(The Question Humanity Has Not Answered in Six Thousand Years)
[Summary: Humanity has never been able to answer the question, “Where did I come from, why am I living, and where am I going?” Christianity answered “glory” and Islam answered “worship,” but both asked only what human beings owe to God; neither asked about God’s own heart. Philosophy could offer no grounds for its answers, materialism turned human beings into a means, and science described the beginning without knowing the cause. The Divine Principle answers: the purpose of creation is neither glory nor worship, but joy. Not even an almighty God can love alone, so He created human beings as partners resembling Himself. That is why He is not a Master but our Heavenly Parent. This purpose takes concrete form in the Three Great Blessings — the perfection of individual character, of the family, and of dominion — and its teaching of dual purposes, which give life to the whole and to the individual at once, resolves the great clash of values of the twentieth century. Both the subject and the object of life are love: we come from love, we live to complete love, and we return to the embrace of love.]
Two geniuses who never found the answer
In 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher who shook the twentieth century, lay in a Paris hospital with pulmonary edema. All his life he had proclaimed freedom. There is no God, no destiny, no predetermined purpose. A human being is nothing but what he makes of himself. That is what he taught. Yet when the agony of death drew near, he is said to have cried out in anguish. Not one of the visitors at his bedside could comfort him. After he passed away, the French press asked: why did a man who had proclaimed freedom from death so loudly have to end his life in such anxiety and misery? A reader is said to have sent this answer to the newspaper: “Sartre’s end was miserable because he had no home to return to.”
There is a similar story about the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the pessimist who believed that everything in the world is suffering produced by a blind will to live. One evening at dusk, a park keeper approached an old man sitting lost in thought on a bench. “Sir, it is getting dark. It is time for you to go home. Where did you come from?” The old philosopher is said to have answered with a question of his own: “Where did I come from? That is exactly what I do not know, and that is why I am sitting here like this. My life is drawing toward evening, and still I cannot tell where I am supposed to return.”
Both men were geniuses who represented their age. Yet there was one question they wrestled with all their lives and never solved.
“Where did I come from, why am I living, and where am I going?” Before this question, intellect was of no use whatsoever.
Today I would like to make a slightly unusual proposal. Our members have heard the Divine Principle a great many times. We have heard it so often that the moment someone says “the purpose of creation,” we think, “Ah yes, the Three Great Blessings,” and wait for the next point.
Even a precious pearl comes to feel like a pebble if you hold it in your hand every day. So today, before we speak about the Principle of Creation, let us first look at the other answers. Let us see what the great religions of the world, the finest philosophers of humankind, the communism that stained the twentieth century with blood, and the most advanced modern science have said in reply to this question.
After hearing all of those answers, when we come back to the Principle, the words we hear every day will sound completely different. I hope we can feel together just how extraordinary the thing in our hands really is.
First, Christianity
Protestantism’s most famous catechism is the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and its very first question is precisely this: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer is: “To glorify God.” It is a fine answer. But take just one more step inward. Why did God need glory? Why would a perfect being, lacking nothing at all, go to the trouble of creating human beings in order to receive glory? This is the point at which Christian theology grows vague. It closes the door and says, “That is God’s will; do not dare to ask.” Moreover, the central word of Christian faith is not “the purpose of creation” but “salvation.” Being saved from sin is the whole of faith. As a result, life on this earth became a temporary waiting room, and the real stage became the world after death — “Believe in Jesus and go to heaven; disbelieve and go to hell.”
Second, Islam
Islam answers this question with great clarity. (Qur’an 51:56) “I did not create jinn and mankind except to worship Me.” The purpose is unmistakable: human beings were made in order to worship God. That is why the most common name in the Islamic world is Abdullah, which means “servant of Allah.” Here the relationship between God and the human being is that of master and servant. But consider this. What happens in Islam if you call Allah “Father”? It is blasphemy. Allah is absolutely transcendent, and so He cannot stand in a parent-child relationship with human beings. Between a master and a servant there may be obedience, but there is no inheritance of heart.
Third, Buddhism
Buddhism is quite distinctive. It dismantles the very question “Where did I come from?” This is because the fundamental teaching of Buddhism is anatta (non-self) — that there is no such thing as a self to speak of. Consider the Four Noble Truths. Life is suffering. The cause of suffering is attachment. When attachment is cut off, suffering disappears. The path to that is the Eightfold Path. So the question Buddhism asks is not “Where did I come from?” but “How do I get out of this life?” Since there is no Creator, there is no purpose of creation either. Escaping the wheel of rebirth becomes the final goal. Compassion is there. But there is no personal Heavenly Parent who created me, no one who loves me absolutely. That is why it leaves an emptiness.
What all these answers have in common
Let us sum up. Christianity said “glory.” Islam said “worship.” The answers differ. Yet, surprisingly, there is one thing they all share. What is it? Every one of them is an answer to the question of what human beings must do for God. No one asked the opposite direction: “With what motivation did God create the universe? Why did He need human beings?” In several thousand years of religious history, not one religion asked directly about the heart of God. Humanity knew how to kneel before God, but did not know how to enter into God’s heart.
The philosophers, who could not find the answer
Now let us turn to philosophy — to those who set out to find the answer through human reason.
Kant said, “Treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end.” The human being is an end in himself. Is this not something we have heard many times in the Exposition of the Divine Principle — that the human being is not a means of creation but the purpose of creation itself? Kant came right to the threshold of the Principle. But there he stops. Why is the human being an end? Kant cannot supply the grounds. All he could say was, “Because reason commands it.” The Principle supplies the grounds: because the human being is the object partner of God’s love.
Camus told the story of the myth of Sisyphus: a man who pushes a boulder up a mountain every day, knowing perfectly well that it will roll back down. That, he said, is human life. And at the end he adds that we must nonetheless imagine Sisyphus happy. This is not an answer. It is the cry of a man who could not find one.
Materialism and communism: the thought that made human beings a means
Now a completely different answer appears. It is Marx.
Marx overturned the whole board.
There is no such thing as God. Mind did not produce matter; matter produced mind. Religion is the opium of the people.
The value of a human being is determined by social relations. What is the purpose of life? To build a classless society.
At first hearing it sounds enormously innovative. And indeed, countless young people in the twentieth century staked their lives on these words. But there is one fatal trap here: the individual becomes a tool of historical development. For the sake of the whole, the individual can be sacrificed without limit. In the end, human beings became not an “end” but a “means of production.” The moment a means takes the seat of the end, we become its slaves rather than its masters. The moment human beings are demoted to the position of a means, they become interchangeable parts. The tragedy of twentieth-century communism came from reversing ends and means.
Materialism has an even more fundamental problem. If we came out of matter, then when we die we end as dust. In that case love is a chemical reaction and conscience is an electrical signal in the brain. A mother giving her life for her child is simply the way DNA evolved. Matter in itself has no purpose. Materialism did not merely fail to find the purpose; it is a system of thought that discarded the question of purpose altogether.
Modern science and Big Bang cosmology: the discipline that does not know “why”
Finally, modern science — today treated as the most authoritative answer of all.
Big Bang cosmology says this. Thirteen point eight billion years ago, the universe began in a state smaller than a single point and expanded explosively. Within it hydrogen formed, and stars formed. As stars died they released carbon, oxygen and iron, and from that debris the earth was made. There, by chance, conditions aligned and life appeared. So the calcium and iron in our bodies really are the remains of ancient stars. We are, quite literally, made of stardust.
But here a decisive question remains. The Big Bang explained the “beginning,” but it cannot tell us the “reason.” This is not a defect of science; it is a matter of domain. You cannot see a mother’s love through a microscope. However much you increase the magnification, it will not appear — because love is not the kind of thing a microscope is made to see.
So there we have the answers humanity has produced. Religion told us what human beings must devote to God; philosophy wanted to know the purpose; materialism erased the purpose; science described the beginning but did not know the cause. Science with 13.8 billion years to study, six thousand years of religious history, 2,500 years of philosophy — none of them produced an answer to this question.
The first great turning point: God created for joy
But we have the answer. Now let me speak about it.
When you open the Principle of Creation in the Exposition of the Divine Principle, it is different from the very first sentence.
In Genesis, each time God finishes a stage of creation, the phrase “and He saw that it was good” — that is, joy — is repeated six times. And after creating human beings, it concludes with “it was very good.” The purpose of creation is not “glory.” Nor is it “worship.” It is “joy.”
Here the Principle asks a question no one in human history had asked: “How does joy arise?” The answer is this. Joy never arises alone. There must be an object partner developed in the likeness of one’s own sungsang and hyungsang — one’s internal nature and external form. Joy arises when, through the stimulation that comes from that partner, one feels oneself reflected back — that is, when that partner resembles oneself. Let me give an example. However magnificent a conception a painter may hold in his mind, the conception alone brings no substantial joy. Joy comes when it is completed as an actual work on the canvas, and the stimulation returning from that work resembles his own heart.
Apply this same logic to God, and you arrive at a staggering conclusion:
“If God is to have joy, there must be an object partner resembling God’s own sungsang and hyungsang.”
I like to put this passage as follows. “God is almighty. There is nothing He cannot do. Yet there is exactly one thing that the almighty God absolutely cannot do alone. What is it? Love.” No matter how almighty one is, one cannot love alone. And so God needed someone to love. That is why He created the universe, and why, at the very end, He created human beings — the partners who could give and receive perfect love with Him.
And it is here that it becomes clear why we call Him “Heavenly Parent.” Islam did not dare to call Him Father. Buddhism has no one to call. Christianity does call Him Father, but from the position of a servant or an adopted child. We call Him Heavenly Parent from the position of true children. That single name contains the whole of the Principle.
True Father, too, said that when at the age of twenty-five he realized in deep prayer that “the relationship between God and man is the bond of parent and child,” every question in the Bible — creation, the fall, restoration — was resolved at once.
The second great turning point: the Three Great Blessings, a purpose this concrete
The answers of other religions are vague somewhere along the line. Give glory. Worship. Attain liberation. Become a sage. But the Principle tells us the purpose of life in three concrete points. Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over all things.” This is not something the Principle invented. It was there in Genesis all along. These are the Three Great Blessings.
The First Blessing: perfection of individual character
The Principle explains this as the mind and the body becoming one. How are we living right now? We resolve in the morning and regret in the evening. The mind says, “Let us forgive,” while the mouth has already fired back. The Apostle Paul, too, lamented in Romans 7:25: “I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh the law of sin.” This is the reality of fallen human beings. Mind and body split apart — that is where suffering begins.
Then what kind of person is one who has perfected his individual character? The Principle says: “A person whose mind and body have formed a four position foundation centered on God becomes a temple of God, and by experiencing God’s heart as his own he knows God’s will and lives accordingly.” And it adds a decisive line: such a person can never fall.
Why can such a person not fall? Not because he is afraid of hell, but because he feels God’s joys and sorrows as his own. Could you do something that would make the person you love weep? You could not. It is not that you choose not to; it simply cannot be done. That is what the Principle means by the perfection of individual character. Not a person who holds back from sin, but a person for whom sin has become impossible.
There is one thing here that is easily misunderstood. When people hear “perfection,” they imagine everyone becoming identical. Not so. This is the perfection of individuality. God created eight billion people every one of them different. Fingerprints differ, irises differ, voices differ. What does that mean? It means there is a joy God can feel only through me. If not for me, God could never feel that joy for all eternity. Each and every one of you is irreplaceable to God.
The Second Blessing: perfection of the family
I consider this the most singular part of the entire Principle.
There is a striking feature common to the religious history of humankind: in almost every religion, the holiest people do not marry. It is true of the Catholic priest, of the Buddhist monk, of the Hindu sannyasin. “If you would be holy, leave the family” was the common sense of thousands of years of religious history. The family was regarded as the realm of the secular.
The Principle says exactly the opposite: “Adam and Eve, separated as substantial object partners of God’s dual characteristics and each having perfected his and her individuality, must become husband and wife, unite as one, multiply children, and thereby establish a family-level four position foundation centered on God.”
The family is the textbook and the training ground of the Kingdom of Heaven. Marriage is not a descent into the secular; it is the summit of the completion of creation.
Why the family in particular? There is a reason. God’s love is fully experienced in only four forms: the love of a child, the love of brothers and sisters, the love of husband and wife, and the love of a parent. The only school in this world where one can pass through all four is the family. No seminary, however excellent, and no monastery, however deep, can offer that experience.
Among these four, the love of a parent is decisive. There is a saying that you do not know your parents’ heart until you have raised a child of your own. I regard this saying as the summit of theology, because until you have become a parent you cannot truly know God’s heart. When a child is sick, the parent wishes to be sick in his place. Even when a child does wrong, the parent cannot abandon him to the very end. The reason God could not abandon fallen humanity for six thousand years is precisely this parental heart. Only someone who has become a parent can understand it.
So the conclusion is this. The real reason God created human beings is that He wanted to become a Parent. He did not want to preside over capable servants; He wanted to embrace children whose hearts could resonate with His own. And He wanted those children to grow up, become parents in their turn, and pass on the heart of the Heavenly Parent without limit. This is the inheritance of heart.
The Third Blessing: perfection of dominion
The Principle says, “When human beings, the substantial object partners to God’s image, and the created world, His substantial object partner in symbol, give and receive love and beauty and become one, a four position foundation of dominion centered on God is established.” But we must not misunderstand the word “dominion.” Dominion is not domination. Nor is it exploitation. There is dominion only where there is giving and receiving. It is precisely the way a parent exercises dominion over a child.
How, then, are human beings meant to have dominion over all things? The Principle’s explanation here is fascinating. Before creating human beings, God unfolded in image form the sungsang and hyungsang of the human beings He was about to create, and created the world of all things first. And so the human being is the substantial being that sums up the whole created world — a microcosm.
The Exposition gives vivid concrete examples. The earth has a crust covered with plants; underground water flows within it; and beneath that lies a layer of magma surrounded by rock. Human beings are the same. There is skin covered with fine hair, blood vessels running through muscle, and beneath them the skeleton and the marrow. It is the same structure as the earth. And just as the earth has five oceans and six continents, the human being has five viscera and six bowels — this too is no coincidence at all.
Then when do all things attain their value of existence? Through human beings. Iron ore buried in the ground realizes its value only when it becomes a car or an airplane. The value of nature is realized through human beings — just as, without human beings, God would have no way of being manifested, and without God, human beings would have no way of possessing value.
Why are the Three Great Blessings blessings for human beings?
The First Blessing, perfection of individual character: it is a blessing that a human being should dare to resemble the Heavenly Parent.
A dog or a tiger could not be made to resemble God, but human beings alone were born fully resembling the Heavenly Parent. That is why it is a blessing.
The Second Blessing, perfection of the family: it is a blessing that a human being should dare to be able to complete the Heavenly Parent’s love.
No animal or plant can complete God’s love. Human beings alone received the blessing of being able to do so.
The Third Blessing, perfection of dominion: it is a blessing that a human being should dare to exercise dominion over heaven, earth and all things in the Heavenly Parent’s place.
Amid the great universe of heaven and earth, human beings are, in terms of time and of space, less than a speck of dust. And yet the Heavenly Parent entrusted the dominion of all things to those very human beings.
Human beings who complete these Three Great Blessings become the visible substance of the Heavenly Parent. That is why they are blessings.
The third great turning point: the dual purposes
The Exposition of the Divine Principle says that every existing being possesses “dual purposes” — that it is “a connected body possessing both a sungsang purpose for the whole and a hyungsang purpose for itself.” And it states flatly: there can be no individual purpose apart from the purpose of the whole, and there can be no purpose of the whole that does not guarantee the individual purpose. I believe this single sentence is the answer to the whole of the twentieth century.
What was the twentieth century fighting about? It was a century in which these two views of purpose fought each other. Communism sacrificed the individual for the whole. Liberal democracy gave priority to individual freedom. Tens of millions of lives were lost in the war between two value systems that could not yield to each other. But the Principle says that the fight itself rested on a false premise. These two are not by nature in conflict; they are mutually life-giving.
Look at your own body. Does the heart beat for itself, or for the whole body? Both. When the heart beats for the whole body, the heart itself is at its healthiest. And only when the body is healthy does the heart live. There is no fight here.
So the Principle says that all things form one magnificent organism interwoven by these dual purposes. A world in which individual happiness and the peace of the whole point in the same direction — that is the peace we speak of. The peace we speak of is not a political compromise. It is the restoration of the Principle of Creation.
The Heavenly Parent’s purpose of creation is the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth
Most religions see this world as a place to pass through: a sea of suffering, a testing ground, temporary lodging. They teach that the real stage comes after death.
The Principle says something different. Had the purpose of creation been fulfilled, an ideal world in which not even the shadow of sin could be found would have been realized on this earth — and that is what we call the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. And it says that human beings were originally made to live in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and then, the moment they take off the physical body, to live automatically in the Kingdom of Heaven in the spirit world.
“Automatically.” I find that word wonderful. It is not that you die, undergo an examination, and are then admitted. It simply continues on from the way you lived here. What, then, does the Kingdom of Heaven look like? The Exposition’s definition is splendid: “The Kingdom of Heaven is a world resembling one human being who has perfected his individual character.” Just as in our body the mind’s command is transmitted through the central nervous system to every part, so that all the members move toward one purpose, so in the Kingdom of Heaven the Heavenly Parent’s love is transmitted through the True Parents of humankind to all the children, and all humanity moves toward one purpose.
Both the subject and the object of life are love
Sartre could not find a home to return to.
Schopenhauer sat on a bench until the sun had set, never knowing in the end where he had come from.
So it was with the greatest minds of humankind. But we have the answer.
Where did we come from? We came from the love of the Heavenly Parent.
Why do we live? We live in order to complete that love.
Where are we going? We return into the embrace of that love.
We have a place we came from, work to do, and a home to return to.
Let us go over once more what we have confirmed today.
Christianity said glory; we say joy.
Islam said servants; we say children.
Buddhism said escape the cycle of rebirth; we say build the Kingdom of Heaven on this earth.
Philosophy could not find the answer; we have received it.
Materialism made human beings a means; we say human beings are the purpose of creation itself.
Science described the beginning; we know the “why.”
This is that same Principle we have heard so often. We are holding in our hands the answer sheet humanity searched for over six thousand years. And yet, because it has become so familiar, we have lived forgetting its worth. I hope you will price it again today.
The subject of our life must be love, and its object must be love as well. May all of us return today to that purpose for which the Creator first created me — to that place of love and joy. <The End>
댓글 남기기