in Adam's family, it would have become the first family of the Kingdom of Heaven. Also, the Kingdom of Heaven family ideal, centering at its origin on Adam and Eve as True Parents, would have expanded in scope naturally into tribes, peoples, nations and the world. The tradition of the family of true love would have become the tradition of the world.
In this world, the united center would be the incarnate True Parents, who resemble and inherit all the attributes of the spiritual absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher, and absolute True Owner, God. In the Kingdom of Heaven of true love, the vertical axis is created by the incarnate True Parents who are one with God. Centering on this axis, all instances of upper and lower, left and right, front and back, and internal and external occurring among created entities are in harmony. Thus, all creation dwells in freedom, peace, unification and happiness.
When we come to the end of our life on earth in the physical body, our spirit self transitions into the spirit world, which is the ultimate world. It is an extension of our life on earth and also a place where we are to perfect the Kingdom of Heaven ideal. If this had come to pass in the beginning, there would have been no need for God's salvation providence through religions or the advent of the Messiah.
The Human Ancestors' Fall and the Providence of Restoration
Unfortunately, as a result of the fall of Adam and Eve, God's intended Kingdom of Heaven ideal in Adam's family was not realized. This was because Adam and Eve became false parents when they indulged in false love centering on Satan. They formed a false husband-wife partnership and false family that had no relation to God's blessing, and bequeathed false life and false lineage to their descendants. They left God in grief, with the original lineage altered by the enemy, Satan.
In this way, they lost God and did not establish the temple in which they were to have lived in attendance to God. In fact, their bodies became the den of Satan's devils, and their spiritual desire to seek absolute value shut down, rendering them incapable of knowing about the spirit world, which is the ultimate world. Because the first human ancestors deformed themselves, all human beings as their descendants never knew that God is our True Father. We inherited Satan's selfish desires and lived unrighteous, self-centered lives parading our fallen nature. Not even knowing that human beings were created as brothers and sisters to attend one God, we lived in sin, strife and dispute. We do not know that to kill another is to kill oneself, and so we live in unhappiness.
The world inherits the tradition of Adam's family in which Cain killed his own brother Abel. The outcome for us descendants of false love is the unhappiness, sin and ruin seen in family breakdown, the moral degradation of youth, and diseases such as AIDS.
Look at the world. The acute crisis of the modern age is manifested in mind-body struggle, the confusion of values, criminality, drug abuse, the breakdown of the family that holds humanity's future in the balance, the destruction of the environment, conflict and hatred, terror and war, and even conflict between religions and civilizations. With each passing day, this crisis becomes more serious, more complex and more pervasive. We can no longer stand by and do nothing as the world careens forward on this course. There is no time left. Who can take responsibility for this world? Where is the leader who will present a fundamental plan to solve the world's problems?
At the same time that human beings lost God, we also lost true love, peace and happiness. Throughout history, we have tried to liberate ourselves from unhappiness and achieve peace on our own, excluding God from the process. Such efforts were fundamentally flawed. We cannot defuse the crisis through human effort alone. True peace and happiness have their origin in God's true love, true life and true lineage.
God is absolute and so His will for the creation is also absolute. This means that God is working to reverse what went wrong as a result of the fall and return back to the original state. So God's providence of salvation is a providence of restoration. Its purpose is to recover the original world that existed prior to the fall. In other words, God's purpose is to establish a restored Adam and Eve, or True Parents, centering on true love. It is to establish the original true world by having them receive the marriage blessing. Once that is accomplished, their true family will be the point of origin for true tribes, peoples, nations and the world.
Respected leaders, following God's call through indescribable hardship, I have established the foundation for peace to settle in various fields of life. More than 30 years ago, I founded the Unification Thought Institute and began to guide the field of philosophy. Since 1972, I have sponsored nearly 30 global meetings of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, for the purpose of exploring absolute value and creating harmony and unity among the various fields of learning. I founded and have continuously supported a movement for peace transcending individual nations; this movement for peace includes the work of the Professors World Peace Academy, the Summit Council for World Peace, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, CAUSA, the Federation for World Peace, the Federation of Island Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Peninsular Nations for World Peace, the Federation of Continental Nations for World Peace, and the Citizens' Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland. I have also promoted culture and the arts, fostered peace through sports, and developed elementary, middle school, high school and university level educational institutions. I founded and supported the Women's Federation for World Peace, various media organizations for the purpose of bringing about responsible and ethical journalism, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, the Youth Federation for World Peace, the Pure Love Alliance, international conferences on the environment, the International Relief and Friendship Foundation, Service for Peace, the Religious Youth Service, the voluntary service organization Aewon, the World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Holy Blessing and true family movement. I have supported efforts to renew the United Nations for the sake of achieving God's desire for peace. These are some of the initiatives for national and worldwide salvation that I have instituted around the globe. I have pursued these efforts continuously, without funding from any government or major corporation, even in the midst of unsympathetic public opinion and outright persecution. All I had, as I worked to lay the foundation for the establishment of the ideal world, was my determination to fulfill the mission of humanity's True Parent that God entrusted to me, and to accomplish God's will.
In bringing about the ideal of peace implicit in God's true love, it is most important that the various religions achieve harmony with each other and provide a model for the world. Withstanding the cold-hearted attitudes and persecution by narrow-minded religious bodies in various countries, I have laid my greatest emphasis on creating a movement for unity and cooperation among religions, nations and NGOs. I have offered all manner of sacrifice as I did everything that I could to build one world in this area, including founding an interdenominational seminary, the New Ecumenical Research Association, the Council for the World's Religions, the Youth Seminar on World Religions, the Assembly of the World's Religions, publishing World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, continuously supporting conferences for harmony among religions, and founding the Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace.
Taking this a step further, I founded the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP) as an overarching structure for unification and world peace that would go beyond the goal of harmony among the religions and embrace leaders in the fields of academia, politics, journalism, finance, and NGO's, where foundations have already been laid.
Since the founding of IIFWP in February 1999, we have appointed tens of thousands of leaders in a wide variety of fields from 189 countries as Ambassadors for Peace. Reflecting my philosophy of peace, these ambassadors are practicing true love by living for the sake of others, and are engaged in many important activities that help to break down barriers between nations, races and religions. Their practical activities range from AIDS prevention and service projects, to true family development, youth and leadership education, and environmental improvement.
Godism and Headwing Thought
My philosophy is Headwing Thought based on Godism. This thought places God, the standard of absolute value and our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, in the absolute center. When human beings live in accordance with the Three Great Subject Body Thought, attending God in our life in the spirit world and on earth as our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, and living as His object partners, this will be the Kingdom of Heaven and the place where true love is practiced.
We had better overcome atheistic and Communist philosophies that deny God and the spirit world, as well as the secular humanism and moral relativism that ignore the importance of absolute value and the vertical standard. It is time to overcome the hypocritical faith in God's name that lacks true love, and abandon all selfish works that violate original human rights and result in injustice. The Headwing Thought that I propose transcends right and left wing, breaks down the walls between countries, races and religions, and brings about a broad and unified harmony centering on the absolute God. This task should be carried out with the help of both heaven and earth. We are in a great transition, and during this time the United Nations and the nations of the world must unite and cooperate with one another.
Modern society is a world lacking an ideology or system of absolute philosophy. There are no absolute values that apply with consistency to individuals, families, societies, nations, the world and the cosmos. This is the reason that thinking has become confused, human relationships disordered, and human society chaotic. Facing unreflective pluralism and modernization, and without a basic axis in their hearts and daily lives, people in the modern age suffer an ever-worsening confusion of values.
We face endless temptations to live in slavery to the physical appetites and drift through life aimlessly, but we must never turn away from a life based on values. Absolute value is our vertical axis. The center of absolute value is God's true love expressed in living for the sake of others.
Respected leaders, I will tell you right now that peace is not something that is realized first in the external world. It is realized first in each individual. It requires first that there be individuals who have achieved harmonious unification within. As a result of the fall, conflict arose between mind and body. To control human beings, Satan uses the body as his stronghold. He has turned us away from our original nature and our spiritual nature and toward the satisfaction of selfish and individualistic needs. The only path to escape Satan's dominion lies within God's true love lineage.
If you live unselfishly for the sake of others and work for the sake of others, Satan will not be able to follow you. This is because Satan is essentially selfish. This is why fallen human beings can change their character and recover their spiritual nature through the practice of God's true love. Our faith cannot be in a conceptual God; we need a true faith that connects us to the living God.
Because God originally created us as the object partners of His true love, we are able to practice this true love naturally. Values such as truth, goodness and beauty appear in the practice of love. People whose minds and bodies have become one in God's true love are individual embodiments of truth, happiness and tranquility, satisfaction and peace. Such subject bodies of character are prerequisite for a world of peace.
Second, no institutions or power, material or knowledge, or any other external factors will bring about the world of peace. Only the true love of living for the sake of others will accomplish it. True peace, unification and happiness cannot be found apart from a loving relationship of living for the sake of others. This is the basic principle of God's creation. Unconditional giving, investing and loving for the sake of an object partner are both the cause and purpose of God's creation.
God created us in His image, as beings whose purpose is to live for the sake of others. It is only by living for the sake of others that people can become central beings, become subject entities of peace and unification, and become the eternal owners of love and ideals. We can find the path to meet God, our absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, receive His inheritance, and then ourselves become true parents, true teachers and true owners, only in a life of true love and of living for the sake of others. On the path of true love, parties overcome conflict and division naturally, harmonizing and uniting the environment. This is not conquest through struggle; instead, it is a path of natural subjugation bringing eternal unification.
Third, the basic unit of the world of peace is not the nation; it is the peaceful family. The basic unit is the family formed by a man and a woman who have the character to attend God, a man and woman who have each accomplished harmonious mind-body union and are joined by God in His Holy Blessing. These are the first blessed families in history, established through the True Parents. These are peaceful and happy families. True love joins their members in harmonious union. When these families multiply, they will bring about a world of peaceful tribes, peoples and nations. In God's original ideal, humankind is one family under one God and the cosmos is one family centering on true love. The place of resolution for the problems of the family centering on True Parents is the foundation for the world of peace. In the ideal world of blessed families based on true love, there can be no barriers of nationality, race or religion.
Respected leaders, humanity is to find God and escape from our ignorance concerning our spiritual True Parent. Living within the eternal and profound order of this universe that manifests His omniscience and omnipotence, we shall never again make the mistake of having ingratitude to our Creator for His magnificent accomplishments. Fallen humanity is to rid itself of the arrogance that says we are the owners of our own life. Instead, we will nurture an enlightened spirituality in the presence of the absolute nature of God's true love.
God is our True Parent. It is time to discover the living God, whose heart to invest greater true love is firm, absolute and eternal. We need to know the heart of God, who created humanity as the object partner who would inherit His absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal true love, true life and true lineage completely.
In this way, we will establish God -- the absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner -- and the True Parents as the axis of absolute value for the individual, family, nation, world and cosmos. This will be the basis for our life as individuals, families, nations and the world. We will feel the desire to follow without change for eternity the path of tradition set by the Parents of Heaven and Earth, the path of living in true love for the sake of others. If we do that, then we can resolve all problems, whether of the family, society, race or religion.
We will arrive in an age in which God and humankind live as one in the original ideal world, the world of heart. We will arrive in an age where we realize that living for the sake of others holds greater eternal value than living for ourselves. The blind age of self-centered life will pass away, as we build an other-centered world of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values. For this purpose, let us attain correct knowledge about God and the spirit world; let us lead humanity on the correct path by testifying to the world about God's true love, true life and true lineage; and let us build the universal family of Heaven and Earth in God's fatherland and homeland on earth. Let us complete the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and in Heaven through the absolute love, unique love, unchanging love and eternal love that seeks to live for the sake of others, and offer Heavenly Kingship to God.
May God bless you, your family and your country. Thank you
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