Let us say you live up to eighty years of age. If you subtract the hours you spend sleeping, you are left with about fifty years of life. Would you say you are alive when you are asleep? When
you are asleep, you are as good as dead, because you
are inanimate. Sleeping is the same as being dead the whole time. The number
of hours you labor each day to make a living is about half of the
twenty-four hours in a day. Now deduct the time you spend eating. From whatever time
is left subtract the time spent visiting, going to friends’ parties, attending
the sixtieth birthday celebrations of village elders, attending funerals and wakes, and
being bedridden. In short, if you were to exclude all the days you lose for
whatever reasons that might arise, you cannot claim to have actually lived very
much. Would it even be half of your entire lifetime? When I calculated this
recently, it came out as roughly seven years. Even so, of those seven years,
how many days could you claim to have truly lived? (49-336,1971.10.24)
Life passes by very quickly. After attaining maturity
and coming to know the affairs of the world, doing things here and there, you
will find yourselves crossing the forty-year mark, and soon
after that, the fifty-year mark. A decade will fly by
in the twinkling of an eye, and in what will seem like only seconds, you will
be sixty years old. Then very soon you will be seventy, but only for a
minute before you age again. When you think about it,
the saying, “Life is but a fleeting dream,” has never sounded so true.
(188-38, 1989.2.16)
A person’s fortune stretches and shrinks like an
elastic rubber band. If someone who is born with fortune valued at 100 spends
120 in the course of his life, his descendants will perish. If he spends only 80, he can bequeath the remaining 20
as a blessing to his descendants. (78-332, 1975.6.10)
You can change your fortune, but not your inherited
destiny. Can you change your homeland? Can you change your parents? However strong
a nation’s sovereignty and customs might be, it can
never change the fact that you were born as the son or
daughter of your parents. As can be seen, the path of restoration is also a
destined path. (172-55,
1988.1.7)
When you make a wrong start, you end up in a totally
unexpected place. Hence, when a ship sets out into the great ocean, it should
chart its course and follow the compass from the moment it first sets sail from
port. Then, what is the port of departure for human life? People do not know.
Where can we find the direction and guiding compass to reach our
destination in the world beyond? People have not been able to find this, so
they have been wandering about back and forth. However much they try, they are not able to overcome their human limitations.
(172-28,
1988.1.3)
====Rev. Sun Myung Moon (CSG) =========
