God is the original entity of true love. True love has the attributes of unconditional giving and giving again; investing, not remembering the investment and then investing again; and living for the sake of others time and time again. The reason righteous people and evil people alike are allowed to breathe the same air in the atmosphere God created is that God, though He is all-powerful, is the original entity of true love. This is also the reason good people and sinners alike are able to carry on their lives by tilling the fields and enjoying the blessings of nature.
Exercising His almighty and absolute power, God could pass summary judgment on sinful humanity at any time. However, He has embraced the world of sin with true love throughout these long years, enduring the pain and waiting for us to repent. God, our Creator and Parent, has been subjected to all types of insults from those who refuse Him, betray Him, and go so far as to claim that He does not exist or is dead. In spite of all this, He has endured with an unchanging heart. Since God knew that love is perfected only with a partner, He has been working to build a world of love through His love partner.
Respected leaders, have you ever heard God complain? Have you ever met a God who gave excuses? In the beginning, God established true love as the absolute standard, and He took the lead in demonstrating absolute obedience to that ideal as He manifested His creation and carried out His providence. Just as the ocean takes in sewage and garbage and then cleanses itself, God, as the original entity of absolute true love, cleanses the human world that deviated from the principles of His creation and works to bring this world to complete goodness.
God is the absolute True Parent, absolute True Teacher and absolute True Owner, with His focus on true love. Therefore, God needed an object partner to whom He could give His true love. This was His motivation for creating. God’s creation was a necessary act. The creative ideal of true love cannot be realized by a being that exists in isolation. This ideal exists so that God can share with human beings the joy of His exalted and righteous Will. When we have a correct understanding of the God of true love, it becomes self-evident that this unhappy world of sin and strife was not His original plan.
At the same time that we lost God, we also lost true love, peace and happiness. Throughout history, we have tried to liberate ourselves from unhappiness and achieve peace on our own, excluding God from the process. Such efforts have been fundamentally flawed. We cannot defuse the crises by human effort alone. True peace and happiness have their origin in God’s true love, true life and true lineage.
God is absolute, so His Will for the creation is also absolute. This means that God is working to reverse what went wrong as a result of the Fall and return us to the original state. Thus, God’s providence of salvation is a providence of restoration. Its purpose is to recover the original world that existed prior to the Fall. In other words, God’s intention is to establish a couple in the position of restored Adam and Eve, or True Parents, practicing true love. God wants to give them the marriage Blessing and have them form a true family, which will be the point of origin of true tribes, peoples, nations and world.
My philosophy is known as head-wing thought, which is based on Godism. This thought places God, the standard of absolute values and our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, in the absolute center. We can therefore call it the “three subject partner’s principle.” During our life on earth and in the spirit world, we have to live in accordance with this thought, being God’s object partners and attending Him as our True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner. We will then be creating the kingdom of heaven, the place where true love is practiced.
We have to surpass atheistic and communist philosophies that deny God and the spirit world, as well as the secular humanism and moral relativism that ignore the importance of absolute values and the vertical standard. It is also time to rise above the hypocritical faith that uses God’s name and lacks true love, and abandon all selfish works that violate original human rights and result in injustice. The head-wing thought that I propose transcends right-wing and left-wing philosophies, resolves the conflicts between countries, races and religions, and brings about wide-ranging harmony and unity, with the absolute God at the center. This task will be carried out with the help of both heaven and earth. We are in a period of great transition, and during this time the United Nations and the nations of the world need to unite and cooperate with one another.
Modern society lacks an understanding or philosophical system based on absolute values. There are no absolute values that we can consistently apply to individuals, families, societies, nations, the world and the cosmos. This is the reason our thinking is confused, human relationships are disordered, and human society is chaotic. In the face of unreflective pluralism and modernization, and in the absence of a fundamental guiding axis in their hearts and daily lives, people in the modern age suffer due to an ever-worsening confusion of values. We are endlessly tempted and live enslaved by our physical appetites, drifting aimlessly through life.
I need to tell you that we must never turn away from a life based on values.
Absolute values form our vertical axis. At the center of absolute values is God’s true love, expressed in living for the sake of others.
Respected leaders, peace is not something that is realized only in the external world. It is realized initially within each individual. First of all, it requires individuals to achieve harmonious unity within themselves. As a result of the Fall, conflict arose between our mind and body. To control us, Satan uses our body as his stronghold. He has turned us away from our original nature and spiritual nature and toward the attempts to satisfy our selfish and individualistic desires. The only path to escape from Satan’s dominion lies within God’s lineage of true love.
If you live unselfishly for the sake of others and work for the sake of others, Satan will not be able to follow you. This is because Satan is essentially selfish. This is why fallen human beings can transform their character and recover their spiritual nature through the practice of God’s true love. Our faith cannot be in a conceptual God; we need a true faith that connects us to the living God.
Because God originally created us as the object partners of His true love, we can practice this true love naturally. Values such as truth, goodness and beauty appear in the practice of true love. People whose minds and bodies have united based on God’s true love are individual embodiments of truth, happiness and tranquility, satisfaction and peace. Such people become subject partners of character; they serve as prerequisites for a world of peace.
Second, no institutions of power, materials or knowledge, nor any other external factors, will bring about a world of peace. Only true love, involving living for the sake of others, will accomplish it. True peace, unity and happiness cannot be found apart from a loving relationship of living for the sake of others. This is the basic principle of God’s creation. Unconditional giving, investing and living for the sake of an object partner, is both the cause and purpose of God’s creation.
God created us in His image, as beings whose purpose is to live for the sake of others. It is only by living for the sake of others that we become central beings, subject partners of peace and unity, and the eternal owners of love and ideals. Only through a life of true love, or living for the sake of others, can we find the path to meet God, our absolute True Parent, True Teacher and True Owner, receive His inheritance, and then ourselves become true parents, true teachers and true owners. On the path of true love, different parties overcome conflict and division naturally. True love harmonizes and unites us with one another and our environment. This is not conquest through struggle. Instead, it is a path of natural subjugation leading to eternal unity.
Third, the basic unit of the world of peace is not the nation; it is the peaceful family. The basic unit is the family formed by a man and a woman who have the character to attend God, a man and woman who have each accomplished harmonious mind-body unity and are joined by God through His holy marriage Blessing. These are the first blessed families in history, established through the True Parents. These are peaceful and happy families. True love joins their members in harmonious unity. When these families multiply, they will bring about a world of peaceful tribes, peoples and nations.
In God’s original ideal, humankind is one family under one God and the cosmos is one family, with true love in the central position. The place where the problems of the family can be resolved, with True Parents at the center, is the foundation for the world of peace. In the ideal world of blessed families based on true love, there can be no barriers of nationality, race or religion.
Respected leaders, we have to find God and cast away our ignorance concerning our spiritual True Parent. Living within the eternal and profound order of this universe, which manifests His omniscience and omnipotence, we shall never again make the mistake of being ungrateful to our Creator for His magnificent accomplishments. Fallen humanity is to rid itself of the arrogance that makes us think we are the owners of our own life. Instead, we will nurture an enlightened spirituality in the presence of the absolute nature of God’s true love.
(Extracts from "God and a United World of Peace", December 27, 2002, Sheraton National Hotel, Arlington, Virginia, USA, Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, Conference for Clergy.)