1. A Being of Heart
As explained in the Theory of the Original Image, Heart (Shimjung) is the “emotional impulse to seek joy through love.” It is the “source of love,” the “emotional impulse that can not but love,” and the core of the Original Image. Thus, Heart is the core of Sungsang, and therefore the core of God’s personality. Jesus said, “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:18). In other words, Jesus taught that human beings should reflect God’s personality centered on God’s Heart. In human beings as well, heart is the core of the personality. Accordingly, the perfection of one’s personality becomes possible only when one experiences the Heart of God. A person who has perfected his or her character by experiencing the Heart of God is, indeed, a being of heart.
When people continuously experience God’s Heart, they eventually come to inherit God’s Heart completely. Such people naturally come to feel like loving everyone and everything. Not to do so would cause their heart to feel a great deal of pain. Fallen people find it difficult to love others, but once they become one with God’s Heart, their life as a whole is transformed into one of love. Also, if love is present, those who have many possessions can not but want to share with those who have less. This is because love is not self-centered. Consequently, the gap between the haves and have-nots, between the rich and the poor, namely, exploitation in the world, will naturally disappear. Such a phenomenon is manifested due to the equalizing function of love. That human beings are beings of heart means that they live a life of love. Therefore, one can conclude that the human being is Homo amans, a loving person, or a person of love.
Heart is the core of the human personality. Therefore, the fact that human beings are beings of heart means that they are beings of personality. Such a person’s spirit mind and physical mind engage in harmonious give and receive action centering on heart, and their faculties of intellect, emotion, and will are all equally developed in a balanced way, centering on heart.
In a fallen person, the functioning of the spirit mind is often very weak and is dominated by the functioning of the physical mind. Also, in many cases a person may have a well-developed faculty of reason (intellectual ability) but lack the emotional maturity, or sufficient will power to do what is good or right. On the other hand, once a person is able to inherit God’s Heart and become a being of heart, then that person’s intellect, emotion, and will can develop in a well-balanced manner, and their spirit mind will have the power to take dominion over their physical mind, whereby they can properly engage in harmonious give and receive action.
Furthermore, as the core of Sungsang, heart is the motivating force that stimulates or empowers the faculties of intellect, emotion, and will to seek the values of truth, beauty, and goodness, respectively. Intellect is the faculty to cognize, and it pursues the value of truth; emotion is the faculty to feel joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, and so forth, and it pursues the value of beauty; and will is the faculty to determine one’s mind, and it pursues the value of goodness. Originally, all three faculties should function with heart as their primary motivation. When one pursues truth through intellectual activity, the result will be the knowledge of science, philosophy, and so on. When one pursues beauty through emotional activity, the result will be art. When one pursues goodness through volitional activity, the result will be morality, ethics, and so on.
Politics, economics, law, media, sports, etc. are also the results of intellectual, emotional, and volitional activities. Accordingly, heart becomes the driving force behind all cultural activities based on intellect, emotion and will. Particularly, it becomes the driving force of artistic activities. The totality of these intellectual, emotional, and volitional activities is culture. In the original world, persons of heart (persons of love) play the main role in cultural activities. This is illustrated in fig. 3.1.
In this way, heart is the driving force behind all cultural activities. Therefore, the culture which human beings should originally have actualized would be a culture of heart. Heart is the essence of what a true culture should be. The culture of heart, which God originally intended to realize through Adam, would have been the “Adam culture.” Due to Adam’s fall, however, a culture of heart was not realized; instead, until today cultures based on self-centeredness, or cultures in which the intellect, emotion, and will are separated from one another, have been established.
For example, in economic activities, in many cases, making money has, until today, been considered as the supreme purpose. In the original world, however, if someone were to live in isolated affluence while others lived in poverty, that person could never live comfortably, but would feel stricken by pain in his or her heart. Thus, those who earned a great deal of money would naturally want to share it with their neighbors or with society. In other words, people would feel like actualizing God’s love through their economic activities. Not only in the economy, but also in other fields, people would want to actualize God’s love. Thus, the culture of heart, or culture of love, will certainly be established, wherein intellectual, emotional and volitional activities will be united, centering on love. Hence, a culture of love is a unified culture.
To date, humankind has tried in many different ways to actualize the true culture, but all attempts ended in failure. The reality that, in human history various cultures have aisen and declined, illustrates this fact. The reason for this is that people did not understand what a true culture is like. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is one example. The leaders of that revolution attempted to build a culture based on labor, in accordance with the materialist dialectic, but their efforts resulted only in the oppression of human nature and the delay of modernization. The true culture is a culture centered on heart. The New Cultural Revolution advocated by Rev. Sun Myung Moon aims precisely at the establishment of the culture of heart.
At this point, it may be opportune to elaborate on the concepts of culture and civilization. The sum total of the results of intellectual, emotional, and volitional activities, when considered from their material or external aspects, is called, “civilization”; and when those results are considered from their spiritual or internal aspects (especially in religion, art, and so on), they are called “culture.” Since it is difficult to clearly distinguish the spiritual aspect from the material, however, these two terms are generally used with the same meaning. Therefore, in Unification Thought as well, culture and civilization are often used interchangeably.