Living the Principle - Updating our thinking process

I’ve procrastinated a long time writing this paper. How to express my thoughts without having people feel I’m reinventing the Principle or reinterpreting it? Instead, I’m looking at the fashion in which we are living the Principle, in particular our thought processes. This is not religion. I’m telling my story.

Among the readers, I believe there will be some who will understand and relate to my experiences and thought patterns. I’m writing this as we have recently entered the age of Heavenly Parents Church, as declared by True Mother. These are but a few ideas; I hope more people pitch in and give their thoughts.

Without being too coarse I’d like to start by saying that I have followed religion for 45 years now, not without reservation. Religion is a necessity. The Divine Principle is a necessity, as are True Parents. Without True Parents in particular I cannot write these papers nor can I find my way back to God. I see religion, especially the Divine Principle, as a restoration tool, whose purpose is to reverse the evil tendencies of our dark minds. It has come down to us very symbolically. Was it necessarily so? Father says human history is hundreds of thousands of years old..at least1, he mentioned this in several of his speeches. Science is slowly reaching that age. Father was a firm believer in math and science2, i.e., a clear, logical thinker.

If indeed there had been an Adam & Eve at the onset of human history, when and where did they exist? Did they even exist on this planet? The amount of unprincipled activities that have taken place since the beginning of human existence by the many billions of people that have lived, all uncentered on God and Principle, is something only Heavenly Father knows, and something He wouldn’t like to remember nor be reminded of. The knots of history are so tangled that even the messiah, True Parents wouldn’t want to, probably couldn’t, get into each detail. Important has been that they learnt the different hearts that went into all evil. Patterns, principles; this is the only way he can liberate everyone and declare the ‘Era Of The Settlement Of The Cosmic Parent, Parents of Heaven And Earth And Parents Of Heaven,

1 Found in Father’s Jan 1, 1989 speech. “God has been crying for His son and daughter for tens of thousands of years, millions of years”. This English translation of the Japanese version was given to me by Ms. Izumi Sasaki. I use this version of the speech because I’ve found that the meaning of the word 万 in Korean is the same as the Japanese. Unfortunately, often it’s mistranslated into English as million. 2 April 18, 1977 ‘True Parents Day From The Historical Point Of View’.

Earth And Humankind’3. How can True Parents go through everything? They found the fundamental patterns of unprincipledness to then finally put together and bequeath us what we now have, the Divine Principle, to use as a tool to study how to reverse evil in us. True Parents spoke of going to the ends of Spirit World to learn of Satan. Had Satan been but a single being True Parents would have just had to follow the one mean devil. It’s unfathomable what Heavenly Father went through to send True Parents and then what True Parents had to go through to free us all from our past bonds.

6,000 year old religion thinking will not win 21st century minds Religion doesn’t have to be weird or odd. If the purpose of religion is restoration, then simplify it. God works with results4. Important is that God be able to reach our hearts & minds. He doesn’t really care how. The Divine Principle guides us to that world of living with Heavenly Father. So, let’s clarify the path of religion for ourselves. Doing so helps Heavenly Father come down more easily & sooner. As the Bible promised, one day God would speak to us plainly, not in figures of speech, i.e., straight talk5.

The cosmic, third blessing through the Origin - Division - Union process will not be achieved with old thought patterns. The division stage has not been properly achieved; i.e., there’s no sufficient part in the cutting of our offering for Heavenly Father to take..not enough. To the extent we divide our offering, Heavenly Father can receive it. As True Mother recently said, there’s no perfection in ignorance6. What’s True Mother hinting?

We need to understand what we are believing and repeating; and by putting it all in context, win our position as lords over creation.

Can God, the absolute, unchanging and eternal God, the creator of the cosmos make both science and religion when there are so many seeming contradictions? As science claims mankind is hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old, religion states our first ancestors lived a mere 6,000 years ago. Who do we believe? Unless we clearly state each discipline’s purpose, the struggle will continue.

https://history.familyfed.org/tf-sermons/declared-the-era-of-the-settlement-of-the-cosmic-parent-parents-of-heaven-and- earth-and-parents-of-heaven-earth-and-humankind.

4 Divine Principle pg 233.

5 John 16:25. ‘Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father.’

6 https://history.familyfed.org/tm-sermons/there-is-no-perfection-in-ignorance-education-is-needed.

Religion as a tool for restoration, not science. By necessity religion has to be studied as figure of speech, i.e., allegory, parable, simile, metaphor, personification, antithesis, pun, anthropomorphism, riddle, alter ego, etc. No one knows when nor where the still mythical biblical Adam & Eve story took place. As I said above, Father spoke of man being 6,000 years old but that in reality mankind was even millions of years old7. He spoke these words in the same sentence. Unless we breakdown Father’s words and look at them from a non-religious perspective, like a Unification Thought perspective, we will think True Parents are either playing with our minds, still teaching in riddles, or they are teaching us something we’ve failed to understand.

In this paper I’ll jump into different, unrelated topics. You may see me as a kind of purist; I’m indeed a sort of ascetic. I don’t listen to music, watch TV, go to movies, play video games, watch sports, etc, unless I’m pulled to do so by family or someone. Satan is real. We have yet to make more Cain-Abel divisions on a cosmic O-D-U level within us to be liberated from him. We don’t take seriously enough or understand our Heavenly Parents. They are waiting for us to peel away our satanic culture. Many of us live our daily routines uninspired to break with Satan around us. Old habits die hard. Heavenly Parents are waiting for us.

Satan exists from inside Let’s look at a real world example. This can be either good or evil. It all starts within us. Our heart, or lack of it, is what directs us toward God or toward Satan.

A person has an emotion. He is listening to music and begins to sing. The music excites him / her. An observer is inspired to sing along. Soon a few more join in the song. This can lead to a good situation where many people are enjoying something good. From the heart comes this desire to express joy. God comes down & builds great harmony among the participants8.

In another setting we have another group of people who are listening to and enjoying a darker piece of music, something whose rhythm rather than inspire heavenliness resonates with more lowly, basic instincts. This awakens within us an energy which doesn’t harmonize or resonate with a higher spirit, soul.

In both cases we have an external stimulus which excites us. We can say one is Heavenly and the other hell-like.

This is simple enough to understand because many of us have lived these situations. The 7 1/1/78 God’s Day speech. “Through many women before Mary, God worked to set the condition for Mary to have no stigma of satanic influence. Practically speaking, how many years did God take to prepare this one woman to be mother of the Messiah? The Bible counts 4,000 years, which represents a symbolic time, but counting in the physical way it took millions of years.”

8 Bible. Matthew 18:20. For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.

confusion comes when having to square it off with the religion we’ve learnt, God vs Satan.

We cannot stop believing in restoration; we must at least follow the religious principles of restoration even if we don’t want to affiliate ourselves with a church; we need to follow the patterns (principles) taught by our True Parents. Heavenly Father is still using religion for our restoration, as imperfect as it may be. As I said earlier, God works with results, the Principle teaches us. In the history of restoration God has always used what belief existed at a given point in time as a starting point for restoration; this goes from the individual all the way up to the cosmic levels. True Parents came and straightened the course again. We need to build on it.

We contribute to Heaven or Hell Let’s look at another example of how we create Satan. In the Unification Thought book we read once about Satan and not once about angels.

Paraphrasing the above quote of Matthew 18:20, when two or more are gathered in God’s name, He dwells within. A person’s energy grows and multiplies. When we enjoy music we even want it louder. When two or more people enjoy the music, the joy is multiplied. Our collective Heavenly heart-filled energy brings God down. God lives through our give & take (receive). The more we share, the stronger it becomes. We’re talking music here but this also holds true for ideas and feelings, etc.

Imagine a situation where a person is angry and develops ill intentions for being mistreated in some way. A second person hears of the mistreatment and begins to resonate with the first person’s anger and ill intentions. This energy soon multiplies. The incensed people’s ill intentions grow. These aren’t (necessarily) people who can or maybe even want to control themselves. These emotions can ultimately go in the direction of good or evil, depending on whether the group or crowd is ultimately intent on controlling them or carrying out their emotions. In an earlier paper I mentioned that emotions are physical, and unless connected to heart they will go in the direction of evil. Satan is born. We’ve created another Satan, which momentarily sits atop the huge historic pile of Satans created throughout history.

Allowing our uncontrolled emotions to do evil is what religious people call inviting Satan to enter us. Satan doesn’t enter us; the Satan we were born with was given free rein to express itself. It overwhelms us like a spring shooting out from within. This idea expanded to the world level is what created today’s China and / or communism, among other problems. It is our expanded Satan which reached global / cosmic levels. The collective we is who created this global / cosmic Satan. Some people wisely retreat or disown & draw away from the monster we’ve created; others run with and continue to build on it. It’s all in our veins, our education, our ancestors who work through us, etc.

As much as we are able to, we do good. God definitely is there. We need to be educated

well on how Satan lives and exists in our selves. Satanic forces and power grow from individual to family, society, world and cosmic levels. Like vines growing in a forest or unkempt hair growing into knots, the longer they are not maintained the more difficult it is to keep and control. After a while, the only way to deal with it is to cut it off. That’s the cutting off of the Original Sin.

Take the example of old folks knowing your family going back many generations, & knowing the wrong our ancestors have done. In their eyes, as they see you, you’re a product of their wrong. This is how Heavenly Father sees us and why we need our evil roots cut off.

True Parents learnt all this and gave us a new beginning with Heavenly Father. Satan knew Heavenly Father sent His only begotten children and viciously attacked them. Satan is a very conscious spiritual living entity.

As Satan along with Heavenly Father is always within us, we can see that every thought and desire we have is necessarily monitored by both of them. Both are looking for an opportunity to act next, based on our last move. We can’t hide a thought from either one. Satan is the conscious evil force born within each of us. It can’t act unless given permission. I.E., we must give it freedom to act. It literally can grow to cosmic proportions if unrestrained.

Satan can’t act without our giving it free reins; neither can Heavenly Father. It’s the ubiquitous historic heartache Heavenly Father suffers. We’re born with both within until True Parents have freed us.

How to break away from Satan? Purification. Restoration. This is at the heart of True Parents’ Divine Principle. As we purify ourselves Satan has less life. Unlike God, Satan needs us to feed him to survive. Conversely, we need God to survive. The more we starve our uncentered emotions, those not connected to Heavenly Father, the less Satan can act.

As long as we are not centered and principled, and our heart not in control of our emotions and actions, the more we are in Satan’s camp, regardless of our being conscious of it or not. By virtue of ignorance we allow Satan to grow and control unreined. The less God is within us, the more selfish, fallen Satan grows to be, growing up to cosmic dimensions.

Our world, and cosmos is so complicatedly evil, no one can straighten it out. True Parents have to literally cut Satan off at the root; it’s all too complex to deal with. Cut off the roots.

Father’s clarifications There are some things I remember Father saying which I then could not understand but now I might.

Satan is God’s cousin / younger brother9. They both dwell in us; they share our minds. We feed them both through our volition, whether consciously or not, often unknowingly. We hurt others, starting with Heavenly Father. In catering to our satanic nature we hurt God & our relationship with Him, as well as those we love and care about around us and more. God raises us as His child; Satan grows by taking us away from our conscience and Heavenly Father.

Father talked about having to strike Satan within him. It was indeed a strange thought..back in the late 70s (?). Slowly I began to understand that Father was saying that our physical bodies by Heavenly design, have a will of their own, instinct. He referred to his as Satan. Why? Forever our body has a survival instinct within itself. Our mind, spiritual mind, must control it, especially if it’s sinful, which in True Parents it’s not. I believe he was making the point that we must not be controlled by our physical desires especially at such an important time in history as now when restoration battles are reaching their most intense periods. Any energy going against restoration would be considered satanic10. Our bodies instinctively go against indemnity, having to suffer for the sake of strengthening our minds and hearts for the purpose of restoration. Thus True Parents would consider satanic their physical desires not aligned with their mind advancing the Heavenly providence.

Many blessed families pray as Central Blessed Families. Father clarified that True Parents are the Central Blessed Family. All blessed couples are Blessed Central Families.

In the Heavenly Calendar we do not use January, February, etc. As angel worship, this goes back to idol worshipping as the names of the months represent Roman gods11. The same goes for the days of the week12. We’ve been told to use 1st, 2nd, etc. month in the nth year of Cheon Il Guk. I don’t know if any direction was given for the days of the Heavenly week, which number 8. I’d suppose they are also to be referred to as 1st day, 2nd day, etc.

Angels and Ancestors Buddhism is not in the Abrahamic group nor in its sphere of influence. They never were absorbed into the angel culture. Instead Asia, and the Orient in particular, has worshipped ancestors. In the Abrahamic religions we worship God, the messiah Jesus, or the prophets Mohammad or Moses. We never think about worshipping our ancestors. I don’t remember many people talking about often going to the grave in Europe or in the US. That’s not to say

9 Sorry, I can’t find a quote. In going over the many speeches from the late 70s onward many texts have been edited.

10 In his 4/9/78 When Are We Satisfied? speech Father says that after the Kingdom of Heaven is established we can do as we want.

11 https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/origin-of-month-names-343331-2016-09-26.

12 https://www.almanac.com/fact/where-did-the-names-of-the-days

some don’t. Ancestral worship isn’t part of the culture.

Is it possible to change our way of thinking, ‘centering’ ourselves more under our ancestors? Why would Heavenly Father have designed it this way? Who shares the same heart as Heavenly Father toward us? Our ancestors. They’re the ones taking care of us, whether we believe they are doing it or not. In addition, at this time in God’s providence they need merit to grow and resurrect through True Parents. It’s a unique opportunity in history. It comes only once. Would-be angels, on the other hand, have no compelling reason to help us other than because it’s Heaven requesting them to help out His children, and they’d loyally comply. The image is that of a servant attending the master by taking care of his children. The heart is quite different; while a would be angel would be part of the household, they wouldn’t be family. God, Heavenly Father and ancestors are family.