Cheon Seong Gyeong Ⅱ - 293. Developing Our Spirituality
1 You do not know what great grace and blessing it is that I have revealed in detail the root of the spirit world. At present, not everyone believes in the spirit world. Since there are many disbelievers, those who do believe will receive blessings. They can become the trunk and the first branches that grow out from the trunk. Once the central trunk and first branches of a tree develop, even if that tree lasts for a thousand years, it will grow and develop on the basis of that trunk and those branches. (392-243, 2002.09.22) Experiencing the spirit world through prayer and offering devotions 2 There is something called the gate of the mind. You will know this when you pray. You get a different feeling depending on the time of your prayer. Praying at one o’clock in the morning is very different from praying at three o’clock. You will see for yourself when you experience this. When you go into a deep, mystical state and pray, you will see that you feel differently depending on the time of your prayer. What you feel in the morning, at noon, in the evening, and at night are all different. The feeling within our mind differs in the same way that our physical senses respond differently to the changes of the four seasons. Therefore, in offering prayers, you should know at which time you can pray well. The time when you can pray well is the time when your degree of correspondence with God is the highest. At that time you will discover the gate of the mind. Once the gate of your mind is in perfect accord with that of God, they revolve around each other and reach a certain level. At that time the path opens up so that you can experience what God feels. To reach such a position, you need to cultivate your mind. (76-127, 1975.02.02) 3 In general, people who are spiritually adept may not have clear perception with regard to the truth. They start out strong on one side, but they are weak on the other side. Since they are not consistent throughout, they cannot make their way forward. At one time or another, they will roll over and fall down. Conversely, if the side of truth is big but the spiritual side is small, that person cannot keep going. Therefore you need to make an effort to balance these two aspects in your daily life. The Bible says to worship “in spirit and truth”; that is, with prayer and with truth. This means you need to reach a level where you can balance the two aspects and harmonize them. Human beings are meant to mediate between the spirit world and the physical world. You therefore need to become people who can mediate by standing at the center of the spirit world and at the center of the world of truth. Unless you become such people, you cannot attain the position of perfection. (76-137, 1975.02.02) 4 When you offer devotions, God’s grace will come to you. Those who have practiced a life of prayer will know this. When you pray, a great and mighty power will come to you. Thus, through that power, the eyes of a person who prays can see in both the physical world and the spirit world. God has carried out His providence through the religious foundation to make a connection between the supernatural realm of substantial ideology and humankind. By stimulating people’s core emotions, He causes them to desire to go to such a realm. By so doing, God is trying to connect us to the transcendental plane. (18-067, 1967.05.21) 5 What Saint Paul saw and experienced in the third heaven of the spirit world became the driving force that enabled him to carry out his mission tirelessly for fourteen years. You need to have such an experience. This also holds true for me. I too have a standard that I aspire to. Though I have not told you about it, I have a non-negotiable standard that dictates, “I will do such and such.” With such a conviction, I plow my way through to the end. With this unyielding conviction, I will plow my way forward no matter what hardships and troubles I face. (27-128, 1969.11.30) 6 We speak of God’s heart. If you wonder where His heart is and you listen while praying, you will hear His voice say, “Listen closely to what Reverend Moon is telling you. Do not make him sad. Make him happy instead.” That is what you will hear, and this is what He will teach you to do. And if you stay awake because you miss me so much, you will find that the spirit world opens before you. The spirit world will open, so that you can sit where you are and see what I am doing in America. Such things will take place. This means you have reached a realm in which you can experience a higher level of faith, where what was previously obscure becomes real and substantial on the physical plane. This fact will usher in a great revolution in the religious world. That is why you need to have such experiences. (76-152, 1975.02.02) 7 You have continued to work from the time you joined the Unification Church until now, but you should think about the position in which you are working. You should think about your direction and your location at all times, and consider whether you are leading a self-centered life or working to harmonize the world centered on Heaven. Thus through your prayer you will come to know that God is with you. You will know this as soon as you close your eyes. You will know it even if you do not pray. When you go somewhere and speak, you will find yourself talking eloquently. If you meet a conscientious person, you will be drawn to that person right away. Everything is reciprocal. If someone becomes your subject partner or your object partner, one of you will attract the other. Even if you are meeting someone for the first time, that person could become your object partner. The essence of this principle is eternal and unchanging. Likewise, if you go to a place with receptive people, you will feel pleased and will be compelled to speak. Even if you had not intended to speak, your mouth will open up. (230-030, 1992.04.15) 8 You need to think about who you are going to meet today along the way. Wondering what kind of person the first person you meet will be like, what the second and third people you meet will be like, you should pray, “Father, what kind of person will it be? I wish to meet a person who is like this, but what kind of person will it really be?” When the person you meet is exactly the person you imagined in your prayer, then you will feel pleased. Through such experiences, your spiritual senses will develop. As soon as you go out on the street, you will feel you are going to meet such and such a person today. The human spirit goes beyond all limits. If you think, “I will meet such and such a person today,” and you actually meet such a person, you will be surprised and will exclaim, “Wow!” In this way, there are many instances in which your thoughts and intuitions from the spirit world actually come true in perfect accord with one another. You need to accumulate such experiences. (30-151, 1970.03.21) 9 The life element of the spirit world is love. It can be likened to the water that sustains the life of fish and the air that sustains our life in the human world. Love is like the air. When your physical body and all five senses are in harmony, you experience a corresponding relationship with the spirit world, through which your cells breathe love, move in rhythm with Heaven and breathe together with God. You need to have faith based on experience and actual feeling. As a husband loves and respects his wife every day through real life experience, so divine love and human love should be harmonized through real life experience. (211-065, 1990.12.28) 10 When the mind moves and the body reflects that motion, there is no consumption of energy. If our body were to block the waves of energy from the spirit world, it would not respond. However, if those waves could pass freely through, our bodies would respond with a kind of vibration and spiritual experiences would come to us automatically. If you have a spiritual experience too suddenly, you will suffer side effects. Therefore you need to experience these things naturally. In the spring flowers naturally bloom on trees, but in order for a tree to blossom, it needs to grow big enough. If a tree has only just sprouted, could it blossom? Would it work if you pulled on it to make it grow more quickly, wishing it to have flowers? If the tree were uprooted, that would be the end. Flowers must bloom naturally. Therefore I am telling you that you should not rush on the path of faith. Since it is the path through which the history of a thousand years is created, you cannot tread upon it hastily. (37-123, 1970.12.23) 11 You need to cultivate the field of your mind in line with the gate of your mind. In order to cultivate this field of the mind and pioneer its direction, you must discover God, the subject. However, you may feel that God, the subject, is obscure. If you want to connect to God, you must focus your mind and set out from your mind, for there is no other way. If you illuminate your mind from within, you can come to know its direction clearly. Then you will follow it naturally. You may have been praying facing east, but once you enter a mystical state, the direction will have already changed. Based on this, there really is a gate of the mind. (76-144, 1975.02.02) 12 In order to have spiritual experiences, first you need to pray. You need to focus your mind. If you can, you should descend to the zero point. What is the quickest way to achieve this? To go to the zero point, the quickest way is to humble yourself. That is why people who practice Zen meditation focus on the question, “What is the mind?” The answer is very simple. As God is the eternal, ideal subject of goodness, the mind can at any time achieve the position of an unchanging object partner in front of that subject being. This is referred to in the Unification Church as the spirit mind. If you go into a mystical state in prayer and engage in a reciprocal relationship with God, then transcendental power appears in you. It is when he reached nirvana that the Gautama Buddha remarked, “In heaven and earth, only I am the honored one.” (76-143, 1975.02.02) |