The Reverend True Father Sun Myung Moon

God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the
Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release

Address on the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the
Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity

May 1, 2004
Seoul, Korea

Respected present and former heads of state, distinguished guests from around the world, leaders of all fields of Korean society: I am sincerely grateful that such a large number of you have taken time from your busy schedules to attend today’s event.

It seems like yesterday that on May 1, 1954, in a humble dwelling known as the “House of Three Gates” in Seoul’s Buk-hak Dong, I and a few disciples who were with me raised a signboard that read “Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity” and offered a most serious prayer to Heaven. Today, this has become the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which continues its steady development and has mission headquarters in 191 countries. How could anyone say that this is anything other than a miracle of Heaven?

I received God’s call when I was a vibrant youth of 16 years, and started out on this path of Heaven with unbending determination. It has been a path of indescribable pain and suffering. At each climax of indemnity, sacrifices were made that led to pools of blood, sweat and tears. It was the path of a lonely man. I swallowed desperate tears of blood and hid them within myself to comfort the heart of God, who was grieving over the tragic situation of the son He had sent forth.

My life of over 80 years has been lived to teach the truth that I received from Heaven. As a way of summing up what I have taught, I would like to speak today on the topic of “God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release.”

Distinguished guests, everything I have ever taught is permeated with one point above all else. That is that we must know God and spirit world with certainty. It is not enough to have God vaguely in our head, like a mathematical formula that we once memorized. Instead, we must carve His existence onto our hearts, even into our bones. We must know the relationship that God has with us, and the attributes He possesses. We must know about the ideal world that He desired in the beginning, and when that world will be brought about. We must have the same degree of knowledge of spirit world. The world after death definitely exists independent of human beings’ will, and we must know it accurately, if we are to use our time in this world to prepare thoroughly for the next.

Ladies and gentlemen, please quietly place your hand on your heart and think seriously. If everyone truly knew that God exists and always lived in attendance to Him, what would keep us from solving the problems in today’s world?

I declare to you very bluntly today: God exists and He is our Parent. He lives and carries out His work within each person’s life. He exists without form. If you think of Him as large, He is infinitely large, but if you think of Him as small, he is also infinitely small. Every human being possesses a mind, but can anyone locate the mind with confidence and certainty?

Energy clearly exists and sustains life, but energy is invisible. In the same way, God absolutely exists with attributes of eternality, changelessness and uniqueness, but He cannot be seen with the human eye, which is one part of the human physical body. Because God is the original body of energy, we will not be able to see Him even in spirit world.

This is why we say that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Because He has no form, there is nothing to keep Him from going anywhere He pleases in the world of existence. He could pass right through your body without you feeling anything. He could step on you as He passes by while you doze off, and you would not know it. Think how convenient that is. What would you do if God were to appear and involve Himself in every little thing you do? If you had to live with God visible to your eyes, what would you do? Probably you would not last a day before having a nervous breakdown. You cannot see the incredible amount of air that is passing through your body even as you sit here. So how could you possibly know how God, who exists without form, passes through you as He carries on His work? Rather than foolishly saying, “Show me God and I’ll believe,” you should be grateful that God is invisible to our eyes.

Leaders from around the world, do you have love? Do you have life? Do you have a lineage and a conscience? Then, have you ever seen love? Can you say that you have seen life, lineage or conscience? You clearly know these exist, but you must acknowledge that you cannot feel or see them. You only know them because you sense them with your mind. A similar logic applies to the question of whether God exists, or whether a person has or has not seen God. No one can say that they have not seen God or that He does not exist.

When God enters into the mind, the mind knows it. When the omniscient and almighty God is with you, you can call for saints who died thousands of years ago to come to you and you can clearly see who is sitting on the other side of a thick wall. When the eternal God enters your heart, such things are possible. Eternity cannot be grasped in the context of time, but time exists within eternity.

The universe in which we live is wrapped in mystery. The size of the vast universe is as great as 21 billion light years across. If a light year is the distance light travels in a year at a speed so fast that it can go around the Earth seven and a half times in a second, then try to imagine what God, who created the universe and manages it, must be like. How large would He have to be, and how heavy? God is the great king of wisdom, so He made it so that He would exist without form, enabling Him to go anywhere in the universe instantaneously or enter even into the eye of a needle. When we search within for the best place to receive God, our greatest treasure, the natural conclusion is, “The heart is the only appropriate place.” No place can be safer or more comfortable for Him. The heart is able to stand in the position of God’s object partner and exist for eternity by engaging in spherical motion, and this is the reason that human beings can have eternal life.

If humanity had not committed the fall but had been born through parents possessing an original nature of goodness, then it would not have been necessary to argue with each other about whether God exists. We would have known this naturally from the time we were born. Just as an infant does not learn how to suckle its mother’s breast while it is in the womb, but naturally learns how to do so as soon as it is born, so also people born into a world where the fall of the human ancestors had not occurred would have naturally attended God as their Father throughout their lives. When God created Adam and Eve as the first human ancestors, He wanted to establish them as substantiations of Himself. So He arranged for His masculine nature to be placed within the mind of Adam and His feminine nature to be placed within the mind of Eve and remain there for eternity. This did not mean that God would be divided in two. Instead, while residing in the minds of Adam and Eve, He would exist as a harmonized being of dual characteristics and as a unified being centering on love.

As a result of the fall, humanity lost everything. We fell into a false world. We appear to have sight but in fact are blind, not even knowing whether God exists. What could be more tragic in the history of humankind?

If Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, had grown to maturity without falling, achieved perfection, and acquired the position of the parents of humankind, all human beings would have been able to recognize the reality of God’s existence through Adam and Eve. It would have been impossible even to imagine people arguing with each other, saying, “God exists,” and “No, He doesn’t.” God would have lived with us and shared our emotions for eternity as the Parent of humankind. He would have been the center of our life and the root of our existence.

We truly know God only when we feel Him in our heart and understand the reality of His existence in the course of daily life. We know God’s existence only through experience.

When we understand the reality of God’s existence directly through experience in our daily life, we will be able to sense God’s will from moment to moment naturally. We will be able to act in accordance with His will without being told. We will become people who cannot sin even if we try. It was intended that the formless God would take on substantial form as human beings and exercise dominion with the character and appearance of an owner, not only over all of creation in this world, a world of form, but even over the sprit world. This is why our highest priority in life is to know God with certainty.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us think for a moment about human life. We spend our first lifetime in the womb of our mother. The ten months that we spend there as a fetus is a period of water-borne life, because we are bathed in the amniotic fluid. We cannot speak or move about freely, but this does not mean that our term in the womb is not life. During this period, we clearly possess a life given to us by Heaven, and it is a period for us to prepare for life on the earth, which is the next phase. The fact that we don’t breathe through our nose during this period doesn’t mean there is no life. The human being as a fetus in the womb cannot imagine what life will be like in the next phase, on the earth. It cannot imagine a world outside its mother’s womb. It cannot imagine not receiving all nourishment from its mother through the umbilical cord.

Human beings, though, are created so that when the time comes we bring our life in the womb to a close and begin life on the earth. Irrespective of our wishes, this happens in accordance with the laws of the universe. A new, vast world that we could never have imagined appears before us. Our water-borne life ends, and our new life on earth begins. The ten months of life in the womb transitions into an earthly life of 100 years. Human beings then live in a wide variety of unique ways and prepare for the final phase of our existence, in the spirit world, that is, the world after death.

A world that is eternal and endless awaits us, but human beings living in a physical body are no more capable of imagining the spirit world that we were of imagining life on Earth while we lived in the womb. Our lives of some 100 years on Earth will transfer into an eternal world that transcends time and space. In the womb, we received nourishment from our mother through the umbilical cord, and during our time on earth we receive the three basic elements, the universe’s water, air and light. Once we enter the spirit world, however, we will no longer have need of physical nourishment. We instead will breathe love as we live eternally. So human beings, without exception, live through three stages: ten months in the womb, 100 years on earth, and an eternity in the spirit world. This is not something that we do by our own choice. It is a blessing and grace given by Heaven. What could be a blessing and grace greater than this?

So when I say you need to know the spirit world well, it is not enough to live with a vague faith in the existence of the spirit world. On Earth we must know how to prepare for life in the spirit world, where we will live eternally, and then prepare ourselves thoroughly. Just as a child that develops a problem while in the womb may spend his entire life after birth in poor health, so too if we fail to recognize Heaven’s will during our short life on Earth and commit sin or carry out evil deeds, we will eventually pay the price in the spirit world according to the principle of cause and effect. It means that our spirit self will have to suffer indescribable pain and indemnity in spirit world.

Once the physical body has been shed, it will be too late. When the physical body dies, it returns to the earth as a handful of dirt, but do you think that our life, our mind, our heart, and our hopes are also buried? It is absolutely not so. Our 100-year-long life is recorded, photographed and automatically evaluated without fail in our personal computer, built by God, called the spirit self. This is why all of us, during life on earth, will stop and check ourselves again and again, and ask our unsteady mind and heart: “Where are you going?” The saints, sages and spiritual masters are those who spent their entire lives wrestling with such issues. None of them, however, were able to present clear answers.

It is true that their teachings have remained with us, allowing religions to be formed and sacred texts to be published, guiding the mass of people for their lives. It is also true, though, that humanity still lacks even the ability to have dominion over our own mind. I have toured the world hundreds of times to declare Heaven’s truth and educate people. No matter where I go in the world or what kind of audience I face, I always ask one question. I issue a challenge, saying, “If there is anyone here whose mind and body are not in conflict, please raise your hand.” So far no one anywhere has dared to raise a hand.

What does this tell us? It means that human beings are still slaves to the fallen nature that we inherited from our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. We have not yet escaped that yoke. This is evidenced by the confessions of saints and sages who spent their lives in fasting and abstinence and consistently pursued paths of incredible suffering. Their confessions that they could not root out the desires of the flesh before they had to leave this world remain as pitiful cries to their disciples who still insist on following in their footsteps. Those who are counted among the saints and sages are now declaring with one voice that I, Sun Myung Moon, have brought for the first time from Heaven the truth of true love that they could not grasp, and that their followers and descendents on Earth should follow my teachings absolutely and practice them. People in spirit world who regret that they could not meet Rev. Moon while they were on earth and attend him as Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent during their lives here are sending a flood of messages. The resolutions that these people adopted in the spirit world now echo around the world. In the near future, all religious people will begin to receive revelations directly from the founders of their own religion, and there will be a great migration of people being guided to attend Rev. Moon as the True Parent. They will gather as the clouds to learn from Rev. Moon the truth of true love that enables them to unite their mind and body. They will learn the way of the true family, leading to their singing together the praises of eternal happiness as parents and children on Earth and in Heaven.

Communists of the world who insisted there is no God and passed away as sacrifices to materialism, intellectuals of the world who as journalists commanded an entire generation, and even dictators and emperors who brandished the sword of absolute power and sacrificed countless lives, have shed tears of repentance before me and begged for forgiveness through their messages and resolutions from spirit world.

Any among you who still cannot believe with certainty the reality of the spirit world may still not be sure whether to believe these messages. To you my advice is this: “You will see for yourself when you pass on to spirit world!” But once you go down that path you can never return, no matter how much you may strike the ground in lamentation. Once in the spirit world, a person cannot do anything on his own about the sins he committed while on earth. So your ancestors now are observing your life in tears, waiting for an opportunity to help you in a way that indemnifies their sins. I am telling you clearly that thousands, even tens of thousands, of your ancestors’ eyes are watching your every step and every action, sometimes with tears of heartbreak and other times with joy. Is there still anyone who cannot believe the reality of spirit world?

Distinguished guests, once we come to know God with certainty and know not just the concept of the spirit world but also its reality, our life can move forward as smoothly as a car on an expressway. Just as the car will reach its destination safely if the driver follows the rules of the road, keeps his hands on the steering wheel and doesn’t fall asleep, so too we only need to live in line with the direction from our conscience, which is given by Heaven. This is where our mind and body become one and where the blossom of human perfection blooms and bears fruit. Going deep into the mountains will not perfect one’s character, and extensive reading of sacred texts and philosophy books that line library shelves will not unite the mind and body.

God is the great King of wisdom. He did not place the path to perfection in some far off place. Instead, He placed it in the place that is nearest to us, the place that is most private and safe. He prepared and placed that path inside your conscience.

Ladies and gentlemen, your conscience is your master. It is your teacher. It stands in the place of your parents. Your conscience is the first to know everything about you. Your conscience knows all your thoughts. It knows before your teacher, before your parents and before even God knows. Think how much advice your conscience gives you over your lifetime. Day and night, every time you have an evil thought, it scolds you, saying, “Hey you!” It never grows tired as it works constantly to pull you over rivers and mountains. The conscience always stands as the true master, protecting you and trying to help you. Yet, how often have you gone against your own conscience? What should be done about your body, which has thoroughly mistreated this precious irreplaceable teacher that the universe bequeathed to you? Your conscience was given to represent the Parent who makes it possible for you to inherit the original love. Do you intend to idle your life away, embracing only your physical body and enslaved by its desires, allowing it mercilessly to trample the conscience?

That is why I, too, as I began to pioneer the way of truth, set as my slogan, “Before seeking dominion over the universe, perfect dominion over yourself.” I discovered that there is only one way to resolve the conflict between mind and body, and that is “the way of true love.” Unity between mind and body can be achieved only when the mind sacrifices itself for the sake of the body time and again, thus practicing “true love that lives for the sake of others.”

When you follow the path set out by your conscience, your mind will come to embrace the universe. When this happens, you will be able to communicate with your heart. Whenever you start to do something, your conscience will immediately show you the effects of that action. This experience proves that God resides within your heart.

The person who attains this position will enter the state of being of one mind, one body and one thought with God. He or she will live in a world of one circle and one harmony. This is the ideal world, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth that God desired in the beginning when He created Adam and Eve.

Respected guests, it is now more than 80 years since I began my search for such incredible secrets of Heaven and began to walk the path to lead humanity. It has been the path of a lonely and pitiful man pushing my way through suffering and difficulties that are unprecedented in the past and unrepeatable in the future. It has been a path that has proven and taught the reality of an omnipresent God. Every one of the six billion people in the world are blind. Though they appear normal, they cannot see even an inch in front of themselves. But this has not kept people from pretending to be philosophers and theologians with respect to Heaven’s truth, bringing grief to God throughout history. The providence of restoration that sought to live for the sake of God and take pity on God never even had a chance to begin.

I cannot count the days I spent in tears and lamentation after I came to know this world of God’s inner heart. Who could even dare to imagine the grief-stricken God? He has carried out His providence for thousands, even tens of thousands of years after the first human ancestors, whom He created as His children and tried to place in the eternal position of His object partners in true love, fell into the path of the human fall. God was sorrowful and mortified. Anger exploded within Him, and His heart overflowed with grief as He walked this course. He came as the Father and King of glory, but the enemy Satan stole His throne and His position as Parent. Though He was clearly alive and carrying out His providence, people said “He’s dead,” and they mocked and mistreated Him. Still, He persevered on the path with patient endurance, waiting for the day when human beings would themselves understand the truth. Please understand that it is because God conducts His providence on a foundation of true love, which lives for the sake of others, and on the basis of eternity, that He did not just annihilate the universe and begin again after witnessing His children descend into the bottomless pit of the human fall.

With the power of His omniscience and omnipotence, He could have judged the world and Satan at once, smashing them to pieces. Though He has this power, He has chosen until now to absorb all the contempt and accusation into Himself. He has placed Himself in a prison-like environment, because He is our Father. Ladies and gentlemen, have you spent even one day before our Father God, shedding tears of sincere sympathy and repentance? Can you stand before God and close your eyes as if to block out how He bites His tongue and endures humankind that inherited the lineage of the devil and became the tool of Satan, and how He waits impatiently for the day of His liberation and release?

This is the reason that my life has been more serious than any other in history. As I walked this fateful course of restoration through indemnity, I had to go the way of the perfection of character in order to stand as the Lord of judgment and determine the sin of the devil Satan and judge him. I had to send as many as four of my young children, whom I loved deeply, to the spirit world, and I have had to cast even my remaining children out into the wilderness.

I stand before you as one who has received Heaven’s appointment as Savior and True Parent for the sake of liberating and releasing God and, on that foundation, liberating and releasing humankind. I do not come out of a need for money and power, or honor and fame. For more than 80 years, I have lived oblivious to morning or evening, day or night, even weathering the coldest winters and harshest snow and rain, in order to move as quickly as I could along the heavenly path. Even in the torture chamber, where my flesh was torn from my body and I was made to vomit blood, I never prayed for God to save me. Instead, my life has been that of a filial son, patriot, saint, and divine son of Heaven and Earth who sheds tears to comfort God’s heart as He weeps to look upon the tragic state of His children. I left my parents and homeland behind to follow the straight and narrow path to human salvation, that is, the path of true love that lives for the sake of others. My life of never compromising and never acting in a cowardly manner may seem incredibly pitiful and bleak from a worldly point of view.

No torture or punishment could make me compromise from the heavenly path. Neither could six imprisonments stand in the way of the True Parent’s search for his children. As I sat in a cold prison cell and watched drops of water fall from an eave, I pledged to myself, “Just as those droplets will eventually bore a hole through a boulder, the day will certainly come when these hot tears that fall from my eyes will melt the heart of God frozen in grief and liberate and release Him.” That is how I have lived. It has been a sacrificial course of practicing a love that loves the enemy more than my own children and of offering everything to teach all six billion people in the world.

In line with this, I went to America in the early 1970s, and announced, “I have come as a fire fighter to extinguish a fire and as a physician to cure a disease.” It is important that we understand that, more than 30 years later, humanity has entered a new age. Finally, heavenly fortune is settling on the planet Earth. The blood, sweat, and tears I have shed on the course of restoration through indemnity for the sake of human salvation are now beginning to bear fruit.

In 2001, at the opening of the 21st century, I dedicated the “Coronation Ceremony of God’s Kingship,” offering to Him the day of His liberation and release. This marked the beginning of the opening of the age of God’s direct dominion. On that foundation, the “Coronation Ceremony of the King of World Peace” was held this year on March 23 in a Senate building of the United States Congress. World leaders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and members of the United States Congress gathered to crown me as the king of world peace. How can this possibly be a human work? Just as the French prophet Nostradamus prophesied, and as is clearly recorded in the Orient’s greatest book of prophesies, “Kyeok-Am-Yu-Rok,” Rev. Moon has come as the one who has received Heaven’s appointment and fulfilled the responsibilities of humanity’s True Parent and the king of peace. So now, leaders from all walks of life and from all over the world are surging forward in a giant wave to join the ranks of people working to build the Peace Kingdom on this earth. They are acknowledging that peace cannot be achieved without my help. This is true not only on the Korean peninsula, the only place in the world where the conflict between democracy and Communism still divides an innocent people and land, but also in the Middle East, which has become the most serious and bloody conflict threatening world peace.

On April 10 this year, I declared the “release of the angelic world,” the “release of Cain and Abel,” and the “release of the Parents of Cheon-ju, Cheon-ji, Cheon-ji-in.” [Parents of the Cosmos, of Heaven and Earth, and of Heaven, Earth and Humankind.] By marking May 1 with the declaration, “God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release,” I am completing the spiritual conditions on many levels that are needed for God to exercise His authority of all-immanence, all-authority, all-power and all-transcendence. Together with God’s liberation and release, a world of freedom, peace, unity and happiness is spreading across this land. In this respect, there is a special meaning to today’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, which I established.

Heavenly fortune is with each of you present here today. Though our time together is short, you can become people of the Kingdom of Heaven simply by living according to what I have taught you today. That is, first live in the certainty of God’s existence to the point that you can feel His presence against your skin. Second, be certain of the reality of the spirit world and use your life on Earth to prepare for your eternal life in the spirit world. Third, live in attendance to your conscience as you would your teacher, your God, or your parents.

The flames of true love, now fanned by the spring breezes of the 21st century, are spreading like a wildfire across the Earth. Exchange marriages are becoming accepted among young people belonging to traditionally enemy countries as a matter of faith. Just as water, air and light will flow to fill even the smallest space, the movement of true love is flowing and covering the Earth. Young people of intellect who will inherit God’s love, God’s life and God’s lineage and settle the Peace Kingdom on the Earth are now waking from their sleep.

Eminent world leaders, I hope that you, too, will join the ranks of the owners of Cheon Il Guk [the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth] who are to “establish His Kingdom and His righteousness,” and become a revolutionary army of true love, putting into practice the truth of true love that grows larger the more that it is given.

Thank you.