Special Grace Workbook (One-Day Workshop)

This workbook has been prepared by the European Blessed Family and Education Department to assist you in your preparations to receive the Special Grace from True Parents in this time period up until Foundation Day 2017.

There is a stipulation that each person should attend a one-day workshop. This material is chosen to provide the basis for such a programme although it is not the only way to fulfil this requirement - it is just one tool that we hope many will find useful.

This collection of readings, drawn largely from the three heavenly canons: Cheon Seong Gyeong, Pyeong Hwa Gyeong and Champumo Gyeong, is divided into four sections so that it can provide enough content for a day spent studying together and writing some personal reflections. This could be done at a community gathering or in smaller Home Groups over four one-and-a-half hour sessions, with breaks in between.

We should be naturally moved, through engaging with True Parents’ words this way, to greater feelings of gratitude, repentance and resolve.

It is suggested that the booklet be used in the following way:

Each of four sessions can begin with a song and a representative prayer.

A. Read the Session Introduction together.

B. Make smaller groups of up to seven people. Take turns in reading the passages around the circle.

C. Discuss together ‘what it means for me’ (you can use the suggested questions to guide the discussion).

D. Take some moments to write a personal ‘Response’ and consider writing also a personal ‘Affirmation’ which you could continue to use in your preparations - in particular to ensure that one does not slip back into old habits after receiving the extraordinary benefits of the Special Grace.

(Affirmations use the ‘I’ form and are worded in positive language. They can then be repeated many times a day to strengthen one’s resolve and bring about a positive change by influencing the sub-conscious mind.)

It is recommended that any group that is meeting to study is first guided through the ‘Special Grace’ PowerPoint explanation which introduces the Four Holy Items, the meaning of the Special Grace and details concerning one’s participation in the ceremony.

CONTENTS The topics that make up the four working sessions are:

1. God’s Love for Us .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2. Our Source of Shame and Regret . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3. Salvation and Blessing for All .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 4. True Parents’ Love and Sacrifice for Me . . . . . . 40

SESSION 1 God’s Love for Us

A. Introduction

True Parents’ Benediction on the Original Holy Items of Cheon-Il-Guk:

“Once again, the Heavenly Parent has bestowed His compassionate grace and laid the condition for the blessed families to uphold the wishes of the True Parents. Through this grace, the blessed families can establish the standard of faith that is 90 degrees straight and without shadow, the standard of true blessed families, and become the true citizens of Cheon Il Guk, blessed children who fulfill their mission and responsibility. Please bless this occasion so that these blessed children can be born anew as the children of Unification who can fulfill their responsibility and realize the Heavenly Parent and True Parents’ wish, which is to embrace all 7.3 billion people around the world. Once again, I ask You, Heavenly Parent, in the name of True Parents that through these holy items, blessed families can be born anew and can ascend to the eternal Bonhyangwon with no shadow or blemish. Please grant that these blessed children can ascend to the eternal Bonghyangwon with no traces of the Satanic sphere. I know that these holy items are the grace of blessing that will allow these children to ascend in the eternal homeland as the last true children. Please grant us your hand of grace so that all the children of the Unification movement are grateful for these holy items and your children will offer their last measure of effort and fulfill their responsibility so that all 7.3 billion people around the world can come within the embrace of True Parents and these children can proudly be remembered in history. I pray these things in the name of True Parents. Aju.”

[True Mother’s prayer on 3.15 by the Heavenly Calendar in the 4th year of Cheon Il Guk (April 21, 2016)]

The Origin of True Love

1. What kind of being is God? He is the God of love. St. Paul said, “Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:39) Even Jesus Christ would be nothing without God’s love. This is why we value God’s love above everything. God’s love is the original source of life, the source of happiness, and the source of peace. (24-325,1969.09.14)

What is God’s love?

2. God’s love is stronger than the sun. When the sun rises in the morning, the shoots of all plants turn toward it. Yet God’s love, and it alone, is the source of life, the source of our original mind, and the source of the ideal. (099-232, 1978.09.25)

3. The coming Lord possesses God’s original true love and His real truth. Through this truth, families emerge, and true societies, nations and the world emerge. On each of these levels — individual, family, tribe, people, nation and world — love, ideas and personality emerge. It all begins with the individual. In this way, a person who lives a true life as an individual, in whatever corner of the world he or she may be, is living for the sake of the whole world. That is how it is in the world of love. Living in the world of heart for even one hour would be our source of pride for a thousand years, and living in that world for one day would give us pride for ten thousand years. It is true love that allows us to experience the precious value of life. True love lets us feel even the energy by which our cells multiply. The world filled with God’s love is like that. It is hard to describe in words, but it is a world of enchantment where all our cells are dancing and we feel as if we are flying on the clouds on a bright spring day. (20- 026, 1968.03.31)

5. The place where God dwells is filled with love. It is a place where the more you give, the more you want to give, and the more you receive, the more you want to return millions of times more than you receive. This is the kingdom of heaven. Because you can give more and receive more

there, you feel an explosive stimulation, as if all your cells are bursting. God’s love is like that. (039-335, 1971.01.16)

6. What defines a good person? It is the attitude that good and precious things belong to the whole, rather than to him or her alone, and it is the heart to connect the value of such things to the value of the whole. God, who created heaven and earth, is a being of utmost goodness, the root of all things, and the subject partner of love. When there is someone whom God can truly trust and love and to whom He can entrust things, He will want to hand over everything He values to that person. If this is so, the desire to give one’s most precious things to others is the principle of heavenly law and the original heart of all people. (13-247, 1964.04.12)

7. God’s love encompasses parents’ love, the love between husband and wife, and children’s love. Of course, it includes siblings’ love as well, and when that expands, it also contains love for the nation and the world. So we say that God’s love is parental love, conjugal love and filial love. This is the most wonderful statement that can be made. Because the power of love can guide everything, it affects one’s destiny. If we really understood love and its power to determine what happens in our life, we would be able to change our destiny. (067-172, 1973.06.03)

8. The love God needs is absolute love. Just as God needs absolute love, unique love, unchanging love and eternal love, we also need absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal love. In this respect, we resemble God. Since God has both a masculine and feminine nature as well as plus and minus qualities, He created human beings, His substantial object partners, as men and women. Thus when people marry, they become the substantial plus and minus representing God. God seeks to bring perfect unity between His vertical love and horizontal love through marriage; this is God’s Will. (279-246, 1996.09.15)

9. When giving us love, how much would God want to give? God is not one who limits His love, saying, “Okay, okay, that’s enough.” God wants to love without limit. Even after giving everything, God will still say, “Because of who you are, I want to live deeper inside you.” That impulse is in the

original nature of love. Once having entered into a relationship of love, God would be happy to live even as a servant. A father feels joy even when he sees his beloved infant son or daughter climbing onto his dining table. Love transcends the law. After giving all His love to people until now, can God say, “I have given everything to you. Why have you given nothing back?” The God of absolute love still has the attitude that He has not been able to give all the love He wants to give. God cannot assert Himself. It is a principle of creation that God wanted to give humankind complete love, and for that reason, because He still has not been able to give us that complete love, He wants to give us something more. Because God is like that, the more we think of Him, the better we feel. (36-077, 1970.11.15)

10. God says, “I am love.” This means He likes love by night and by day, while working, resting, dancing or crying. This is why He said, “I have love, in all its fullness.” The phrase, “in all its fullness,” indicates that everything is contained therein. The one who likes love most is God. Since God has such love, if we come to know and taste His love, we will not let go of God even at the cost of our life. (44-188, 1971.05.07)

Eternal and absolute true love

12. Do you have eternal love in your heart? Have you arrived at the position where you can say, “God’s love has come to me. It will never change. Though heaven and earth may change, this promise does not change”? That’s where you have to be. God’s love appears in places that do not change. God’s love is unchanging, so we can say it is eternal. Because it is unchanging love, if it comes to you, it comes on the foundation of your having also developed an unchanging heart. Therefore throughout your life, everything you eat, you should eat for that love; you should sleep for that love; everything you do should be only for that love. If you have a perfect, unchanging standard for the sake of love, God’s love will appear. If that doesn’t happen, all the promises of the universe are proven false. (83-180, 1976.02.08)

13. God is in the position of the Father for all humankind. Because He is the

Father, He is the centre for all His children. Even though God created humankind, since He is in the position of their Parent, He also naturally exists for their sake. Parents want to exist for the sake of their children. Day and night they worry about their children’s safety. Parents try to protect them from troubles and from harm. The way of goodness is to seek and connect to the original nature of such a parent; that is the way of love. Goodness brings the connection of love in the parent-child relationship, and enables us to realize our purpose. That is why we have to base goodness on love, and not just any love, but God’s love, which is at the centre. If we do not do so, we cannot establish the centre of love on earth. (057-085, 1972.05.29)

14. Until now, God has loved those people, tribes and nations that were dear to Him. He blessed the Israelites as individuals, as a people and as a nation, adding blessings again and again, with the concern that they might reject His blessing if they thought it too small. Even this was not enough. He wanted to bless them further by sending His beloved Son. When they rejected that blessing, He even gave them the life of His Son. Even after His only Son died as he did, God still wanted to give more love. This is why, on the day when this love is finally returned, all of heaven and earth will be transformed into the ideal kingdom of heaven. (38-167, 1971.01.03)

17. Why do all people like God and follow Him? It is because God is the One who gives everything to them, then continues giving more, continues giving everything for thousands of years, and still feels it is not enough. He says, “Now I can give you only this much, but wait a bit longer, and I will give you something that is many hundreds of times, many thousands of times better.” This is because He has so much in His heart that He is never satisfied with what He has given today. Far from it; He promises to give better things in the future. If we were with that kind of God, we would be happy even if we were poor and had no food to eat. Such a reality would be no problem, because we would be stimulated by hope. It would be like receiving a jolt. In fact, that kind of situation is all the better because it leads to new resolve. Being together like that, our tears, shed for the future, would be mutually comforting. We would not despair over the present reality but would be filled with hope for tomorrow. Encouraging

each other face to face, we would express our mutual resolve. It would be an intense experience. (36-291, 1970.12.13)

God, the origin of true love

20. In terms of love, God is the origin of all the related emotions. It is from here that parents’ love, husband-wife love, children’s love, brotherly love, the love of relatives and the love of a people emerge. Just as the branches, twigs and leaves spread out from a tree trunk, and as ripples flow out from waves, the shoots of love grow out; the farther they go, the more sensitive you become. If you become a person who receives God’s love, the one among your relatives whose heart is closest to God will be attracted to you. If God is with you, people are attracted to you, although they don’t know why. (050-267, 1971.11.08)

21. We should become sons and daughters who are concerned about the heart of our Father and attend Him. Otherwise we will become objects of pity. Once we know that God exists, that He seeks us and works for us, we must understand that it is not enough to attend this God as merely a mental image. God is the substantial being who wants to be with us eternally as one body, eating together, living together, sharing joy and suffering together for eternity. God is the eternally unchanging original being of love, the embodiment of eternal hope. Jesus Christ was the person who made no excuses in front of this God. Completely forgetting himself, he was able to do anything for the sake of God’s Will. We must be sons and daughters who can follow in Jesus’ footsteps. (4-082, 1958.03.09)

22. Whenever we see something big, we want to make it our own. In our heart, there is nothing we cannot own. Our heart is vast enough to want to bring God to us and attend Him, and vast enough to bring any country that follows God to us, and to bring the world to us. Therefore, attending God in our heart is not a problem; our heart is that big. We want to attend God in our heart. Since God is a loving God and the Absolute Being, we cannot put this being of absolute value anywhere else. People want to go

together, be together and live together with the person they love. How do we want to live together with our beloved? We want to go deeply into one another, and become one. This is the original nature of love. (56-149, 1972.05.14)

23. A man must be able to say, “I am the subject partner of perfect love representing men.” A woman must be able to say, “I am the subject partner of perfect love representing women, so you and I absolutely need each other.” What a man absolutely needs on earth, other than God, is a woman. Also, other than God, what a woman absolutely needs is a man. Wfhy is this so? It is so they can receive God’s love. To do this, the man and woman both must stand in the position of true perfection, where even if they could turn back they would not want to, and even if they had a chance to stop loving they would not want to. This is the meaning of attending God. The owner of love is neither man nor woman, but God. (149-100, 1986.11.17)

24. Where can we dig to find God’s love? God’s love does not originate where brothers and sisters love each other. God’s love does not originate with man and woman’s love at the centre. God’s love originates in the love between parent and child. There has to be a vertical relationship. Such a relationship is established only through parents’ love, so the parent-child relationship is the foundation for love. In this love there is no distance. In this vertical relationship there must be a centre. There is only one centre. The centre must be the best place. Wherever there are two centres in this world, struggle begins. (28-169, 1970.01.11)

25. If, with true love, you seek a person better than yourself, you must invest 100 percent, then 1,000 percent, and then invest again. When you think you have invested enough, at that moment, everything stops. When God created human beings, He wanted to make His object partners of love greater than Himself, so He invested every ounce of His being. He invested and wanted to invest even more, in order to make His intangible nature completely substantial. Only when you have invested everything and forgotten about your investment can you find the beginning of true love. It is that simple. This is a fundamental principle of the universe.

Creation is the investment of true love

26. Even though God is the Absolute Being and the subject of true love in the eternal, unchanging and unique realm, He doesn’t ask others to live for Him. Working from nothing, God invested Himself to bring everything into being. His investment was for His creation. He had to invest Himself. Through this investment the universe came into being. The origin, the foundation and starting point was true love for the sake of the world. Everything began from true love. This was the original point, the beginning of the ideal. (173-255, 1988.02.21)

27. God invested Himself totally in making all things of creation. He found love only when the object partner into which He had invested was complete. In the same way, the more we invest ourselves for the sake of the public sphere, the more love will come to us. So we must be devoted children in our families. Why do we need to be dutiful toward our parents and loving toward our brothers and sisters? The more we are, the more love will come to us. Then, what do we want to own? We don’t want to own knowledge, power or glory. We want to own love. That’s the highest purpose for which human beings were created. It is the destination we seek. (109-270, 1980.11.02)

28. A mother offers her body for her child, and then forgets her investment. There is no mother who remembers how she gave and shared her flesh and blood. While she is nursing her baby, a mother does not keep a record in a notebook, writing, “Today I gave the baby this many millilitres of milk.” She invests and forgets, invests and forgets. The way a mother raises her child is the same way God created all things, by investing and forgetting, investing and forgetting; the two are exactly the same. (235- 101, 1992.08.29)

29. The origin of creation reveals the logic of love for the sake of others. It is great to invest for the sake of an object partner. This is where the life philosophy of “living for the sake of others” originates. Love should take us on a voyage to the ideal. The life philosophy of living for the sake of others originated in order to keep us moving in the direction of the world

of purpose. Unless one takes the path of total investment, one cannot reach the destination of true love. This is possible only when you invest yourself totally and live completely for the sake of others. (173-213, 1988.02.18)

31. True love is not about being served, but serving others. When God created His object partner of love in the beginning, He invested all of His energy, all of Himself, 100 percent. In this way God set the example of true love. In other words, God set the tradition of true love by exhausting Himself completely. This true love is the centre of the cosmos. (201-205, 1990.04.09)

32. The way of true love is not to have others live for one’s own sake; it is to live for the sake of others. When God created His object partner of love, He did so for the sake of His object partner, repeatedly investing all He had. This God is the original central being. The original central being with this kind of heart is the God who made all creation. True love for the sake of others is giving 100 percent, then 1,000 percent; it is giving everything, thus turning oneself into a vacuum. (201-349, 1990.04.30)

33. Love is total investment. A man looking for love needs to invest everything. He has to invest his five senses completely, his eyes, ears, nose, mouth and sense of touch. Unless he fits with the perfect shape of the model according to the original form of creation, he does not qualify to attain his love. Resembling God, he must invest everything. (173-213, 1988.02.18)

34. God began His creation based on love. He did not do so in order to suffer a loss. People often think that to give of oneself is to lose, so why did God invest everything? It is because love has the power to fill everything to overflowing and still remain undiminished. So God invested everything and used Himself up, but He received love in return. When you invest true love more and more, it does not gradually diminish. The more you invest, and the more you exchange, the more it expands. If it were a principle that true love grows smaller through investment, God would have been depleted. But instead, the more He invests true love, the bigger

it gets. The world of true love grows bigger as it moves. If you want to capture love, you need to invest and forget and invest and forget. (237- 126, 1992.11.13)

35. God created all things of creation with the heart to invest Himself for the sake of His object partner, His partner of love. So if you love all things of creation as God did while creating them, when He invested Himself and enjoyed everything with a heart of love, you will stand on God’s side. The more you love the things of creation, the closer to God you will be. (61-207, 1972.08.31)

36. The origin of the universal principle is God. To create the universe, God invested Himself completely in everything He made. Throughout history He has sacrificed Himself ceaselessly to save fallen human beings. The prophets, saints and sages who knew God’s Will and followed His Principle with their lives were not satisfied to merely keep the truth to themselves. They sacrificed themselves for the sake of teaching the truth to others. (234-222, 1992.08.20)

37. Why should I sacrifice myself, having to overcome difficulties, with a sense of responsibility for others? It is so that I can influence others. This is in order to stand in a position like that of God, who invested energy and created everything from nothing. When He looked at all that He had created, “God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1). Therefore, the things that came from that were also supposed to be good. But we are not really good until we stand in the same position as God and follow His principles of creation. (62-193, 1972.09.25)

[from CSG - Book 3, Chapter 1, Section 1]

Session 1 - Discussion Questions: 1. How much do I appreciate God’s love for this world and all humanity? 2. God loves me. Have I truly understood this, considering the things I might have thought or said or done in my life up to now? 3. Which idea, which words touched on here resonate the most in my heart - what can I take home with me?

My reflections:

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My First Affirmation:

SESSION 2 Our Source of Shame and Regret

A. Introduction

When we choose to sin, what we want is to get some good or get rid of something bad. The lie is in this, that what is done for our good ends in something bad, or what is done to make things better ends by making them worse. Why this paradox, except that the happiness of man can come not from himself but only from God, and that to live according to oneself is to sin, and to sin is to lose God? Saint Augustine, City of God 14.4 (Christianity) in WS2

What is sin? It is what emerges from self-centred living and not living for the sake of others. Why is stealing wrong? A thief steals out of his personal desire—the wrong of the act begins there. What is wrong with stealing a dress from a big department store, where no one will miss it? That dress has value imparted by the people who invested their sacrifice and service in making it. Thus the dress has public value. Stealing it is a sin, because taking something without paying for it nullifies its value. (105:92, September 30, 1979)

We have to recognize and abide by three immutable laws:

The first law: Do not defile the blood lineage, even at the point of death. The blessed blood lineage, bequeathed through God’s love and life, must not be contaminated by actions immersed in the habitual patterns of the fallen world…

The second law: Do not infringe upon human rights… Whether female or male, black or white, everyone is equal… Violation of this is the second of all sins.

The third law: Refrain from stealing money or misusing public funds for selfish purposes. (January 13, 2001)

What is sin? People think sin is to disobey God’s word, but in truth, sin is to make any condition by which Satan can accuse us. While it is wrong not to believe the word of God, it becomes a sin when there is a condition upon which the enemy can grab hold of us. Hence, once we transgress the law, not even God can do anything about it. (22:257, May 4, 1969)

The human tradition of love as it has been passed down through history is evil. It is sinful, unacceptable to God. It is the enemy of God. Of all sins, fallen love is the by far the worst; it is the sin God abhors the most. Those who indulge in fallen love are God’s worst enemies, whom God abhors the most. Unless we correct the ways of love, God will always treat it as a sin and those who engage in love as enemies, and they are bound to perish. It is only natural that they perish. Have you seen Pompeii in Italy? Because of its decadent and immoral social life, the city was destroyed by instant calamity. Sodom and Gomorrah, too, were destroyed for the same reason. The Roman Empire, too, perished for the same reason. (104:140, April 29, 1979)

[From WS2, p 269. True Father’s words]

God’s ideal of creation centres on true love and calls each of us to exist for the sake of others. The purpose of human existence is to realize an ideal family, society, nation and world through individuals whose mind and body are harmoniously united into one in the embodiment of this ideal. However, because of Satan’s false love and self-centredness, each human being has disharmony between mind and body. The family, society, nation and world, consisting of human beings characterized by such a contradiction, have troubles and dissensions that are the multidimensional amplification of this disunity and struggle that exists within the individual.

The democratic world has become increasingly individualistic and self-centred. This is what Satan wants, and thus Satan is leading most of humankind toward damnation. In order to stop this decline, we cannot rely on left-wing or right-wing ideas alone. We need head-wing thought centred on true love, which transcends ideologies on both the left and the right. We

need Godism, the teaching about the ultimate reality that human life is to be lived centred on true love.

Disunity in our society and world originated with Satan’s false love creating discord between mind and body within individuals. Therefore, true peace begins with harmonious unity within individual human beings. This unity can result only from the experience of true love. The base for realizing the peaceful world is not to be discovered merely by seeking global solutions, but through individuals and families. Individuals whose mind and body are harmoniously united by God’s true love and who go beyond Satan’s dominion, and families formed by such men and women, become the delivery room for world peace.

The Human Fall, which came about through false love, created discord between mind and body. As a result, we experience disunity and struggle in our vertical relationships with God, our parents, our children, our students and so on, and in our horizontal relationships with our spouse, our siblings, our friends, our coworkers and so forth. Instead of being characterized by love, these relationships are distorted due to the confusion between the mind’s desire to serve others and the body’s desire to gratify the self. This discord can be seen in the value systems and world-views that guide individual and social life. The confusion between mind and body extends to the confusion between religion and science, between idealism and materialism, and between the pursuit of facts and the pursuit of values.

According to the ideal of creation, mind and body unite within an ideal individual in response to God’s true love. The world of the mind and the world of the body, which are extensions of the individual’s mind and body, need to also come into a harmonious relationship. Religion and philosophy represent the world of the mind, and politics and economics represent the world of the body. Just as mind is in the subject partner and leading position, and the body is in the object-partner position to harmonize with the mind, religion and politics ought to achieve harmony and unity in a subject-object partnership. Otherwise, the ideal society cannot be created. What has been God’s purpose in sending saints and prophets? God’s desire is to educate all people about the Will of true love, by showing models of personality and lifestyle. In particular, God’s Will is for the worlds of the

mind and the body to unite in magnificent harmony centred on God’s Will of true love.

[PHG, 456-8. Religion’s Mission for World Peace, August 27, 1991.]

People think that the weak are sacrificed and exploited for the sake of the strong, but when we observe the order of the universe, we can see that it is not true. The theory of the survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle are fundamentally wrong. Those who believe in this theory overlook the absolute importance of human beings working toward their perfection as owners of love. They should stand as the lords of all by living for the sake of others, investing true love in their object partners and forgetting that they ever invested. Their object partners, in turn, are meant to respond with absolute obedience to the same principle. If true love is excluded from this formula, only the concept of struggle remains. God’s principle of creating is not that existence and development occur through struggle. Rather, He seeks harmony and unity leading to the emergence of absolute values through a mutual process of giving and receiving among entities in the relationship of subject partner and object partners.

An individual may be sacrificed for the sake of the greater good; however we must not perceive this as struggle. It must be seen as an investment for the sake of mutual development. Can we indeed define the act of an individual willingly sacrificing him or herself for his or her family, or the family willingly sacrificing itself for the nation, or the nation for the world, as struggle? Rather it is the way to form the realm of absolute values for the sake of bringing about the full realization of true love, where each strives to first set up the other in a position of an owner of true love.

Thus, we must uproot our self-centred and individualistic mind-set and the behaviour that stems from it. This is the root of fallen nature and the cause of evil. This can be said not only of self-centred behaviour on the individual level, but also of selfish behaviour of collectives in society. Self-centredness is directly contrary to the spirit of true love’s system of absolute values. Instead of sacrificing and living for the sake of others, self-centred people call for others to sacrifice for them.

Self-centredness causes people to be more concerned with their own interests than with the well being of others. Self-centredness was insidiously injected into humankind through the Fall. It induced the struggle between mind and body. Satan planted this poison mushroom in the human heart. Although embracing self-centredness may result in a person appearing beautiful and gaining worldly fame and earthly comforts, it is a trap that once sprung will lead its victim to addiction and a life of suffering that is difficult to escape…

Do you know where to find the dividing line between heaven and hell? Is it in the air? Is it in a cathedral? Is it on a border between nations? No, the dividing line between heaven and hell can be found in your body; it is your reproductive organ. The selfish use of human sexuality caused the greatest tragedy in human history; that tragedy turned heaven and earth upside down.

If you recklessly use your reproductive organ without regard for the consequences of your actions, you will surely go to hell. On the other hand, if you use it in accordance with the standard of God’s absolute love, you will go to heaven. Who can deny this fact? If you doubt this, I ask you to carefully read the Divine Principle, which contains the heavenly laws that I revealed. If you are still in doubt, I sincerely ask that you pray to God. I’m sure that your prayer will be answered.

Tens of thousands of young people in the world who have accepted my teachings have ceased engaging in free sex. The message of the pure love movement, which advocates “absolute sex,” or “absolute truelove,” is now spreading like wildfire.

If free sex is false love centred on selfish desires and Satan, then absolute sex is absolute love centred on God. Many literary works and stories in the press have the tendency to fan the fires of free sex, a disease that cripples individuals and nations. However, now leaders of all spheres of life, including politicians, economists, philosophers, journalists, religious leaders and writers will stand together in a resistance movement against free sex.

The cornerstone of world peace was supposed to have been within Adam’s family, which was to have brought forth the absolute values of true love. It

was also Adam’s family that could destroy the path to world peace. Thus, we must bear in mind the importance of Adam’s family, the ancestral family of humanity.

[PHG, p1101 “Determining the Owner of True Love”]

“… The great universe moves like one living entity and is like the shoot from a single branch or tree springing from the true love root and origin. In this universe You can reside in the position of the great King who has dominion over the self-determining heaven and earth of one mind and one body, and You are in the position of the Lord of glory.

The fact is we lost that Father. Within history and within the realm of Your heart, You who had to pass through the course of bitter pain called restoration through indemnity, You could embrace and forgive the world You relate to based on the standard of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience of our ancestors, as the subject partner and centre representing all things. From the day when everything that longed for that ideal realm failed to become as one, the history of re-creation was repeated until now.

Your great endeavours for re-creation, from one to tens of billions of such efforts, had to be connected together. Ten should have led to eleven, to twenty one, to a hundred and one, to a thousand and one, and to a hundred million and one. By doing so, we could become one with the unified realm, the entirety and all the details, along with the original, formative Origin of creation. We thank You for Your grace that persevered until now when the history of these endeavours allows the unity to arise and be restored through indemnity, perfecting the unified realm that returns to Heaven through the True Parents. We thank You for this grace.

Your heart has been filled with grief. A history of bitter sorrow ensued as You had to deal with an environment in which Satan was independently asserting his authority by separating, dividing and severing all ties between You and humanity, parent and child, husband and wife, older brother and younger brother and all realms of the ancestors, present and future. The

age has come when this history of Your bitter sorrow must come to an end through True Parents. You experienced completely a history of failure spanning thousands of years from the first family, to the failure to restore the nation through Moses, to the repeated failures in Jesus’ time. You experienced this from the source of these mistakes to the end result of these mistakes. You sent the True Parents in the truest form to earth so the grace of liberation and complete freedom could prevail, allowing us to aim for a world of one heart, one body, one mindset, and one centre with You, and to settle at Your centre in unity and harmony. Then the light of life from You, our God of glory, could cover everything from beginning to end, thereby allowing us to enter a time of welcoming a new realm of resurrection for all living beings. We thank You for this grace.

There has never been a hometown, a homeland, a parent, a husband and wife, siblings, a true nation or a true people on this earth. Indemnity was paid for all this to be restored and established. All situations of sorrow greater than that of Adam were resolved by blessing numerous families representing hundreds of millions of families in the world, thus moving beyond the individual family that fell in the past. By doing so, You bequeathed to us the realm of family resurrection in an independent and individual realm of truth, so the beginning with new ancestors could be designated. Through this, we inherited the authority of Heaven’s glory and, at the same time, ushered in anew the seventh year of Cheon Il Guk, in which Your authority as the Owner could be exercised over the centre of heaven and earth and above the realm of unity that covers and makes use of everything. We inherited the force and authority over the universe, the world, and everything included in the acts by which we create again, produce again and complete again.

Your sovereignty now has been established on the earth. Cheon Il Guk, which can become the peace kingdom of heaven, earth and the cosmos, has manifested itself. This standard that manifested itself is based on the standard of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, upon which all existence was created from beginning to end. Everything that was distorted by the false parents will be swept away and, with the authority of life of True Parents’ true love, resurrected anew. Each and every layer will be stripped away, each and every kernel and core coming from that inner

single point, and the focus of the pulse that can breathe in and out the deep pulse of the universe, will expand from the source of the rotational movement to the great motions of the universe. We have entered a time when all of heaven and earth can move independently and still remain together, synchronized with the pulse of love.”

[CSG, p 1642-4. True Parents’ Prayers, Chapter 13 - Peace Messages. True God’s Day 2007, Midnight Prayer]

8. Fruit that has matured fully on the tree will automatically go into the owner’s storehouse. Similarly, only when the spirit of a person has reached perfection during life in the physical world, which can be likened to the tree, can it automatically enter the kingdom of heaven in the incorporeal spirit world. In other words, a person will enter the kingdom of God in heaven automatically only when he or she has qualified for and enjoyed the kingdom of heaven on earth by living as a fully mature person in the physical body.

9. During your life on earth, your spirit self records your every action and movement without exception, keeping the law of heaven in mind as a standard. Accordingly, you will enter the spirit world in the form of your spirit self, which has recorded your life on earth with total accuracy. Your spirit will show plainly whether you have led a wholesome life ripening in goodness or a wormy, rotten life of sinfulness. What this means is that God will not judge you; you will be your own judge. If you are aware of this astonishing rule of Heaven, will you spend your life on earth in selfishness and immorality, succumbing to the temptations of Satan in pursuit of nothing but pleasure? You will not; rather you will abstain from injuring and scarring your spirit body, even at the risk of your earthly life. Please bear this truth in mind: your thoughts, words and deeds in each moment determine whether you are bound for heaven or hell.

10. The spirit does not lead a separate life or express true love through actions of its own. Your spirit self can grow, mature and be finally perfected only within your physical body, through an earthly lifetime of true love that brings your mind and body into a smooth relationship. Nonetheless, it is

undeniable that your outer self and inner self are in a relationship of constant conflict and struggle. How much longer will you allow this fighting to continue? Ten years? One hundred years? In contrast to this, it is also undeniable that all other forms of existence in the universe function in a proper order. This indicates that God did not create human beings in this state of antagonistic disorder. You need to know that as a human being you have the duty and responsibility to dispel all temptations directed at your outer self — your physical body — and achieve victory in life by following the way of your inner self — your conscience – essentially to perfect your life according to the standard of absolute sex. Heavenly fortune will be with those who lead their life in such a way. They will attain the perfection of their spirit self.

What is the nature of heaven?

12. What do you think is the nature of heaven? Heaven is a world overflowing with God’s true love, with true love as its axis. It is a world where true love is the external form as well as the internal content of the entire environment. It is a world where true love is present from the beginning to the end of our life. It is a world filled with people who were born through true love, who lived in the embrace of true love, and who, following the track of true love, finally passed on into that next world, the spirit world. Consequently, antagonism and envy are not to be found in that world, for it is a natural world where each person lives for the sake of others. It is not a world governed by money, honour or power. It is a world wherein the success of each person represents the success of the whole, the desire of each person represents the desire of the whole, and the joy of each person represents the joy of the whole.

13. Heaven is a world filled with the air of true love, where all breathe true love. It is a world where life pulsates with love everywhere, all the time. It is a world where everyone is connected to the true God through blood ties. It is a place where the whole world and all people are linked together in an inseparable relationship, like the cells in your body. It is a world that is governed only by true love, the love that is God’s essence. God exists for true love.

The results of the Fall

14. Look at the world in which we are currently living. The people of the world are caught in the trap of extreme selfishness, clamoring for material gain. They have lost all sense of value, and the desire for self-gratification drags them into the depths of degradation. The world is filled with alcoholics. As if drug addiction and free sex were not enough, there are even those who commit incest, an act not even seen in the animal world, and still strut around with their heads held high. This world has become one wherein beasts with human faces roam freely, even after violating women — grandmothers, mothers, wives and daughters. The swapping of spouses among couples is rampant. Such circumstances represent without a doubt the pinnacle of the destruction of morality and the last of fallen acts. This world has become hell on earth, in which we cannot even dream of the perfected world embodying the ideal that God envisioned at the creation.

15. We have come to know that humanity’s problems are rooted in the Fall of Adam and Eve, our ancestors. Adam and Eve, who were at the perfection stage of the growth period, had a sexual relationship before their rightful time, due to Satan’s temptation. The Fall was an illicit sexual union of a man and woman. This is why, for over thousands of years, people continue to commit these indecent acts, perfidious acts that drive a sharp spike into the heart of God. They have been unable to escape from the realm of the fallen lineage.

16. A man or woman alone can only be one half of the whole. That is how God created us. For that reason, He has interchanged the ownership of the reproductive organs, the love organs. The owner of the wife’s reproductive organ is the husband, and the owner of the husband’s is the wife. Only when each is rooted in true love for the sake of the other do they merit the position of the owner of their spouse. In other words, irrespective of who they are, human beings can only become complete individuals, rather than one half, when they have exchanged the positions of ownership through marriage.

17. The human reproductive organ is sacred. It is the palace of life where the seed of life is sown, the palace of love where the flower of love blooms,

and the palace of lineage where the lineage bears fruit. The reproductive organ is absolute. Through it, absolute lineage, absolute love and absolute life are brought forth, along with absolute harmony, unity, liberation and tranquillity.

18. Why are we trying to restore the ownership of the reproductive organ? It is in order to possess God’s love. He is the subject of three great loves. As the Owner of the universe, He is the true Teacher, true Owner and true loving Parent. These form the basis for the three great subject partners principle. All these teachings and truths are realized through the life of a true, model ideal family. Then, through its expansion, the society, nation, world and even the universe are transformed into the peace kingdom of the model, ideal family.

19. Because of the Fall the first Adam lost the original true lineage, and consequently failed to form the original couple and the original family. Adam, who should have become the true teacher, true parent and true king, inherited the lineage of Satan. He degraded himself to the position of a false teacher, false parent and false king.

Heaven begins from the family

21. The sinful era of restoration through indemnity, the Era before the Coming of Heaven, has passed. The era of heavenly law is upon us, the Era after the Coming of Heaven. You are now living in an era of grace in which — after receiving the marriage Blessing from True Parents, completing the conversion of lineage, and leading a life that is vertically aligned with Heaven, such that no shadow is cast — you can enter the kingdom of heaven automatically. That is to say, if you establish a true family on earth and lead a heavenly life, your life will be connected to the kingdom of God in heaven when you die, and you will enjoy eternal life. Therefore, within the framework of the family, you should serve God as your Father, revering Him in the highest position. Every one of you should become God’s child, perfecting the parent-child relationship and sharing your life with Him, connected by blood. In short, you should form a partnership of true love with God and live together with Him.

[CSG, p 1389, Chapter 2 ‘True Owners of the Founding of Cheon Il Guk’]

Session 2 - Discussion Questions: 1. How should I respond to True Parents’ teaching on the source and nature of sin in this world? 2. What do I see in myself that has to change? 3. That we have the chance at all to be liberated from our sinful past is extraordinary. What should I be resolved to do from now?

My reflections:

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My Second Affirmation:

SESSION 3 Salvation and Blessing for All

A. Introduction

Almighty God is the God of love and the God of mercy. He is deeply concerned and grieved over the living death of His children. He knows that people are incapable of breaking their chains and getting rid of their sin by their own efforts. He knows that only one power can bring people to salvation – God Himself. And God, in His mercy, is determined to save this world. (September 18, 1974)

Because God must, in the end, accomplish His Will on earth, He has preserved us although we were perishing. (Way of God’s Will 1.3)

God is not the kind of God to just stand by while human beings live a fallen existence. He has worked until today to lay the foundation for re-creation through religion, in order to recreate the ideal world that He has purposed from the very beginning. This is God’s providence for salvation. (May 10, 1981)

Our ancestors who were expelled from the Garden of Eden were the worst criminals in human history; they have no basis to be proud of themselves. However, because God still has a relationship of heart with them, He endures all ordeals while leading the providence of restoration from Adam, Noah, Moses and Jesus to the present day. Thinking of this grace of God, we should appeal to Him with gratitude for His mercy upon humanity throughout history, not merely for His mercy in the current moment. (16:236, June 19, 1966)

[from WS2, p314]

Cheon Il Guk is a world where, based on true love, heaven and earth unite, the body and mind unite, and one lives in harmony with nature. Citizens of Cheon Il Guk should live according to the original ideal of creation. They should be able to feel that God is always with them, even while Cheon Il Guk is being built, and that He shares the pleasures and pains of life with them. To sustain this, they should live with joy, prayer and gratitude for everything at all times. A life of gratitude is always accompanied by heavenly blessings and heavenly fortune. True Mother teaches that this life of gratitude starts when we completely empty our minds.

True Parents have forgiven the unforgivable for the sake of God and have loved their enemies for the sake of humankind. Forgiveness and love have great power. Forgiveness opens the hearts of people and love moves people. Miracles have been accomplished through True Parents’ forgiveness and love. They have said that, when you forgive and love, fighting can turn to reconciliation, conflict can turn to harmony, and war can turn to peace.

Each human being is an individual embodiment of truth. When we become aware of how we are connected to one another, the way to unity will open up. Ignorance and fallen nature block our awareness of the reality that we are not separate beings. When with love and truth we scale the high wall of ignorance and cross the wide river of fallen nature, we meet our original human nature. At that place we feel a presence of God that makes us tremble. When we always attend God, ponder the will of True Parents, and govern our lives and the world with love and wisdom, a miracle is wrought by which all beings from the self to the great cosmos unite with oneness in heart, oneness in body and oneness in thought.

[From: The Life of Cheon Il Guk Citizens, CPG Book 13, narrative.]

The ultimate purpose of God’s providence of restoration is to save all of humanity. Therefore, God intends to abolish hell completely after the passage of time necessary for each individual to make restitution for his sin. If hell were to remain eternally in the world where God’s purpose of

goodness is fulfilled, it would contradict the perfection of God, His ideal, and His providence of restoration.

Even fallen parents cannot feel joyful when one of their children is unhappy. Is this not even more true for God, our Heavenly Parent? It is written, “The Lord . . . is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” Accordingly, hell cannot remain forever. No trace of hell will remain in the ideal world, which is the fulfilment of God’s deepest desire. In the Last Days, when the time is ripe, evil spirits will descend to evil people on earth of the same spiritual level and assist them to accomplish God’s Will. Indeed, even the demons testified that Jesus was the Son of God. By participating in these various dispensations over a long course of time, all people will gradually converge toward the goal of God’s ideal world.

[Exposition of the Divine Principle: Chapter 5 Resurrection 3.3, p151.]

1. The words True Parents did not come into existence only after the Fall. God’s ideal of creation was to begin with True Parents. However, due to the Fall, the lineage was changed. It became precisely the opposite of what was intended. Nations today are also different from the original nation that would have emerged if the Fall had not occurred. In the original plan, there would have been no religion. Religions and nations and all such things stemming from the fallen lineage have nothing to do with me. In this sense, only the ideal of the True Parents, which God had in mind before the Creation, is absolute. Only that thought is connected to God’s love, life and lineage. The concepts, ideas and relationships you have, which came about after the Fall, have no connection to the True Parents, who are unrelated to the Fall. Therefore, you need to cleanly cut off from all these fallen things, as if they were your enemies. (491-144, 2005.03.18)

2. God has been working to appoint a central figure who could realize His desire, the kingdom of heaven. That person, whom God designates on earth, first receives God’s truth, life and love. He then can become the embodiment of these. God has worked throughout the long course of

history to establish one person who could achieve the standard for humankind based on these three criteria. If we cannot meet the central figure who comes on God’s behalf, who as His embodiment has integrity of mind and body, then we can have no relationship with the kingdom of heaven that God is trying to establish. Nor can we build the kingdom of heaven desired by all people on earth, even by all of creation. (2-130, 1957.03.17)

3. The one person who stands in the central position, possessing the genuine truth, life and love that God can relate to, will become the centre of hope for all things of creation and the core of God’s hope. Created beings will naturally want to be with him. If he speaks God’s truth from that standard, he will be able to testify to the life of God, demonstrate the love of God, and manifest the truth of God as His very substance. That is the meaning behind Jesus’ saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (2-129, 1957.03.17)

4. You were born originally to continue the history of the original lineage through the love of God and True Parents. When you discover this self, you will find the True Parents and their love as well. Since you originated from God’s love, when you find yourself, you will discover the two original images of love — God and True Parents — already planted within you. They are implanted there as the root. You cannot pull yourself out of God or out of True Parents. Since you are one of their branches, you cannot deny that you are that branch. For example, if you look at a plant’s cells, they are all alike, whether they are from a leaf or the root. These days, plants can be multiplied by cloning cells. It is the same principle. Leaves contain elements of the root and of all other parts. In the same way, God’s love and True Parents’ love are at the core of their dominion over the universe. Their love is the eternal standard, making them the ultimate subject partners. This is why they govern everything through love. (202-283, 1990.05.25)

5. Restoration through indemnity entails recovering the state of innocence that was lost. Two groups appeared in order to unite what was separated into Cain and Abel, centred on the mother. The mother and father on Satan’s side fought with the mother and father on Heaven’s side. The

means to settle this was the Second World War. That is how the world formed one global realm. Originally God’s love was to have been connected to True Parents’ love, God’s life to True Parent’s life, and God’s lineage to True Parent’s lineage. However, these connections were not made. Humankind abandoned that standard. Satan planted his root next to it, seized everything and sprouted his shoots. Those shoots need to be severed. There, with the new True Parents at the centre, the connection must be made once again, establishing the realm of resurrection of the tree of life. To accomplish this, everything of Satan’s must be cut off and human beings must be engrafted to the original standard. (199-132, 1990.02.16) 6. When it is said that Jesus is coming again, it means Christ is coming as the True Parent of humankind. That is, he comes as the original root of true life and true lineage founded on true love, in oneness with God. Through him all people need to return to the true lineage and make the condition of reconnecting and engrafting to the true lineage. In other words, the returning Jesus must reconnect humankind to God’s lineage. Unless he elevates their value to a status equal to his own, by connecting them to God’s love, life and lineage, he cannot attain the goal of the kingdom of heaven. Those who can enter the kingdom of heaven are the sons and daughters of the original unfallen Adam and Eve — their descendants who are one with God through lineage. People today with the defect of a fallen lineage cannot enter the heavenly kingdom if this connection is not made. (224-279, 1991.12.15)

7. When the Lord of the Second Advent, the Saviour, comes to this earth, he is the Lord. He is the Saviour of love and life. Because love, life and lineage all went off track, he comes as the Saviour of true love, true life and true lineage. Those things of the original world were lost, and they must be recovered. The effort to recover them through human history forms the history of True Parents tradition. (191-245, 1989.06.25)

8. Who will end the battle between God and Satan? The True Parents will do that. How? With true love. Their true love brings Satan to surrender. Then God and restored Lucifer will embrace each other and praise the True Parents. Through the principle of True Parents true love, God is liberated, Satan is liberated and the gates of hell are abolished. Then the bright

sunlight of the kingdom of heavens new love will permeate hell, bringing a revolution in the spirit world. (317-213, 2000.02.26)

9. The True Parents are the manifestation of true love. The True Parents are the individuals in the central position who set the standard of absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal love. This love requires a certain standard on the part of the partner. Everyone and everything needs a partner. Small things need small partners, and in their own small way they form spheres based on subject and object partnerships. Big things also form spheres based on subject and object partnerships in their own big way. In this way they grow into something even larger. God is the essence, so He forms a sphere that extends from the beginning to the end. The entire universe fits within the realm of His love. (317-271, 2000.02.28)

10. True Parents are the parents whose lineage is woven together with God’s love and life. That is why they are called the True Parents. From this point on, people who do not know the True Parents will not be able to realize their full potential as human beings. The True Parents are the pioneers who can perfect God’s love and make God into the Lord of love. Without the True Parents, God’s plan to perfect love can never be fulfilled. (459-071, 2004.07.10)

11. When the lineage was stained, it became contaminated. You must understand how difficult it is to cleanse a lineage that has been defiled. Also, since the lineage was stained, God could not freely relate to the people in this world, as they had become the children of His enemy. Therefore, it took tens of thousands of years to completely turn a good number of people around through religion. (332-304, 2000.09.24)

12. Due to the false parents in the earthly world, the heavenly world came to be divided into paradise, the middle spirit world and hell, and the phenomenon of division also occurred on earth. During the Old Testament Age came the promise that the Messiah would be sent to put the earthly world in order. During the New Testament Age, Jesus was to have built the kingdom of heaven on earth, on the family level first. Had he done so, the kingdom of heaven in the spirit world could have begun as well. However,

because Jesus was unable to fulfill this, the task was delayed until this global era. At the time of the Second Coming, the True Parents, based on the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, stand in the position of having resolved the fundamental problem that arose at the beginning of history, through having indemnified everything. Therefore, the true lineage centred on True Parents’ love can be passed down and engrafted. The Blessing is the engrafting of this lineage on the family level. Only families may enter the kingdom of heaven, so those families who are engrafted in this way can, with that fruit of being engrafted, enter the kingdom of heaven. By that engrafting, what had been the fruit of wild olive trees becomes the fruit of true olive trees. (295-127, 1998.08.19)

13. If you accomplish your portion of responsibility you will connect only to God’s true love, true life and true lineage, and by this you will establish the tradition of the True Parents. To become true parents you have to change your lineage. To do so, you wild olive trees need to receive a graft from the true olive tree. This engrafting is done through the Unification Church Blessing. (482-187, 2005.01.12)

14. Until now, a perfect family with God at the centre could not be established, and the eight stages – including the tribe, people, nation, world and cosmos — could not be unified. Cain’s killing of Abel and the persecution of Seth have not been resolved. That is why the Saviour, Messiah, Lord of the Second Advent and True Parents are necessary. The True Parents can resolve all this, and based on their true love, life and lineage, they can begin the family untouched by the Fall. This is the beginning of the family king, the beginning of the tribal king, and the beginning of God’s kingship over the people, the nation, the world and all of heaven and earth. Thus the whole world becomes one sovereignty of love, with God’s throne at the centre. (488-245, 2005.02.23)

15. Believing in a religion does not make you a true person. If the Fall had not occurred, there would be no need for religion. Holy and pure sons and daughters would simply be born through the use of the reproductive organs. They are where true love comes from. That is where true life and the true sons and daughters of the true lineage — the liberated sons and

daughters whom Satan cannot accuse — come from. The reproductive organs are the palace of true love, true life and true lineage. They are the most precious things. If they disappeared, heaven and earth would disappear. Without them, God’s ideal, God’s family and God’s Will could not be achieved. They are the source of the perfection of everything. (216-218, 1991.04.01)

16. Unification Church members live together with True Parents and with God. They are born again through the love of True Parents. That connection of love is eternal and cannot be severed. You can never forget their love, even on the day you die. When parents die, they take their heart of love for their sons and daughters with them. It is the same with husbands and wives. When we die, we do not forget those we love. Love goes beyond death and is connected to eternity. This is why you men and women who have inherited the realm of life through True Parents’ love cannot forget the True Parents, who are the root of love. If they are the root and you are the trunk, your sons and daughters are the buds. When they grow in number, they will expand to form a tribe, a people and a nation. (218-128, 1991.07.14)

[CSG, Book 2, Chapter 4, Section 3, p220 ff]

True love takes the shortest and most direct route. The path of true love connecting God, Adam and Eve can only be a vertical line, for it is the shortest route to the horizontal. The path of true love between husband and wife connects from the east to the west and also follows the shortest route. There is only one intersecting point, and it is at a ninety-degree angle.

When a man and a woman reach maturity, they meet each other on the shortest horizontal route centring on true love. God’s vertical line and their horizontal line meet and form a right angle automatically. This point is where the vertical line and the horizontal line meet. It is the position of absolute value, the model, and the single central point that binds them together in true love.

However, because of the archangel, before Adam and Eve could reach maturity this angle was twisted, and this constitutes the human Fall. Due to the Fall, humankind inherited the lineage of Satan. This act of the devil was self-centred, self-focussed, and is the root of extreme individualism. As a result, fallen human beings place themselves first in every situation. God, on the other hand, thinks always of the whole. Therefore, good people who resemble God live for the sake of the whole, whereas evil people who resemble Satan live only for their own sake. This is what divides heaven and earth, divides the kingdom of heaven from hell, divides good people from evil people, and divides public-minded people from self interested people.

The corrupted path of love that aims to satisfy only one’s own physical body must be obliterated from this planet. I’m not talking about killing people, but about saving them. To use a biblical parable, people who have fallen and gone over to Satan’s side are wild olive trees. But the human beings whom God has selected from among them are the wild olive trees of the religious realm, and they are under His ownership. That is why God can deal with them freely. He has prepared them for the time of the returning Lord. It will be easy to cut and engraft them onto the returning Lord, when he comes, in one fell swoop. Thus, they will become true olive trees, achieving their originally intended state.

In other words, people of faith need to find the True Father, for as wild olive trees they were born without having received his seed of life. That is why they have been unable to achieve the ideal as true sons and daughters connected to the lineage of God, centring on original true love. That is why the Messiah needs to come.

Do you know who the Messiah is? The Messiah and his bride come as the True Parents. They pull out the false root of all who were born of the false parent, Satan, and guide them to their originally intended state. By doing so, they will expel Satan and build the kingdom of heaven of freedom and liberation, which all will welcome. They come with this enormous responsibility. Yet, are Christians today even thinking about this?

Then what kind of a being is God? He is the Parent of vertical true love. How close is He to us? When the unfallen, original True Parents, that is the Lord of the Second Advent and his bride, come to earth, the vertical line of God and the horizontal line of human beings finally will be able to come together at a right angle. I am educating people in the ability to create this right angle. When you come into the realm of true love resonance, you will be able to see heaven and earth clearly.

The reason Buddha was able to say, “I am my own Lord throughout heaven and earth,” is that when you enter the core of that realm of resonance, all of heaven and earth is in your hands, God is inside you, and the law of nature is connected to you. When you enter the realm of true love resonance, you do not need religion and you also do not need a saviour. You are liberated. Everything is finished and done with.

We have seen that one of the reasons God has carried out the providence of creating human beings was to find His object partners of true love. A second reason is so that God can dwell in a physical body. The physical body is important. People who dwell in the kingdom of heaven in heaven are sons and daughters who used to live in physical bodies. Therefore, God too needs to dwell there as the Parent who attained the form of a physical body.

When you ask what the form of this body is, the answer is that it is the internal form of the original Adam and Eve. Then the question is, where would God and the original Adam and Eve meet? The place where the love of God and the love of True Parents, the life of God and the life of True Parents, and the lineage of God and the lineage of True Parents come together in union is this right angle connecting the vertical and the horizontal, and no other. This is the point that establishes true love.

God is the vertical Parent of true love, and the perfected Adam and Eve are the parents centred on horizontal true love. When you are born inheriting the love, life and lineage of these two sets of parents, your mind becomes the vertical “you” and your body becomes the horizontal “you.” When this

vertical “you” and horizontal “you” become one in unity, you become the eternal object partner of God’s true love.

[CSG Book 8, 8. ‘True Love and the World of Unity’, p1214-6]

Session 3 - Discussion Questions: 1. How much do I appreciate God’s investment in the salvation process? 2. What is my responsibility in this process, and how can I better help our Heavenly Parent and True Parents in their task? 3. How do I see myself as part of the bigger picture - God’s untiring efforts to save humanity?

My reflections:

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My Third Affirmation:

SESSION 4 True Parents’ Love and Sacrifice for Me

A. Introduction

True Parents walked the model course that all people will have to go. More than anything, they demonstrated their philosophy of life, of true love centred on God. True Parents set the example that we should emulate in the age of Cheon Il Guk.

Out of their love for God, they took on the course of restoration through indemnity. They did not avoid a life of suffering. True Parents had to pioneer that path, which no one had gone before, even going to the very bottom of hell. Even when they were in situations that others would have tried to avoid, True Parents practised true love in order to liberate God and all people. Moreover, they even forgave and embraced their enemies who had wanted to kill them, and the incomparable suffering they endured moved even the heart of God.

True Father gave and gave again. He invested completely and forgot about it. Even while undergoing forced labour at the Hungnam fertilizer plant, where starvation and the menace of death hovered constantly, he shared his meagre ration, which was as life itself, with other inmates. He always shouldered the heaviest burdens and carried other people’s burdens on their behalf. True Mother, also, when she encountered members in difficult circumstances, always loved them and offered help. True Parents consistently gave away what was most precious to them; this has been their way of life.

[PWG: Chapter 3. True Parents’ Philosophy of Life and Their Public Life]

[From CBG, Section 6. Learning from Suffering]

The path of indemnity

Because Christianity and its representatives whom God had prepared failed to fulfill their responsibility, True Father walked the path of indemnity, enduring the suffering of prison six times. He walked a thorny path, leaving a trail of blood, sweat and tears, even as he comforted God in His bitter sorrow. In the end, True Parents surmounted a course of eight vertical and eight horizontal stages and were victorious in completing the providence of restoration through indemnity.

1. The path of restoration is paved with suffering. It is the way of indemnity. On this path, you should not think centred on yourself, or insist that you must live this way or that way. You cannot hold onto any particular expectation about how your life should go. Rather, you must maintain a public perspective. On the arduous path that heaven has mandated for you, you should feel that you are ever falling short and must redouble your efforts. You need to press forward one step at a time, always striving to overcome the challenges on your path, and to go as quickly as you can. If you start complaining that your path is too difficult, you will not be able to overcome it. To overcome the suffering, you must walk the path with gratitude.

There is a gap between us and heaven. God is high above, and we are far below. Therefore, we must always contemplate how we can reach the position that God wants us to reach. Yet the gap between individuals and heaven is so huge. How can we bridge the gap and meet together? God must descend to find us, and we must ascend to find Him. Yet, because it is difficult to reach Him, we need to pay indemnity in the process. (277-121, 1996/04/07)

2. Ever since the Fall, the levels of the individual, family, tribe, people, nation and world have been Satan’s kingdom. So how do we restore this world? Each individual has to be planted in a place where he or she is separated from the world. The path that each of us must go is opposite to

the world, and we need to pull ourselves through it in order to separate from the fallen world. This is why in high-level religions like Buddhism, believers leave their homes and renounce the world. It is why Christianity teaches that we must love Jesus more than we love even our mother and father, or our older brother or sister; as is written in the Bible, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matt. 10:37) It sounds paradoxical, but it actually embodies a logical principle that leads us along the path to heaven.

I came to understand that this law of indemnity has to be extended to the cosmic level. That is why I have been focussed on perfecting love from the individual level to the levels of the family, tribe, people, nation - to all levels. As I proceeded on each level, Satan used all his strength to destroy me. So we can see why the path of faith entails persecution. You simply must not walk the path that the world says is good. You must proceed on a path where you are willing to shed tears and blood. Do not strive to reach the top of the world, but rather remain in the shadow of suffering. That is the safety zone. Since Satan is arrogant, he despises difficult places. So our safety zone is found in the most miserable places. (181-212, 1988/10/03)

3. From the time I turned 20 until the time I passed 40, I had to endure a period of tearful struggle. You really do not know what it was like. I went to prison as if it were just another stage on life’s way; I decided that undergoing torture was something ordinary, and I accepted it as necessary in order to go through the course of indemnity, to pay the price. That was my whole life during that time. The nation of Korea and the religious world in Korea opposed me. The 30 million people of Korea banded together to oppose me. They drove me out into sorrowful circumstances. I come from that kind of personal history.(059-286, 1972/07/27)

4. When God created, He invested His whole heart into all things of creation and into human beings. Therefore, we should be willing to offer ourselves and all our material possessions to God. This is why the motto of the Unification Church emerged, “Shedding tears for humanity, sweat for earth and blood for heaven.”

Are you all living this way? You should be. If you do not, it is a serious problem. To live like this involves treading a complex and complicated indemnity course. In order to pass through the individual challenges of this course, you have to bring yourself to the zero point and tear down the walls within yourself. I myself do that continually, which is why during the most crucial times of my life I willingly went to prison. (211-318, 1991/01/01)

5. Looking back on my life, I recall going to prison and being severely tortured many times. During those times, I would tell myself, “If I die here in prison under this torture, it would be an utter catastrophe for God’s providence.” If I had died with my body covered with scars from torture, despairing and groaning in pain, it would have been a serious problem for God. Who else did He have who would take responsibility for this path of restoration through indemnity?

In these circumstances, when I shed tears transcending my own death, moving God’s heart and even shocking Him, God resolved everything for me. I had many such experiences. In my mind, the pain of thetorture was not the real issue. What was most fearful to me was dying with my mission unfulfilled. (276-012, 1996/01/02)

6. Never in my entire life have I insisted on my own way. My life has been like living in prison, or even more difficult. Prisoners have to endure hunger with barely enough food to survive, but my life is not that simple. I am intensely aware that on this earth thousands upon thousands of people are dying in pain every day, at every moment. To me, this is as painful as having my own hand cut off. That is what you should feel too.

We should not be able to look at the world we are living in without tears. When we have this mind-set, we cannot face God without tears. That is why, when I prayed in wintertime, I shed tears and sweat to the point where my cotton pants were completely soaked. (343-095, 2001/01/16)

7. I pioneered the course of indemnity, conquered Satan’s realm and laid the foundation for our victory.

This is easy to say, but the reality was — and is — not easy at all. Unimaginable complications arose during my course. As I walked the path,

the way I could overcome all obstacles was by leading a life of extreme intensity in which I felt I could not let my guard down even for a second. Without such seriousness, there would be no way to ever turn Satan’s world around. (362-182, 2001/12/12)

8. Because I came in Adam’s place, I had to walk the course of indemnity on the world level. Settling the accounts with Satan is not just a symbolic matter. I had to face him man-to-man. Now it is easy to make conditions; you are now in circumstances where you can even be welcomed by the world. You have just no idea what I went through.

My hope is that your family will become a family that is filial to heaven, that your nation will become a nation that is loyal to heaven’s nation, that the world will become the realm of global citizens, and that heaven and earth will become the realm of divine, holy men and women. Yet, no place on earth other than the Unification Church provides the training for you to grow into people of such greatness. Therefore you must do this work, to create that which the whole world longs to see. By establishing the realm ofliberation and securing it on earth, you should be able to say that we have gone beyond the age of indemnity. (307-191, 1998/11/08)

9. Parents can never sit idly by as their child edges toward death. Until their last breath they invest all their strength to revive their child, and if they do, they raise a heartfelt cheer. Unless you have experienced a state like that, you cannot understand me. I am fighting, risking my life to the edge of death, to save even one person. I have devoted my entire life to battling for the lives of all humankind.

The spirit world knows this. That is why a person like me can never be overcome by bad fortune. Even in prison I would always examine myself and think that my imprisonment occurred because I still needed to invest more. Because I was determined to do more to save humankind, I had no regrets whatsoever. Since I had no regrets, I could embrace my incarceration, even forgetting that I was in prison.

When parents look at their son who has such a heart, they have to hold back their tears and bless him for eternity. Such is the heart of God. (247- 033, 1993/04/21)

10. Throughout my entire life, I have had to climb over many hills of restoration through indemnity. I climbed over the hills of eight stages, from the individual to the family, tribe, people, nation, world, cosmos and God. On my individual course, the entire world opposed me. On the family level, the parents of our members were against me. After I went over that family- level hill, the tribe opposed me, then the Korean people opposed me, the nation of Korea opposed me, and the entire world opposed me. All the Christian denominations stood against me. However, they could not succeed in eliminating me. On the contrary, those who attacked me have since suffered misfortune. God formally recognizes this.

Although they struck me with all of their might, since they could not eliminate me, they are now being won over. Yet I never fought with them. God’s strategy is to be struck first and take back what is lost. In God’s ideal of creation, there is no such thing as striking. (302-217, 1999/06/14)

11. In order to pay the indemnity to restore Satan’s world, the shortest path is the one beset by the most persecution. It is the path that takes you to the rock bottom of prison. The path that can reach the vertical is the path of suffering. It is the path of prison, which intersects with death. That path is like a bridge that makes a straight line. This is why I did not mind going to prison. That is why God even led me to prison.

In fact, Jesus also was imprisoned before he died on the cross.

When the ruler of your nation sends you to the dungeons of your nation’s foulest prison, you form an adversarial relationship with that ruler. That is why if you want to reach the topmost position in your nation, the shortcut is to go to prison and overcome that experience, and then you can stand even above that ruler. When a righteous person is cast into prison, the ruler who imprisoned him or her is considered evil. Then when that righteous person is released, he or she can stand above that ruler. When a good person is forced to go to prison, the people in his or her surroundings will support and protect him or her.

That is why on all levels, the path of imprisonment is the shortcut by which to ascend. (136-046,1985/12/20)

The ultimate victor

Although innocent of any crime, True Father underwent imprisonment six times: once by Japan, three times by communist North Korea, once by South Korea and once by the United States. He endured and persevered because he understood the fundamental rule of restoration, that progress in God’s providence comes about through setting indemnity conditions, by being unjustly struck, and then claiming back what was taken. With this conviction, he overcame every kind of suffering in prison. Boldly standing up against Satan’s powers that occupied the positions of authority, he took on the role of a beacon that guides the world shrouded in darkness into the light. In the end, True Father was victorious over every form of opposition and persecution.

12. You have no idea how deplorable it is that during my life on earth I had to go to prison. How will this affect the dignity and honour of both you and your ancestors? All of your necks are on the line. You do not know the fearful consequences that could ensue.

Why do you think I risked my life during six terms of imprisonment? Society brands a person who has gone to prison even once with a scarlet letter, but six times? If a normal person were to go to prison six times, he would carry so much shame that he could not walk the earth with his head held high. However, I am not the least bit ashamed. The ones that should feel ashamed are those nations that did this to me.

Each time I survived. Why? I had a job to finish, and I could not afford to die until I got the job done. That is why each time I went to prison I survived. (612-222, 2009/05/27)

13. I have lived a righteous life in the service of God’s Will, while keeping myself whole under the shade of His protection. That is why I could remain alive despite experiencing prisons more bleak than anything in Satan’s fallen society. Even in those wretched prisons, God was my refuge.

You have no idea how many tears my mother and father cried when I entered prison. My parents had provided me with everything for my schooling, saying that I would help save the nation with my education. But

after graduating from school, I ended up incarcerated. Can you imagine how they felt?

In a sense, I sought out prison. I went to live in North Korea under the communist regime, and while in prison there I studied and analyzed communism more than has anyone else. Besides the prisons in North Korea, I experienced prison life in Japan, in South Korea, and even in America. (430-061, 2003/12/30)

14. I experienced prison life three times in North Korea. It was heaven’s strategy to put me through this so I would not have even the slightest lingering attraction toward communism. It was also God’s plan that I would not be interested in the type of Christianity that was allowed to exist under the communist regime.

God wanted me to utterly repudiate anything influenced by communism, so I would not trust the Christian churches under the sway of communism or in any way trust the nation of North Korea. It was God’s strategy for me to reject it all. Even persecution from South Korea and America was God’s strategy, so that I would not have any unnecessary attachment to the false values in those societies.

Now thinking about the past after going over all those hills, I realize that all those experiences were heaven’s strategy to give me something more precious than I could ever anticipate. I count those suffering times as God’s blessings, because thereby He would bring me something greater, something even more valuable, something infinite — the honour of pioneering the path to give the Blessing to all humankind.

They enabled me to secure a position that no one can usurp. Indeed, it was heaven’s love that I went through those paths full of ordeals, because they were the conditions by which I could claim everything from Satan. Everything that Satan had taken from heaven came back to me. (161-198, 1987/02/03)

15. It is not because I enjoy receiving persecution that I have been doing this work. I have not been working like this because I enjoy being insulted and abused. Honestly, I do not enjoy it at all. Yet I am doing it because I had

personal experiences in the spirit world where I tasted a joy more wonderful than anything else. It is so real and intense, that I can feel it as I reshape this world. That is why I continue this work.

You might think that the reason I can work so tirelessly is because I was born different, as if my body were made of steel, but that is not the case. Why would I do this work if it brought me nothing that I liked? Try and do work that you do not like for one or two years. That is like dying. There is a reason Iam doing this, despite all sorts of hardships; it is because there is something so real, something so worthwhile, that is calling me to continue. (036-121, 1970/11/22)

16. God loves me. I know this very well. Yet while I kept faith in Him and loved Him all my life, there were more than a few times when I felt like complaining to Him. Sometimes when I was in a life-threatening situation, God acted as if He did not know anything about it. However, think of how heartbreaking it must have been for a parent, especially the Heavenly Parent, to say, “I did not know about your suffering plight.” Parents could never stand idly by while their child’s hands and feet were tied up. They would do whatever it took to untie their child’s bonds and free him. But if God had intervened, then the person known as Mr. Moon of the Unification Church would not have been able to accomplish his responsibility, which he had to do on his own. So God had no choice but to stand by as if He were a third party. (048-121, 1971/09/05)

17. When I felt lonely as I walked this path for the Will, I recall God who had called me and said, “Sun Myung, you know that I am with you, don’t you?” Then walking a lonely path became no problem. I said to Him, “For a while I thought I was all alone, but truly You are with me,” and then I went on with new strength.

There were times when I would weep when I saw a beggar on the street, thinking, “What if that beggar were my Father who had come to find me? What would I do?” You should all become people of such heart, so you would even hold the hands of a beggar in tattered clothes and weep for him without letting him know why. I have had many such experiences.

In the midst of pain and loneliness, I sometimes felt, “Heavenly Father, You

are so cold-hearted. You are so merciless. You only give me responsibility, but You do not take care of me.” But as soon as I said that to myself, God said to me, “Look, I was right there with you when you held the hand of that beggar. In the midst of your misery, when you were shedding tears with those sorrowful people, I was with you there.” So how can I not but continue on this path? Now we can understand why Jesus said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me.” (Matt 25:35-36) (011-203, 1961/07/17)

18. God’s strategy is to be struck first and then claim what is His. Satan’s way is to strike first and take what he wants, but eventually he falls into ruin. In both the First and Second World Wars, the side that attacked first was defeated. The third world war is similar; it is a war of ideology in which communism has been attacking the world. Many of its attacks have been aimed at me.

The Republic of Korea opposed me, the United States opposed me, and so did Japan and China. They are still doing so. Virtually the whole world united against me. However, I have emerged from all this and am now receiving blessings from the entire evil world. The Devil cannot keep all the blessings of heaven and earth. In the Last Days, Satan has to hand over all the blessings to the True Man. (176-203, 1988/05/09)

19. I never doubted God’s Will. Nevertheless, without training myself, and without exploring and understanding more and more about the great mysteries of the here and the hereafter, the foundation I built could have been lost. In order to inherit a foundation on a higher dimension, it was imperative that I pay an appropriate level of indemnity.

This is why I received persecution. Persecution is not a bad thing, actually. It helped me reach perfection.

That is why going to prison was not a problem. Nor was facing life-and- death situations. I already knew that if I died while living in adversity, I would go to the most precious place imaginable. So I had no basis to complain. (326-040, 2000/07/02)

20. When I was in prison, beaten so badly that I collapsed and vomited blood, I still did not pray in a way that would cause God to worry about me. I endured, silently pledging, “God, I am different from other saints, even Jesus in ancient times.” If I prayed asking God to save me, that would be a weak prayer. As God’s central person, I did not want to be petty and unmanly. Hence, I never prayed for anything for myself; I only prayed for God’s sake.

21. Before Jesus was crucified, he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” How can there be “my will”? Satan tried to catch him on this point. What I am saying is that at that time, Jesus’ will and God’s Will were not perfectly one. Because I understood this, even when I found myself in circumstances where I was tortured and vomiting blood, I thought to myself, “I am different from Jesus. I am determined to offer my blood for Your Will, without any hesitation.” Truly, I was willing to offer all my blood for God alone. That is why, no matter how difficult my situation, I never pray for myself. Heaven already knows my situation, so I do not pray, “God, please save me!” I have trained my body to go the sacrificial way that will enable all humankind to live. By focusing on the goal, I ultimately emerged as a man of absolute faith and absolute love. Whenever I have to go through the valley of the shadow of death shedding tears and blood, I go only with my love for God, and with my heart and mind in absolute oneness with God. (268-300, 1995/04/03)

22. Alone, I carry out the work of a lighthouse that guides people in the night with its light. A lighthouse is important to those who travel at night by sea. Yet, no one regards a lighthouse as important during the day, and people do not much appreciate the lighthouse keeper. Yet that is the role I have taken on.

People do not appreciate the light from a lighthouse in the daytime. So the question is, how can I make my light become like the daytime sun? The way is by taking up the task of restoration through indemnity. What I am trying to do is to shine a light that will help people change to become God’s eternal, original stars whose light will shine in this world. It was incredibly challenging to change my lighthouse lamp into the shining sun. Yet with

this as my goal, I have come thus far.

Even as I entered the first prison, I asked myself, “Where will prison number two be? Where will prison number three be?” I am the type of person who, as I entered prison number six, was thinking about prison number seven. After all, I still had a mission to fulfill in the Soviet Union and China; thus, I thought that in the years ahead of me I might have to go to prison in those nations.

Since I was preparing myself for this path, God protected me and I did not need to go. However, I was determined that before I died I would visit the countries that could be worse than any prison. Thus I went to the Soviet Union. Many people around me advised against my trip there; they begged me not to go.

However, I went to that prison of the day in order to dissolve the prison of the night. In fact, by going there, I brought daylight to that prison. (311-092, 1999/08/19)

23. I have been shunned and persecuted all my life, but I have not perished. This is because I always go in the original direction. I do not act in a self- centred way. The reason I have been setting this standard is to help people become better, to help them advance to be in a better situation and to have a greater future.

For this purpose, I have been educating people and setting the example of living by that standard. As a result, I have been persecuted, but both heaven and earth are protecting me. There is a fundamental law and principle that defines the path we must walk. A man must walk the path of a man, and a family must walk the path of a family. When we live 100 percent in accord with that fundamental principle, all of heaven and earth will support us, and nothing can cause us to fail. If we were to fail, heaven and earth would fall apart. The principles and standards of nature would fall into chaos, and heaven and earth would face destruction. (120-151, 1982/10/05)

24. In order to enter the kingdom of heaven, I must stand in the position of the perfected Adam, and in that position give out so much blessing that

even the Archangel will protect me until the end. Because such a standard exists in the Principle, you have to meet the condition of overcoming Satan’s accusation and loving your enemy. Otherwise you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. If you do not love your enemy, you cannot go there. (173-295, 1988/02/21)

25. I am the central person in a world where every nation has lost its direction. Day and night I have been pioneering the new direction that will set each nation aright. When I walked the path of indemnity, I had no awareness of myself. Jesus, too, had no awareness of himself when he was nailed to the cross. That is why he prayed to God, pleading with Him to forgive those who crucified him, as they did not know the serious crime they were committing. In this way, he made the condition for Christians to conquer Rome in the future.

It is the same with me. I went through the crucifixion of prison under the Japanese, in North Korea, in South Korea, and in the United States. However, I never forgot God’s guidance that I must not sever the net of love that will save them. So, even in prison, I hauled in people with the net of love.

This can be likened to a light bulb that will always remain lit if it is connected to the power station by alive electric line. If the electricity of God’s love is connected to the spiritual electric line, that light will shine everywhere. If you are connected to God’s love, the electricity of His love can resurrect you and give you new life.

This is how you can see a clear path of hope. This can be your joy. It will make you such an amazing person that you can smile even while going over the path of the cross. Then Satan will flee without looking back. When you become such a person, we can conclude that restoration has been completed.

(229-258, 1992/04/12)

Session 4 - Discussion Questions: 1. In light of all we have studied today, how much do I need our Heavenly Parent and True Parents? 2. What is God calling me to be, and how can I make this a time and place of renewal from where I will never slip back? 3. What more can I do to prepare internally for the Special Grace from True Parents? What do I still need to do?

My reflections:

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My Fourth Affirmation:

Key to Sources:

EDP Exposition of the Divine Principle (1996)

WS2 World Scripture II

CSG Cheon Seong Gyeong (2014)

PHG Pyeong Hwa Gyeong

CBG Chambumo Gyeong