Introduction
Introduction
- Everyone is struggling to attain happiness and avoid misfortune.
- From the commonplace affairs of individuals to the great events that shape the course of history, each is at root an expression of the human aspiration for ever greater happiness.
- How, then, does happiness arise? People feel joy when their desires are fulfilled.
- The word "desire," however, is often not understood in its original sense,
- because in the present circumstances our desires tend to pursue evil rather than good.
- Desires which result in injustice do not emanate from a person's original mind. The original mind is well aware that such desires lead to misfortune.
- Therefore, it repels evil desires and strives to follow the good. Even at the cost of their lives, people seek for the joy that can enrapture the original mind.
- We find a great contradiction in every person. Within the self-same individual are two opposing inclinations.
- The original mind that desires goodness.
- And the evil mind that desires wickedness.
- They are engaged in a fierce battle, striving to accomplish two conflicting purposes.
- Any being possessing such a contradiction within itself is doomed to perish.
- Human beings, having acquired this contradiction, live on the brink of destruction.
- If burdened by an internal contradiction from its inception, human life would not have been able to arise.
- The contradiction, therefore, must have developed after the birth of the human race.
- Christianity sees humanity's state of destruction as the result of the human Fall.
- For humankind to completely overcome the two aspects of ignorance and fully realize the goodness which the original mind desires, at some point in history there must emerge a new truth
- which can reconcile religion and science and resolve their problems in an integrated undertaking.
- God has sent one person to this earth to resolve the fundamental problems of human life and the universe. His name is Sun Myung Moon.
- We can discern two broad courses in the search for solutions to the fundamental questions of human life.
- In the first, people have searched within the resultant, material world.
- Those who walk this path, believing it to be the supreme way, kneel before the glories of highly developed science. They take pride in its omnipotence and the material comforts it provides.
- Nevertheless, can we enjoy full happiness founded only upon external conditions that satisfy the flesh?
- The advance of science may create a comfortable social environment in which we can enjoy abundant wealth and prosperity, but can that alone truly gratify the spiritual desires of the inner self?
- Just as a healthy body depends upon a sound mind, so too the joy of the body is complete only when the mind is content.