Chapter 1 — The Principle of Creation

Every serious religious tradition has to begin somewhere, and the Unification tradition that William Haines spent his life teaching begins with a single question: how is the universe built? Not what is in it, or what happens in it, but what shape does it have at the deepest level — what is the underlying grammar according to which God brought it forth? The answer, in the form William inherited and then patiently unfolded across the lectures gathered here, is the Principle of Creation: a description of reality as a structure of pairs, of inner and outer, of subject and object, growing through stages towards a perfection that has both a personal and a cosmic meaning.

What follows is a reading of six of William's lectures on this principle, drawn from his FFWPU Monday seminars of December 2014. They are not exhaustive — the Divine Principle is a long text, and William's exposition runs to many hours — but they are the load-bearing beams. If you understand these, the rest of the book becomes legible.

God's Dual Characteristics

William's exposition begins where the Divine Principle itself begins: with God's existence and what the tradition calls God's dual characteristics. This is the standard opening of the Principle of Creation, and in his first session William works through it carefully, with the philosophical worked examples that mark his teaching style — examples drawn from physics, biology, and the structure of ordinary objects, used to show that the pattern of paired characteristics is not a theological assertion imposed on the world but something already visible in the world when one looks. (See Principle of Creation Part 1.2.)

The first pair is the most fundamental: every existing reality has both an invisible internal nature and a visible external form. A chair has a shape one can see and a purpose — to be sat on — that one cannot see but which is the chair's real reason for being. A person has a body that can be photographed and a mind that cannot. The universe itself, William teaches, has both an outer face (the material cosmos that science studies) and an inner face (its meaning, its direction, the love that holds it together). To grasp creation, one must grasp that both sides are real and that neither is reducible to the other.

The second pair is gender — masculinity and femininity, or in the Principle's language, the positivity and negativity present in everything from subatomic particles to human beings. Here William is careful, because the language is treacherous. The tradition speaks of God as Father, and Christians have spoken of God as masculine for two thousand years, and William wants to neither dismiss this language nor mistake it for a metaphysical claim it cannot bear:

I understand God as both masculine and feminine, harmonised into Oneness. However, when we consider the relationship between God and the natural world, God is relatively more masculine compared to nature. This is why we have expressions like 'Mother Earth', which describe the Earth as a sort of mother. This perspective is also present in various religions. At the end of the day, words are inadequate to describe what God is like. Just because a term is used does not mean it fully encapsulates the essence of God; we are trying to use our limited language to simplify and understand the relationship between God and the universe.

(from Principle of Creation Part 1.1)

This is a characteristic move. William is willing to use the inherited language — Father, Lord, He — because language has to land somewhere, and the alternative is silence. But he insists that the language is a tool of approximation, not a final description. God contains both poles, and gendered speech about God is a relation (God relative to nature) rather than a category (God as opposed to a female God). The reader who carries this distinction forward will find many later puzzles in the Principle dissolve.

The Seed of Dualism

If the first pair (internal nature and external form) is the structural core of creation, then a particular mistake about pairs has caused enormous historical damage. William traces this mistake to Pythagoras and what is sometimes called the Pythagorean table of opposites — the ancient list of paired terms (one and many, limit and unlimited, light and dark, male and female) that the Pythagoreans saw as organising reality. The trouble, William argues, is that the Pythagoreans also placed good and bad on this table, as if good and evil were simply one more complementary pair on the same footing as light and dark or hot and cold. (See Principle of Creation Part 1.0.)

This was the seed of metaphysical dualism: the idea that evil is a thing, balanced symmetrically against good, woven into the architecture of the cosmos. When this idea passed into European thought — through Plato, through certain strands of Christian theology, and through every later philosophy that takes evil as a positive substance — it distorted the Christian doctrine of creation, which had wanted to say that everything God made was good and that evil is a privation or a perversion rather than a co-equal principle.

The Principle of Creation, as William reads it, has to be carefully distinguished from this dualism. Pairs are real, and pairs are everywhere. But not every pair is the same kind of pair. Internal and external are complementary — they need each other and together constitute a single reality. Masculine and feminine are likewise complementary. Good and evil are not complementary in this sense. Evil is not the partner of good in the constitution of the world; it is a disorder of relations that ought to have been good. To grasp this distinction is to inoculate oneself against a great deal of bad theology.

The Microcosm and the Two Worlds

From the structure of God, William moves to the structure of the human being. Here he draws on a venerable idea — that the human being is a microcosm, a small universe that contains within itself the elements of the larger one — and he gives it a precise content. A human being, on this reading, is not merely an animal with extra mental software. A human being integrates the mineral, vegetable, and animal levels of existence and then adds something further: spirit. And spirit is not predictable from the lower levels. No survey of physics will tell you what biology is going to do; no survey of biology will tell you what mind is going to do; no survey of mind, on William's account, will tell you what spirit is going to do. The higher level is genuinely new. (See Principle of Creation Part 3.2.)

This is the philosophical claim. It carries a practical one: the human spirit, like the human body, has to grow. And it grows by means of what the Principle calls vitality elements, which are not available except through bodily action in the physical world. The spirit cannot mature in a vacuum. It matures through what we do, here, in flesh, with other people. This is why physical life matters so much in William's account — not because the body is everything, but because the body is the workshop in which the spirit is shaped.

The relation between the two worlds — physical and spiritual — is one of the harder points to grasp, and William reaches for an analogy that recurs throughout his teaching. Birth, he suggests, is the inverse image of death. To make this vivid, he asks his audience to imagine the experience from the inside:

Supposing, I mean, it's hard to imagine, just imagine you were living in your mother's womb. What do you think it would be like? Warm and cozy, and lots of space... But after a while, how does it feel? You feel a bit squashed... Then suddenly, one day, somebody lets out the plug. What happened to all the water?... You see a bit of light down at the end of this tunnel, and you think, I can't fit down through that. You probably feel that you're going to die. Then suddenly you come out into all this bright light, and it's harsh air. You start having to breathe, which is hard work. Then suddenly someone goes snip. That's my food supply you just cut off. Within a few minutes, you start to feel hungry, which you never felt before. This new world isn't as pleasant as life in the old world. It feels like dying, but actually, it's the entering into this new world.

(from Principle of Creation Part 3.2)

The analogy does several jobs at once. It explains, gently, why death is frightening: from inside this life, the next world is invisible, and the transition feels like extinction. It also explains why this life matters: the time in the womb is not wasted, because what grows there is what will be born. And it explains why the religious life — the deliberate cultivation of the spirit through bodily action — is not optional. The infant who never developed lungs in the womb cannot breathe air outside it. The spirit that was never exercised in this world will arrive in the next world unformed.

Heaven, Hell, and the Criterion

If the spirit grows here and continues there, the question of where it ends up becomes urgent. William's account of heaven and hell is one of the more striking parts of his exposition, and it is best understood as a refusal of two common pictures. Heaven is not, on his reading, a reward bestowed from outside on the members of a particular religion; hell is not a punishment imposed from outside on the members of the wrong one. Both are self-sorting communities: people gather, in the next world, with those whose spirits have grown to a similar shape, and the gathering is what heaven or hell consists in. (See Principle of Creation Part 3.3.)

The criterion of sorting — and here William reads Jesus closely — is not religious affiliation. It is treatment of others. The sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 are separated by what they did to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned; their creed is not mentioned. This is consonant with the broader Unification claim that God's concern is with the substance of a life rather than its label, and it sets up much of what William will later say about the relations between religions: not that they are all the same, but that none of them is automatically saved or automatically damned by virtue of its name.

Conscience as the Final Authority

The chapter closes with what is, in some ways, the most radical of William's claims about creation. If the human being is made in the image of God, then there is in each human being a faculty that participates in God's own moral knowing. This faculty is the conscience. And the conscience, William teaches, is higher than your teacher, higher than your parents, and — in a startling formulation — higher even than what appears to be God's command. Never, he says, go against your conscience. (See Principle of Creation Part 3.6.)

The claim sounds antinomian until one sees what it is doing. William is not licensing the wilful self; he is locating moral authority in the place where God's voice can actually reach a person, which is the inside. Any apparent external command — from a parent, a teacher, a scripture, or a being claiming to be God — that contradicts the conscience is, on this view, either misheard or counterfeit. The conscience is the court of last appeal because it is the organ in which the image of God is, for each person, most directly available.

He illustrates this not with abstraction but with a domestic anecdote:

My mother always tells a story from when she was a little girl. One day, somebody came to the door, and her mother didn't want to meet this person. My grandmother told my mother to go and tell him she's not in. My mother didn't know what to do; how could she tell a lie? But how could she disobey her mother? So what's the way out of it? My mother said yes, she opened the door and said she's not in anyway. If your parents tell you to do something wrong, don't do it.

(from Principle of Creation Part 3.6)

The story is almost too modest for the weight it carries. A small child at a door, refusing both rebellion and complicity, finds the third way. The conscience is what found it. And the principle the story is meant to illustrate — that even a parent's word does not override the child's conscience — is the principle that the rest of the book will rely on whenever it has to choose between an inherited rule and a deeper duty.

The Shape of What Follows

Pairs, then; inner and outer; the structural distinction between complementarity and dualism; the human being as microcosm whose spirit grows through the body; the two worlds joined by birth and death; heaven and hell as self-sorting communities sorted by love rather than label; and the conscience as the final authority within. These are the elements William lays down in his treatment of the Principle of Creation, and they are the elements every later chapter will assume. The reader who has them in hand is ready for what comes next: the Fall, and the long history of how this beautifully built world went wrong.