1) In Order to Fulfill the Purpose of Life

Question: Please tell us what kind of sad, joyful, or suffering experiences you have had in your life.

Answer: Sad experience, and joyful experience, and what? (Experience of hardship) Experience of hardship. What can be hard? When you are determined to achieve your purpose, then hard things and sad things are not hard or sad. When you are going forward towards your purpose, there cannot be a hardship or sorrow. When you are sad, you think only of how you can achieve your goal. This is the Unification Church way, isn't it? When you decide on a purpose, you have to hold your tears and move on even when it is hard. When you are determined, the harder it gets, the closer you are to achieving the goal, and the more tears you shed, the more heart you have for its realization. Considering this, sorrow and hardship are to be welcomed as good things. Do you understand this?

It takes time to achieve a goal. Then, there should be efforts. How hard can you work? This is the question. Then you should establish spiritual conditions. So, time, and what? (Efforts) Then spiritual conditions. When you make efforts, however, you cannot just simply work. Your mind and body must be one, and your efforts should be acknowledged by Heaven. The more efforts you invest, the closer you are to the goal. Do you understand this? First, what? Time. Then? (Efforts) Then? (Spiritual conditions).

If it normally takes ten years to fulfill a goal, but you want to do it within three years, you have to work more than three times harder. Is it easy? (Difficult) So you have no choice. This is scientific. The question is how much you invest. Your purpose will be realized only when your investment of time and work is greater than what is required to fulfill it. If it is below the standard of the purpose, it will not be achieved. Do you understand? You think you want to become a certain person, leader, writer, scientist, or so forth. If you have decided on something, the bigger the purpose is, the more you should invest your time, work, and spiritual efforts. Western people don't know what spiritual effort is. You need to invest time, work, and spiritual effort. But this purpose should not be for yourself but for the sake of the whole. If you have to invest much time, then you cannot sleep well and cannot play around well. You should invest all these extra hours. Others are out with friends, but you are to live a lonely life. Isn't it so? Forming spiritual conditions is not in order to deal with people but to ask higher beings for help. That is why you have to go through a highly intense situation. This is why there is hardship and sorrow. We should overcome them. Do not take them as pain. Rather, as something that quickens the realization of what you desire.

It is the same in our church. The path that our church has taken is one that has been opposed by the whole of Korea and the world. But this was not something sad or painful. The more we have such things, the more attention we receive from the world and the better things turn for our purpose. So from the standpoint of purpose, sad and difficult things are not bad things. If you realize this, you can digest these things. Do you understand this? In the outside world, if somebody cries without a purpose his tears will disappear after the crying, and his sufferings and pains will be forgotten. But sorrow and hardship that is experienced for the sake of a purpose inevitably remains. The reward will surely come, within your lifetime or through your descendants. Therefore, sorrow is not sorrow, and hardship is not hardship.