FFWPU Seminars 08/24/11 part 1

Should we start anyway? I'm just here. My special request is a little cameo performance. I was supposed to be on holiday still, but Simon phoned me up and said would I like to come and do this opportunity. Why not? Everything has a purpose to it. Supposing they came across somebody else who had stolen it and decided to use it as firewood, how would they feel? Terrible. Yeah, that's the way it is. Depending on the purpose that something is created for, that determines, to a large extent, its value and its meaning. If we want to understand why God created human beings, a place to try and understand it is within ourselves. A person called Saint Clement of Alexandria came up with this sort of hermeneutical principle: know yourself. He who knows himself will know God, and he who knows God will become like God. We need to explore ourselves a little bit, what makes us tick, what motivates us, because through understanding ourselves and why we do things, it will help us to understand God and why God does things.

So let's have a look at what people want. One of the first sentences in the Divine Principle is: everyone is struggling to attain happiness and avoid misfortune. That's not a particularly original insight, you know, because Aristotle said the same thing and actually said it a lot better. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. He wrote a whole book about it, not just a couple of sentences. So what is it that makes us happy? What is it that we want? If we go back and think about a baby, what makes a baby happy? What does a baby know when it's born? Does it know one plus one equals two? No. What does it know? It knows hunger. It's not even aware of its mum as a mum; it's just aware of this pain in its stomach. This hurts, this hunger, and it wants its hunger satisfied. It knows it because hunger can be satisfied if it gets to drink milk, and it also wants to be cuddled. So what makes it satisfied is not the idea of milk; it's the milk itself. It's not the idea of being cuddled; it's actually being cuddled.

What happens if you have a baby that's crying for some milk and you show it the milk and shake the milk in front of its face? Does it calm down? No, it screams. It gets even more agitated. Yeah, because it wants to have a relationship with this milk; it wants to drink it. And what about a toddler? You know what toddlers are like. They want to get into everything. They touch everything. After a while, they get bored with their little rattles and toys, and they crawl into the kitchen, open the cupboards, take out all the pots and pans, empty everything, and make a big noise. Yes, and what happens if you take something away from them? They scream. So what's the trick? Before you take it away, you have something to replace it with. They've got a very short attention span. They don't just want to see a toy; they want to play with it. If you put it out of reach, what does that do? It just makes them even more agitated. When they get it, they touch it, and where do they put it? In their mouth.

I always just have to tell my children: you play with toys and you eat food. But they like to play with food and eat toys. Anyway, it's a sense that you just want to become one with something, and it's through achieving this oneness that one experiences joy. As the principle says, happiness comes when one's desire is fulfilled, which comes from a relationship with an object. For example, if you're hungry and you have something to eat, you're happy; your desire is fulfilled. When there's somebody you miss very much, when you see them, you feel happy because your desire is fulfilled. You see, you come into contact with the person that you love and you run towards them, embrace them, and kiss them. That's the way it is. What kind of objects do we want? I remember I used to collect stamps. During the winter, I'd go to the stamp shop, save up my pocket money, and buy stamps. I'd stick them in my album, and they all looked beautiful and neat and tidy. Anyway, when summer came, I would play outside and put the stamp album on the shelf and forget about them for months.

Then autumn came, and cold weather came again, and I remembered, oh, I'll go and get my stamp album down. I took it down off the shelf, opened it up, and I was so surprised because it was exactly the same as it had been when I put it there. I realised that although I cared about it, it didn't really care about me. It didn't matter whether I lived or died; it would still be there. I had this rock collection as well, all these little semi-precious stones I collected. The last time I went to see my mother, guess what she did? 'You remember that little rock collection you got?' I said, 'Oh yes, that's 40 years ago, no more.' 'Oh, I've got it. Would you like it? Take it home with you.' I said, 'Okay, let's have a look.' There it was, this little chocolate box that I had divided up into lots of little segment squares, and I put all these little rocks inside and labelled them all. I realised I hadn't looked at it for 40, 45 years, and it still looked exactly the same as the day I'd last looked at it. I realised these rocks have been there for millions of years and are still going to be there. I can't actually have a very close relationship with these rocks, despite what they say on the adverts about diamonds being a girl's best friend.

After all, children like to plant a bulb, and when you water the bulb, it starts to grow. You realise it grew because you watered it; because you cared about it, it responded to you. In that sense, a flower can bring more joy than a rock because it's more like us than a rock is. But what happens when you stroke the petals of a flower? They wilt. Well done, you tried that as well. And you can't take them for a walk. Often, people progress to having a little pet, a hamster or a dog. You can teach your dog tricks, and if you look after it well, it'll protect you. But again, there's a limit. You can have a closer relationship with an animal than you can with a plant because an animal is more like us than a plant is. You have a closer relationship, but then if you take your animal for a walk and you sit there on the top of a hill watching the sunset together, and then you start reading your dog your poetry, how's the dog going to respond? Woof! Yeah, its capacity to understand what it is that we want to share or convey is limited. It's more like us than a plant, but it's not as much like us as another human being.

That's why we look for friends, other human beings with whom we can share our thoughts, our feelings, our desires, our ambitions, our aspirations, all these things. We look for someone who can understand what we're talking about, appreciate it, and respond. We form our little friendship groups with people who have something in common with us, share similar values, similar experiences, similar interests. After a while, people often find somebody that they want to share their whole life with. They want to spend their whole life with someone they feel can understand them and respond to them. Yes, I can share my whole life with this person; this person has the capacity to embrace me and respond to me. Sometimes, we're driving along in the car, and my wife sees an elderly couple in their mid-80s or 90s walking down the street hand in hand, and she says, 'Oh, I hope we look like that one day.' I think, 'All wrinkled up and everything.' But anyway, there's this sort of vision of spending life for eternity.

What we look for then is an object in which our own nature is reflected and complements us, an object which stimulates us to feel and discover ourselves. Through a relationship with somebody else, we discover ourselves. We can't really discover ourselves if we're just living on a desert island. Only through relationships with other people do we discover, 'Oh, I didn't know about that.' Sometimes we have a relationship with somebody who reacts in a funny way, and we think, 'Well, I didn't know I was like that. Where did that come from?' It's through this that we discover ourselves. So how is joy produced? It's only produced through a relationship between a subject and an object. This brings us to what is more stimulating. The principle says our object partner helps us to feel our own internal nature and external forms through the stimulation it gives. What is it we want more, an idea or reality? What makes us more satisfied, the idea of a nice meal or a nice meal itself? The nice meal itself. And what makes us more inspired, the idea of a partner of love or an actual partner? The real thing.

When we think about it, this is what makes us tick, and this is what makes God tick. When we think about why God created the universe, God created the universe because He is looking for an object of His love. God is a being of love, an infinite love and heart. If you have a lot of love, what do you want to do? You want to share it. You can imagine how much God had so much love He wanted to share, but He had nobody with whom to share His heart, nobody with whom to share His love. That's why God created the universe; that's why God created human beings as an object of His love, as beings with whom He could share His heart, His love, His ideas, everything. That's why God created a substantial world. He didn't want to just share it with an idea of an ideal person; He wanted real people. That's why God wants a relationship with beings like Himself. That's why it says in Genesis, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.'

God created human beings to be like Himself because, you know, God could have created rocks, but rocks can't receive all of God's love, nor can animals or plants. But God created human beings with the capacity to receive His love and to reflect that love and respond to that love. You could have this incredibly deep relationship where God could share everything with us, and we could respond to that and have this kind of loving relationship. That's why it says in the Bible, 'I say you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.' God wanted to create beings like Himself; God wanted to create gods. That's quite an awesome thing, really, when you think about it. One of the psalm writers said, 'When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have made, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you've made him a little less than God and crowned him with glory and honour.' This is a person looking at the amazing universe that God created with the billions of stars and galaxies, and he felt that God was interested in him as a human being, as an individual. God cared about him, and this is really shocking. The God who created the universe cares about me. When you think about the size of the universe and how big we are, we're little bits of dust, really. But that's this sort of biblical insight: God created this universe as the only way to create human beings that would be His children and could have this deep relationship with Him.

God then wants to live with us. God's purpose, as Samuel Moon said, in creating human beings is to experience joy through relating with ideal families filled with true love. Sometimes people say, 'Well, God created us to worship Him,' but actually, God created us because He wanted to have a relationship of love with us. He couldn't experience love by Himself; that's just the logic of love. One cannot experience love by oneself; one can only experience love when one has someone to whom to give that love. The joy comes from being able to give. In that sense, God couldn't experience that joy from loving unless He had beings with which He could love and share His heart. This, of course, is a biblical revelation and insight as well: 'In the future, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them; they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them.' There's another reason as well. So, is God a physical being? Does God have a body? I don't think so. God is invisible; God is without form. That means that even though God created the universe, He cannot rule it or interact with the universe without having a physical body. You can't really enjoy it. In that sense, He also created human beings as His body. He wanted to create beings in which He could dwell and through whom He could experience the world that He created. He created human beings in that sense. That's why sin Paul talked about, 'Do you not know you are the temple of God?' God wants to dwell and live in us and through us to be able to experience the universe that He created. By becoming one with human beings, God can then experience the creation. It's quite awesome that without us, God can't actually experience the universe, the world that He created. In that sense, God needs us in that way. This kind of relationship of love and responding beauty will allow God to experience joy. Our relationship with the natural world will be very similar; through the relationship we have with the natural world, we would also experience great joy. This then is the challenge: God wants us to become gods. How can we become like God? Eileen Caddy from up in Scotland wrote a whole book about this. Yes, that's right, because God created us in His image. So everything, the principle ends, the Divine Principle, not this thing in the book; it's actually God wrote the principle in us.

That's why when I heard the principle, it resounded with me. I knew it was true because it made sense to me; it resonated with something inside myself. This is where you can tell whether something's true or not: does it resonate? Does it ring a bell? Does it ring true? The only place you can decide that is within yourself. But anyway, this is the thing: how can we become like God, the body of God, the dwelling place of God, the incarnation of God? As Paul said, we are to be imitators of God as his beloved children. So, what was God's plan? God wanted to create gods. How was this to happen? Joyce heard this lecture before; what do you remember? Yes, okay, create a man and woman through that, have a family. All right, anything else? So, the question is, if we're going to become like God, what is the first question you ask? Jen, if we were to become like God, what questions does that presuppose or suggest? What is God like? If we're going to become like God, then what is it we're supposed to become like? One thing is that God is love, but even the source of love is heart. So, you can say God is a being of heart, and the heart is the source of our intellect, our emotion, our will, the source of our soul, the source of our being, the source of the meaning of our life. This is heart.

God is also a being of logos. That's why it says in John, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.' This idea of logos in Greek is to do with reason and law. When we think about laws, we think about ethics: what's right and what's wrong. Ethics is about the relationship with government; it's about what governs the relationships between human beings. It dictates how you should treat others. You shouldn't kill them, basically, at the bottom line. You shouldn't steal, and all sorts of things become more sophisticated, learning how to behave properly, have good manners, and understand etiquette—the right way to treat all sorts of different kinds of people. Since then, it's about inheriting these four great realms of heart, learning how to love all sorts of different kinds of people. God created the universe and is very creative. God wanted us to inherit his heart, his nature of logos, and his creativity. To do this, God gave human beings what we call the three great blessings.

If we turn all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, it says God blessed Adam and Eve and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.' Through these three blessings, God wanted us to become like him. By being fruitful, we would inherit God's heart and be sensitive and empathetic towards how God feels and also towards how other people feel. Through multiplying, we learn how to relate as husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, and next-door neighbours—all sorts of different kinds of people. Again, we learn how to relate and love all sorts of different kinds of people. As they say, you're born with your family, and you choose your friends. You can choose your friends, the people that you like, but the people that you're born with challenge you to develop in that sense. Through having dominion over creation, we inherit God's creativity.

Let's unpack these a little bit. The first blessing, to be fruitful, is the ability to create and perfect our character. God gave us the ability to create and complete our character. This is just an existential reality, whether you like it or not, whether you believe in God or not. The reality of life is that we create ourselves through everything that we think, say, and do. The way I am today is a result of all the things I thought, said, and did in the past. I've created myself, and what I think, say, and do today will affect the kind of person I become tomorrow. It's quite hopeful, really; it's possible to change. We create ourselves in that sense by the decisions that we make. When we get into a situation, how we respond determines how our character develops. A lot of this is about looking at ourselves; we've got a mind and a body, and part of growing up is getting unity between our mind and body. The mind is subject, and the body's object.

Think about a baby: when babies are hungry, when do they want to eat? Immediately. They don't want to wait. As you grow up, part of learning to grow is learning to delay gratification. Why don't you wait half an hour until it's breakfast or lunch or supper? They learn to have dominion over their physical desires. This is part of becoming socialised or civilised—learning to delay gratification to achieve mind-body unity. Also, when do babies do weeing and pooping? When they feel like it, anywhere. That's why they wear nappies. Part of growing up is getting potty trained. When a toddler becomes potty trained, they feel really happy because they have a bit more self-control. So, we have this mind-body unity to learn. What about going to sleep? When do babies go to sleep? All over the place. Part of growing up is learning there's a proper place to sleep: your bed. Before you go to bed, you get changed, clean your teeth, put on your pyjamas, say your prayers, etc. These things become ritualised and spiritualised, and all these physical things become invested with meaning. Through these rituals, they become sacred.

The same goes for eating. When you become socialised and civilised, you don't just go and eat secretly and stuff yourself. You try not to, anyway. Eating becomes not just about satisfying physical desire; it becomes a social occasion. You eat with other people. In some cultures, people won't eat by themselves; they want to share a meal with someone. It becomes a way of forming a friendship. Within religion, meals become sacred. You have religious festivals that are also feasts, and you have communion services where eating becomes spiritually invested with meaning. A lot of growing up is about achieving this mind-body unity: the mind is subject, and the body's object. Another important aspect is keeping promises. You say one thing and do the same thing. You say, 'I'm going to be there at seven o'clock,' and, unlike me, you arrive at seven o'clock. Keeping promises is very important; it's part of growing up and achieving mind-body unity. Words and deeds should be one.

When we think about someone like Jesus, what is extraordinary about him is that people all around the world, whether they're Christians or not, respect him because what he said and what he did were the same. He said you should love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. He also said you should love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. But he didn't just say those things; he actually practised them. When he was crucified, with nails hammered into his hands on the cross, he said, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' In the most difficult circumstances, he practised what he preached. There was no difference between what he taught and what he practised; it was a complete unity of mind and body. He is a perfect, complete person in that sense, and that's how we should be ourselves. That's why Jesus said, 'Be complete as your heavenly Father is complete.' This unity of mind and body is essential, and the most important quality here is being sensitive to the heart of God—to be able to be empathetic, to feel how other people feel, and to pick up their thoughts and feelings. We can do these things through mind-body unity, partly through sports, martial arts, meditation, and prayer. You can start to develop the practice of the presence of God, so you can actually feel how God feels, think how God thinks, and your will becomes naturally aligned with God's will. All these things become spiritualised, and you achieve this sort of mind-body unity. When you don't, it's kind of the opposite.