Leadership for Global Transformation: Exploring the Vision, Methodology, and Best Practices Necessary for Lasting Peace
Washington Times, Arbor ballroom
Washington, DC
Respected world leaders, ladies and gentlemen:
I stand here today with solemn determination. The final moment has come. That is, the moment in human history when we can no longer stand by, allowing humanity to continue on its present course. It may not be apparent to you, but I can clearly see the future of the world’s six billion people. Please look around you—front or back, left or right, east or west. You cannot deny that the world rampant with war and disease, ethnic conflict and religious struggle, immorality and corruption, is running full speed towards despair.
Among the two hundred or more countries spread across the globe, do you think even one of them has the capability to solve the problems we face? Do you think the United Nations has the power, or the conscience, to take responsibility for this world as it speeds toward ruin? Where can we find a hero for this age, a person capable of bringing the world together for the sake of our future, a person who can guarantee peace among the nations?
Humanity, having descended from the fall, is incapable of accomplishing this task by itself. Above all else, humanity needs the grace of God, which is available to those who attend God as the eternal True Parent. Heavenly power does not come to just anyone, simply because they ask for it. It can only be received through the True Parents, who know Heaven’s providence, understand the urgency of the time in which we live, and are able to align humanity to the powerful workings of God. For this reason, the title "True Parents" signifies the Savior longed for by the whole world. "True Parents" also encompasses the meaning of the term, Messiah, used in Christianity to refer to the one who brings salvation, delivering humanity from the world of sin and evil. It also includes the idea of the "returning Lord," who comes again because the Messiah at his first advent left this earth with the last stage of God’s work remaining to be done. Finally, "True Parents" includes the position of the King of kings, or Peace King, who will unite the spiritual world and physical world and reign over the eternal kingdom of peace.
I am taking this opportunity today to declare and give warning that God’s intervention is rushing toward us like a tidal wave. My subject, "The Providential Path to True Liberation and Complete Freedom," is about the things that every family must fulfill. It is a most serious and important message, one that each of you should carve into your hearts and put into practice.
The Standard of Perfection in the Family
Originally, God was to be the True Parent of all human beings. He was to be the Teacher of all teachers, Owner of all owners, King of all kings, and Parent of all parents. When we examine human history, however, we see that because of the fall of Adam and Eve, the first ancestors, humanity lost God. For thousands of years since that time, people have lived as orphans without being aware of it. Why has human history been so full of grief and sorrow? It is because we lost the True Teacher who was to teach us the heavenly tradition, lost the True Owner whom we should revere and attend for eternity, lost the True King to whom we should demonstrate complete loyalty even by laying down our lives, and lost the True Parents who were to bequeath to us the eternal true lineage.
This is why, even now, fallen humanity earnestly desires to meet God’s true Son. This person has no relation to the human fall, and so is not oppressed by Satan’s accusation. He is rooted in God’s original ideal of Adam before the fall, and thus possesses God’s true love, true life, and true lineage. He appears as the Messiah, representing the realm of the elder son on the national level. This is the true meaning of the concept underlying humankind’s messianic expectation.
Because the Messiah comes as the perfected Adam, he has to receive a true bride whom God can love according to the absolute standard. Then they together are to progress to the position of a true husband and wife. They thus perfect God ’s original ideal for husbands and wives, which is the basis for fulfilling God’s original ideal of creation. This is because only on the basis of an ideal husband and wife can true children be born who will inherit the pure lineage of Heaven. This husband and wife are the son and daughter of God. They will never repeat the mistake of the human fall. They serve as the starting point for the eternal lineage of goodness.
A Philosophy Based upon the Ideal of the True Family
The mission of the Messiah does not end there. After he progresses to the position of True Parents and establishes an absolute true family, then, centering on this true family, he has to establish the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven. In this way, he brings God’s ideal of creation to completion. For this purpose, the six billion human beings who have descended from the fall should, without exception, be grafted into the true family. They should be grafted both in heart and in lineage.
How is this grafting accomplished? Everyone here is a wild olive tree, born with fallen nature. Though centuries may pass, a wild olive tree never mutates into a cultivated olive tree. It forever remains a wild olive tree. Unless its lineage is changed, it cannot escape its identity as a wild olive tree. The grafting requires that it be dispassionately severed at the base of its trunk, and a shoot from a cultivated olive tree be attached there. When this shoot matures, that tree will bear the fruit of a cultivated tree. In the same way, fallen human beings must completely sever themselves from the satanic world of sin and evil. Then through the True Parents, who are the cultivated olive tree, they can receive the Holy Blessing of marriage. This Blessing grafts the shoot of a new cultivated olive tree onto them. In this way they are reborn. They become the beginning point for true love, true life and true lineage. Since they now have the true lineage, they are capable of producing true children, the fruit of a cultivated olive tree. This is the only way fallen human beings can inherit true life, true love, and true lineage that can be passed down generation after generation. They must be reborn through the True Parents.
Through this process, we are established as true families, we can bear true children, and we can become true parents. This is the essence of the true family philosophy. This philosophy is based upon God’s true love. True love refers to a life of giving and sharing between partners that is transcendent of national boundaries, ideological differences and any other sort of barrier. True love means that I give, forget what I have given, and continue to give without end. It is a proactive love: when I receive, I seek to give back more. Families with such sacrificial and noble relationships of true love will extend their love to others, creating true clans, true societies, true nations and a true world. Taken a step farther, they lead to the harmonization and unification of the spirit world with the physical world, which we call the true cosmos.
This means that true love has incredible power. It is a power of unimaginable proportions. With this power God created the universe. Only the power of God’ s true love can establish the world of God’s ideal, the Kingdom of God in heaven and on earth.
The ideal world does not have autocrats demanding authority and issuing commands. Rather, it is a world where our hearts move of their own accord, responsive to and in communion with God’s love. It is a brotherhood and sisterhood that encompass all of humankind. Wouldn’t we all like to live in such a world?
The Four Great Realms of Heart
Let us take a closer look at the true family philosophy. The family is the framework and environment for human growth. In the Garden of Eden, Adam’s family was to have modeled God’s ideal of the true family. This family was to have established a Four-Position Foundation,[1]giving visible manifestation to the invisible God. God, the Creator, is the subject partner who created human beings as His object partners. Before He created human beings, however, the idea of children, the idea of brothers and sisters, the idea of husband and wife, and the idea of parents existed only conceptually in His mind. By creating Adam and Eve, God wanted to make these ideas actual and perfect them. Through Adam’s family, He wanted to bring about the perfection of true love in actual children, the perfection of true love in actual brothers and sisters, the perfection of true love in an actual husband and wife, and the perfection of the true love ideal in actual parents. Then God would experience joy, unlimited joy.
This is the core of the true family philosophy. It is to perfect the Four Great Realms of Heart and the Three Great Kingships, which are the fundamental basis of all human relations. Completing them is the requirement for becoming a true family. The Four Great Realms of Heart refer to the child’s realm of heart, the brother and sister’s realm of heart, the husband and wife’s realm of heart, and the parents’ realm of heart. [2] Allow me to elaborate. Everyone is born on this earth as someone’s child. We then go through a process of forming relationships with brothers and sisters, marrying to become a husband or wife, and then bearing children to become parents. Hence, the Four Great Realms of Heart are fulfilled within the framework of the family.
The Child’s Realm of Heart
What does it mean, then, to perfect the child’s realm of heart? Each human being is born as someone’s child, and we find ourselves having no freedom of choice in the matter. We cannot choose to be born the son of the President or the daughter of the world’s most beautiful woman. From the moment of our birth, we are destined to receive our parents’ protection, which enables us to grow and develop. We attend our parents and share their lives. Here we learn the child ’s heart of love and filial piety towards parents. In the ideal, this inspires us to be ready even to sacrifice our lives for our parents. The relationship between parents and children is a vertical relationship of above and below.
Parents do not teach this love to their children by their words or direct instructions, nor is it taught at school. Rather, God implants it, and children acquire and understand it by watching their parents dedicate their lives with true love for their sake. As children grow and mature, their hearts also develop. Eventually, the children’s hearts are perfected, achieving the standard of being able to offer everything for the sake of their parents through eternity. Before the parents speak, the child can read his parents’ minds and serve them according to their wishes. The child understands his parents’ heart just by the look in their eyes, and does what is needed to fulfill his duty.
Serving our physical parents, who are the True Parents on the horizontal plane, is the foundation to offer the same absolute standard of a child’s heart to God, our True Parent on the vertical plane. This is how the realm of the heart of a child is perfected. A perfected child’s heart is infinitely valuable. It creates a realm of absolute value. And we cannot even dream that it could come about outside of the framework of the family.
The Brother and Sister’s Realm of Heart
Second is the brother and sister’s realm of heart. It is another realm of true love, perfected within the framework of the family. Brothers and sisters, while living together, learn from observing their parents. The child grows to resemble the father or the mother. In spatial terms, it is the relationship between front and back. When the older brother is the subject partner, the younger sibling becomes the object partner. Yet it is the younger sibling who makes it possible for the older brother to stand in the subject position. From this, the elder derives absolute value.
This describes the perfection of a beautiful realm of heart among siblings. In this realm, younger siblings attend and revere their elder brother as they would their father, and trust and depend on their older sister as they would their mother. Conversely, the older brother looks after and lives for the sake of his younger siblings in the same way that the parents love their children. The younger siblings practice true love by respecting and serving their older brothers and sisters just as they would serve and support their father or mother. This is the perfection of sibling love. Each sibling nurtures the strengths and compensates for the weaknesses of the others. This realm of heart among brothers and sisters sharing the same blood is a love that no one can divide.
Children living in a true family, who perfect the brother and sister’s realm of heart in the true love of God, will go out into the world to lead lives as clear as crystal and as bright as the shining sun. When they meet people older than themselves, they will honor and serve them with the same heart that they would exhibit toward their own parents. They will show the same true love toward young people that they would toward their younger siblings, sharing with them and helping them. As a result, everyone will love them. Whomever they meet and regardless of the situation, they will always try to give more than they receive. On the job they will work an hour longer than others. Before they look out for themselves, they will consider the situation of others and yield to them. Therefore, they will be respected as owners of true love and heart. Though they may be young, they will become central persons, trusted and relied upon by people of all ages. Thus, perfection of the sibling’s realm of heart within a true family develops values that remain absolute for eternity.
The Husband and Wife’s Realm of Heart
Next, how do we perfect the husband and wife’s realm of heart? The relationship between husband and wife is different from that between parent and child or among siblings, because it does not start out as a bond of blood. A man and a woman reared in different environments and situations meet and make a truly revolutionary commitment to start a life together. Yet when they become one in mind and body through true love, their relationship becomes stronger and more absolute than any blood relationship. The husband-wife relationship contains infinite and inexhaustible treasures. Once formed in the presence of God, the bond of husband and wife is meant to be absolute, and the two should become inseparable for eternity.
Adam and Eve were both God’s children. They were like twins in the womb, with Eve as Adam’s younger sibling and Adam as Eve’s older brother. Then they grew up and became husband and wife. In the same way, the relationship between any husband and wife should begin as if they were brother and sister sharing the same blood. After all, each is born with God as their True Parent. Each is destined to live in attendance to God for eternity. When such a relationship is formed, the evil hand of divorce will never be able to drive a wedge between them. With Heaven watching and the conscience standing guard with a sharp sword, who would desert their partner of eternal joy?
Just as God’s love is absolute, unique, eternal and unchanging, so should be the love between a husband and wife. This is God’s principle of creation, or the law of nature.
Couples who become one in mind and body and perfect the husband and wife’s realm of heart manifest God’s joy. They are the cherished hope of the universe. This step is an absolute requirement prior to perfecting the true parents’ realm of heart. The couple perfects the ideal oneness of God and humankind and thus lays the foundation for a true family on the standard of absolute value. In other words, the unity of husband and wife is the meeting-place of God and His children. It links together the siblings and establishes the parents. It is the realm of the absolute subject and object partners in the Four Great Realms of Heart. To the wife, her husband represents a position of absolute value. She sees in him the ideal heavenly son, heavenly older brother, heavenly husband and father. To the husband, his wife possesses the corresponding absolute qualities as the ideal heavenly daughter, heavenly sister, heavenly wife and mother.
This sacred framework for human relationships was smashed into pieces by the fall of the first human ancestors. As a result, human history has been permeated with grief. Not only have humans suffered; God also has grieved. Although God is the Source of all existence, He was forced to labor to restore His fallen children, all the while constrained to abide by the Principle. This explains why the ceremony in which the True Parents—as the Savior of humanity and Messiah—give the Holy Blessing to true husbands and wives, in God’s true love, is the moment to resolve God’s grief built up over six thousand years. It begins our journey toward regaining the original blood lineage. It is the moment that holds the promise of happiness for every family.
The Parents’ Realm of Heart
Finally, what is the perfection of the parents’ realm of heart, and how is it accomplished? Even the most wonderful husband and wife do not become parents until they have children. The status of parents is granted in the moment the couple’s first child is born and lets out that first cry announcing its arrival. I have said that God created human beings to be His object partners in joy. In the same way, a couple gives birth to and raises a child as a creative act that allows them to experience, through the relationship with their child as their object partner, an eternal joy similar to what God experiences.
By giving birth to children, parents are in the position of God in the flesh. Just as the invisible God nurtured Adam and Eve, parents experience the joy of creating and nurturing God’s children. Through that experience, parents inherit the true parent’s realm of heart from the invisible God. They experience the creative act of the invisible God as they raise their own sons and daughters, grounded in their own husband-wife relationship. They take on the glory of being a second creator, acting in God’s place.
By creating Adam and Eve, God established the standard for a second generation of creators. However, it was God’s historical grief that he was unable to see grandchildren who could stand as a third generation of true creators. He could not take children whose blood lineage had been defiled by Satan and treat them as His true lineage.
Please understand. What happens when human beings, born as wild olive trees, are grafted onto the cultivated olive tree? The Holy Blessing Ceremony changes their blood lineage. This takes place in the realm of grace of the True Parents, who come as the Messiah for humanity. Therefore, when they give birth to children of goodness, they are practicing filial piety on a providential level by enabling God to embrace His third generation, that is, His grandsons and granddaughters. This signifies the historic appearance of the third generation of creators. Their appearance completes the central root, central trunk and central bud linked to God’s original love, original life and original lineage. God has long desired to see this. It marks the perfection of the ideal of creation, one family at a time. As this perfected ideal family expands, there will be ideal tribes, ideal societies, ideal nations and an ideal world—in other words the Kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.
Parents stand in the position of Heaven; therefore, they are the center of the family. Children are in the position of earth. Heaven is in the subject position, and earth is in the object position. What does it mean to say that parents are in the subject position? It means they have a duty to nurture their children and prepare them to marry in a manner consistent with God’s will. Parents are responsible to protect the pure and good lineage that Satan will never again be able to accuse. They are to establish a tradition for their offspring— the holy seed—to pass on Heaven’s lineage from generation to generation. This is the only way to reestablish the position of the original parents that was lost at the human fall and perfect the parents’ realm of heart.
The Three Great Kingships Allow me to explain the meaning of the Three Great Kingships. In brief, while the Four Great Realms of Heart are perfected through the loving oneness of a true husband and wife, the Three Great Kingships are perfected when Adam and Eve give birth to sinless children. God is the first generation, Adam and Eve are the second generation, and the children of Adam and Eve are the third generation. In terms of your family, the grandparents, in the position representing God, would be the first generation, the parents are the second generation, and the children are the third generation. The grandparents are a king and queen representing the past; the parents are a king and queen representing the present, and the children are princes and princesses representing the future. You can establish the realms of these three different eras within your family.
In this way, each family carries out the creative process of origin, division and union. The grandparents represent the origin, the parents represent the division, and the children represent the union, a new creation. Furthermore, by loving and attending the grandparents, we can learn and inherit from the past. By loving and attending the parents, children can learn and become familiar with the present. And by loving their grandchildren, grandparents and parents can sense the future and have hope.
If Adam and Eve had attained perfection, Adam would have been the father and king of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Eve would have been its perfected mother and queen. Having become the lords of their family, they would have established the ideal of kingship in the family, society, nation and world. God is the King of the Kingdom of Heaven in heaven, and Adam would have served as God’s substantial body and as the king of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
In terms of your family, it can be said that your grandparents are ambassadors plenipotentiary sent by Heaven. Therefore, we should honor and attend our grandparents as we would honor and attend God. The parents who attend God are the king and queen of a realm that embraces all six billion people, all humanity, as one family. The children who are responsible for the future should maintain the traditions of Heaven, offer their filial piety and loyalty to their parents, the king and queen, and inherit the royal authority.
These are essential components of the philosophy of the true family. The fulfillment of God’s original ideal stems from this all-embracing perfection of the heavenly three-generational realm on the horizontal plane within a single family. This original family becomes the model for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and in heaven, the realm that is rooted in God’s purpose of creation.
The family that perfects the Four Great Realms of Heart and the Three Great Kingships becomes the basis of the Peace Kingdom, which has been humanity’s cherished desire. Through that family, the Peace Kingdom can be established here on earth. This new family, perfected as I have described, is the royal family of the heavenly kingdom. All the members of this family are royalty. However, if anyone, whether a grandparent, parent or child, fails to perfect the oneness of true love, then the Three Great Kingships and the Four Great Realms of Heart cannot be perfected.
Our Mission
Respected leaders, there is a biblical verse that says, "New wine must be put into new wineskins." (Luke 5:38) Though you were not aware of it, the old wineskin, the Era Before the Coming of Heaven, has passed away, and the new wineskin, the Era After the Coming of Heaven, has begun. With the appearance of the True Parents, the power of God is being manifested on this earth. Since the start of the twenty-first century, God has been carrying out an accelerated providence to establish His ideal of creation—the Kingdom of God on earth. This providence is absolute, and it is our destiny to accomplish it. We who have received Heaven’s call have only one path to follow. The goal of our mission is to establish the Peace Kingdom.
Already the gates of the spirit world have opened wide. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and Confucius, accompanied by billions of good ancestors, are descending to the earth like a windstorm. Their intention is to help the earthly world, and they are coming to help you! They are full of zeal and eagerly watch your every move and seek to help you to tear away the thousands of barriers and boundaries that fill our world. They will work with you to establish a new era of liberation for the world of the heart, that is, the Kingdom of Cosmic Peace and Unification (Cheon Il Guk).
How will you greet your good ancestors? You have been born anew as cultivated olive trees; therefore you should greet them with new eyes, new ears, and a new heart. You are called to be the forerunners in practicing the true family philosophy.
I know with certainty Heaven’s will. I know why God anointed me and sent me in the position of a True Parent. As a True Parent, I must fulfill the mission of the savior—to bring perfect salvation to the world. I must fulfill the responsibility of the Messiah—to remove the sins of humanity. I must fill the earth with fields of cultivated olive trees—true families—by bestowing the marriage Blessing centering on true love. Now this heavenly command is being accomplished with revolutionary speed. Tens of thousands of families have been blessed in international, interracial and interreligious marriages. They are carrying out their work to establish Cheon Il Guk under the banners of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace and the Mongolian Peoples Federation for World Peace. You can see for yourself. They are God’s special forces, working at the risk of their lives in this Era After the Coming of Heaven.
No force can extinguish the torchlight of the true love revolution. The power of God is moving with us, and the entire spirit world is working with us. Who can possibly hold back this typhoon that is establishing the new heaven and new earth? Please have a humble attitude in order to receive the grace of the age that is approaching like a tidal wave. We live in a new age of the family. Those who behave selfishly and individualistically, or do immoral acts that undermine human ethics, will not escape Heaven’s punishment. Please establish true families that live in accord with God’s ideal of creation. Please become true parents. God will reside in your family. Your family will overflow with eternal peace and happiness.
The Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace and Mongolian Peoples’ Federation for World Peace are the pillars of cloud and of fire that will lead humanity in the direction of righteousness. Your core values must now be "absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience." Mongolian people, please elevate your race; become a homogeneous, kinship community by receiving the Blessing and practicing God’s true love. Become the vanguard in establishing this earth as God’s homeland and the homeland of true families. I urge you to put on the armor of true love and become courageous leaders ridding this land of satanic evil.
Ladies and gentlemen, All of us should live according to God's will, practicing the "three subject thought," which means that we are to walk the path of a true parent, a true teacher and a true owner.
Please rise up, in accordance with God's providence, to establish the world of freedom and liberation, which is God's original ideal of creation. Please make your solemn determination to live a most precious life, one in which you dwell and walk together with God, the Owner of the Peace Kingdom, a realm which transcends religions, nations, races and even the cosmos itself.
Be confident! The founders of the world’s major religions, along with many good spirits in the spiritual world, are ready to work with you.
I trust you will treasure the heavenly commandment I convey today. From this moment on, wherever you are and whatever you may do, please never forget that we are one family centered on God. Remember that God works through your conscience, and that your good ancestors are living with you, encouraging you to live every day for the sake of others.
I pray that God’s blessing will be upon you and upon the true families that you will establish.
Thank you.