Rearing Monarchs #4:

A child’s unique individuality, part 1
Unification Thoughts, September 2021

In the previous articles, we’d looked into the interconnected ideas of a Fifth Realm of True Love (i.e., grandparents’ love) and Three Great Kingships (which include the original value of a family’s children).

And last time, we’d mentioned some of Abonim’s thoughts about Attendance. These indicate how parents and grandparents are to attend the children in their family:

“……grandchildren, we have to attend like they are the kings and queens of the heavenly Kingdom of Heaven and earth that will come in the future….”

• Cheon Seong Gyeong p. 2451

“I am someone who has offered bows even to very small children. I have attended three-year-old children with utmost sincerity, as if they were princes and princesses of heaven.”

• Chambumo Gyeong, Book 2, Chapter3, Section 3

“God believes, works and lives in attendance”

• CheonSeong Gyeong, Book 11, Chapter 1: Attendance

Whereas last time, I’d shared how these quotes had affected my understanding of my responsibility as the Golden Ager in my family, this time, I have in mind a particular predicament of some young people. I know that this will be obvious to many readers, but it might not be to some others, so I at least need to mention it.

I became aware of this predicament some decades ago, as I was teaching workshops to our youth. I’d started at summer camps when they and I were younger, but as the years passed, the time came to look more closely at the Second Blessing and starting to prepare for it.

In sharing these lessons, issues regarding the children’s self-image and self-esteem began emerging. The image I’d drawn of a blessed child responsibly growing their connection to God (first blessing) was challenging and even judgment for some. So they’d ask if we could talk privately and it would come out that they lacked confidence and/or didn’t think much of themselves. I’d of course noticed language, body language, facial expressions or even ways of dressing that might project something, but in these personal conversations, the reasons became apparent. My real wake-up call came when our community experienced a few extreme incidents of self-harm. Clearly, some of our young weren’t seeing themselves from HP’s standpoint.

That a young person could feel this way might have started with prejudice and bullying at school, or/and from comparison and falling short of expectations in the community and even at home. As a result, some of the young people had slipped into “double-lives”, on one hand trying to live up to the standards expected of a blessed child, but on the other hand trying to “fit in” at school—which made their consciences uneasy because of the hypocrisy they were caught in.

As I considered all this, it came back to me that I’d been the only person of color all throughout my elementary school. And also, despite my parents’ urging, I couldn’t always be at the top of my class. So I did end up with some issues regarding my self-image. I only could deal with the root causes of these issues when I studied Unification Thought, starting in my mid-20s. I was able to see myself more from God’s standpoint, and that was extremely liberating and uplifting. And that prepared me to notice related things that True Parents said when, years later, the three Holy Books became available to us. I felt the urgency to incorporate these into my lessons.

The very appreciative response of many young people confirmed my belief in the importance of these ideas and so I’d like to share them, and what we as the eldest in our families can do with them. There are two main ones: first idea is that of each person’s unique individuality; the second is that each person is absolutely and uniquely gifted by God.

The idea of unique individuality

1) The starting point of creation

In the Ontology chapter of UT, there’s an explanation of how HP conceived of the universe before He finally created it. It goes like this:

“In conceptualizing, …(God) immediately and comprehensively formed the conception of a human being as a complete, unitary whole…. Moreover, the conception that came to God’s mind was not that of a man and a woman in the abstract, but rather that of a specific man (Adam) and a specific woman (Eve), with their concrete individual images, namely, the very ideas of Adam and Eve.”

• New Essentials of UT, p. 116–117

An older book (Explaining Unification Thought [1993]) that’s not “cleaned up” for general readership is even more specific:

“According to the Bible, God created man on the last day of Creation. It is the Unification Thought point of view, however, that in His mind, God conceived the image of man first. Then He conceived the images of animals, plants, and finally minerals—taking the image of man as the standard. This is the downward process of creation of images (Logos) in the mind of God. It explains why man is the integration of all things.”

"In the phenomenal world, however, God created everything starting from the minerals, then plants, animals, and finally man. This is the of creation of substantial beings."

“The image of man, therefore, was to be created in the mind of God and was the standard for all other images. The original Individual Image of man in the (mind) of God (before the creation of the universe) was none other than the image of Adam himself. It was neither vague nor abstract, but specific and concrete. Adam’s image had both a spiritual aspect (spirit-mind and spirit-body) and a physical aspect (instinct, sense, organs, nerves, tissues, cells, molecules, and atoms). Of course, Adam’s individual character and appearance also were included in the original Individual Image. God then thought of another human, Eve, the helper for Adam based on the image of Adam. The image of Eve was conceived so a to enable her to be a wife to Adam. Their relationship was to be as that of (yang) and (yin). The new image had additional aspects of new individual character, leaving out Adam’s individuality.

• Explaining Unification Thought, p. 69

On the chance that this is offensive and unacceptable to some, I must say that this particular expression of the idea was from notes that were taken when Dr. Lee taught UT in Japan around 1980. I’ve heard that Abonim revealed (later?) that HP actually conceived of Eve first, as the object of His Love. To me, that reasoning is also plausible, so I don’t argue about the sequence of HP’s conception—that isn’t the most essential point. What is essential is the idea that humans didn’t just accidentally appear as one more random outcome of the Big Bang 14 billion years earlier.

What is most essential is that HP conceived the individual images of his first son and daughter in absolute, painstaking detail—both externally in their bodies and internally in their characters and personalities—because HP irrepressibly desired the most beautiful children to be the supreme objects of His heart and love. And when he had conceived these most God-like, divine children in His image and likeness, he took their most exquisite designs as the pattern for all other things in the universe. And when the conception was all complete, the creation began: the Big Bang was initiated and HP waited “with bated breath” (my words ;-) as it unfolded for the next 14 billion years. The prime forces in the universe caused gases to expand, cool, form solid bodies—including our solar system, its earth, and all its “miraculous” processes—to not only support human life, but to make it vibrant and exhilarating. It was all so that the first divine son and divine daughter would appear and feel powerfully how absolutely beloved they were. They were to be the central objects of God’s parental heart and love and HP wanted them to see it, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, know it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Unification Thought describes the heart of God before the creation as one of “hope” and “expectation”:

“According to modern physics, the universe began to be formed about 15 billion years ago. From the perspective of Unification Thought, God began to create the universe at that time. What was everything for? It was all for the sake of creating Adam and Eve, His most beloved children. In the hope of seeing the moment when His children would be born, God spent much time creating the universe, in spite of the grueling character of the effort necessary in making a total investment. God, being filled with hope, however, did not feel the process of creating the universe as too long or too arduous, its length and difficulty notwithstanding.
We can realize through our own experiences that this is true. When we work for something joyful, we do not feel the work to be so grueling, no matter how many hardships are experienced. We even forget about the time, because we know that joy awaits us in the future. God’s expectation of joy was far greater than any kind of joy we may experience. Moreover, the joy God felt when Adam and Eve were actually born was so profound that it cannot be easily compared to anything else.”

• New Essentials of Unification Thought, p. 251

What this reveals is so totally different from the common “scientific” understanding of how humans appeared, who we are, and what our value is. But Abonim has a background in engineering science, so His understanding cannot be dismissed as the poetic expressions of a mystic. It’s a radically unconventional explanation, but I think that it is a plausible one. And when I first read it in my mid-20s, a new appreciation of human life awoke within me. It was the beginning of seeing even my own self from HP’s standpoint. I began to understand and actually feel that we are not just “animals” as we have been taught, but rather divine beings, infinitely precious to HP and unique in the universe…

Abonim puts it this way:

“Creation requires an investment of energy. An artist's great hope is to create a masterpiece. An artist invests all his effort into making great works of art. A masterpiece appears only when the artist gives everything, and feels he cannot give any more. Creation starts with investing oneself. Creation is possible only when energy is poured out. Without contributing energy, there is no result…

The creation was the beginning of God's work through which He determined not to exist for His own sake, but for the sake of His object partner. Creation requires giving out energy. God invested Himself. But how much did He invest? Some people think that when God created through the Word, saying, “Let there be this, let there be that,” it was like a game. But no, God completely poured out His true life, true love and true ideals. We do not love something unless we have worked hard and invested our flesh and blood into it. So the period before creating and the period after creating were therefore different. Before creating, God thought about everything centered on Himself, but after starting to create, He existed for His object partner. We do not exist for ourselves but for our partners, for our sons and daughters. That is how it is.

• Cheon Seong Gyeong, p. 87–88

I think this is an important starting point for our children to understand, because their years in school—and even in summer workshops—may not have given them this essential and elevated view of their humanity so clearly.

And a last thing: Unification Thought—and especially radically groundbreaking ideas like these—are not from the mind of Dr. Sang Hun Lee. Rather, they were learned in his study with Abonim—His books and sermons, and in His one-on-one discussions with Dr. Lee as He taught him how to critique and counter-propose materialism. In Dr. Lee, Abonim found a mind and heart that thirsted for and could appreciate these finer details of His understanding.

I suppose that this is a natural place to end this first of UT’s points related to our children’s self-image and self-esteem. I know that I don’t look in the mirror and see myself as I had in my youth—including my first years in the movement. And when the young people begin to hear such ideas from Abonim’s thought, a light also goes on for them. I’ve seen it; I can’t forget it; and I always earnestly hope that they don’t forget and that the light doesn’t go out. I understand that HP hopes that the children’s parents and grandparents at home are where they should begin to feel this, long before they’re old enough to understand it.

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