ADAMIC NATURE

           

ADAMIC NATURE

Hello Mr. Furuta,

I apologize for not recognizing you when we met at Belvedere, and I apologize very much for not keeping in touch with you as you had so kindly requested. I attach a summary of my activities in HSA-UWC since autumn 1974, with a bibliography of my other published texts. I have kept abreast of activities centering on aUnification Thought but have not really used it or studied it deeply except for when I was writing a paper entitled “Unification Thought in the Context of Marxian Thought” for an anthology in which David Carlson had promised me it would be published (however, Dr. Shimmyo, his coeditor, rejected it, first on the grounds of excessive length and then without comment). When James Rigney was in New York City for a couple of years, we became close. He has kept me informed of symposia in Tokyo and let me read papers that he had written.

I have a couple of requests, and I will lead up to them with the following. At 43^rd Street., Aidan Barry often lectured or preached centering on the concepts of Adamic nature and Angelic nature. It has always seemed to me that, given the theory of man as a microcosm, there should be some feature or aspect of a human being that can have give and take with an angel. In particular, I venture that angels, who know the laws and principles according to which the cosmos exists, knowledge of which is essential in man’s fulfilling his portion of responsibility, function, perhaps mainly, for the maintenance of any entity as it undergoes changes. I further venture that maintenance is a particular tendency of women (as contrasted with of men) in other words, fulfilling the purpose of the individual. The purpose of maintenance, then, might be the Angelic nature. From this perspective, it easily follows that Adamic would be the proclivity to acquire or to develop. (Fallen feminine nature, would then be inordinate hoarding, with fallen masculine nature inordinately risky or even rapacious acquisition.) At this point, a problem for me arises in view of what I have thus far. I have set up a duality in terms of women and men; however, I began with Angelic nature as the function of a human being having given to take action with an angel; then, what would be the contrast to that? – would it not be the function of having give and take with God, the being originally contrasted with angels? That would fit with the theory of dual purpose in the sense that God represents the whole. In the microcosm paradigm, I am ready to lump give and take with spirit persons and with angels in view of a remark by True Father that the physical realm is a factory and the spiritual realm is storage; also, on its face, mediums appear to have been largely women: this would have to include live you that prophets were directly channeling God. This would have to also fit the teaching that immature human beings are not dominated directly by God but are governed by the internal” force of the Principal”, presumably, the principle of complexity location, which would necessarily include the principal of dual purposes. Even given all those possibilities, I feel that I am missing some important point, if not going in the wrong direction entirely.

Long ago, I heard this Mr. Barry received his concept from Kyoshi Nishi. I was present in the Riverdale Center when he and 11 other Japanese brothers arrived in New York City, and was with him for the five months in which I lived in the 71^st Street Center, but I do not remember having any direct give and take with him. When he toured America promoting his book, I tried get an appointment with him but was frustrated by the negligence of the district secretary. I am hoping that you can let me know how to contact him: if you happen to know that that he has not been teaching the Adamic/Angelic natures, I would not ask him about that; otherwise, I would simply ask him for some explication of it, preferably in some text that he has written, but would not run all that I wrote here by him. I also have in my possession random pages from a fascinating term paper that he wrote for a class in our seminary. I can tell that it is outlining parallels within the parallels of the providential courses of the Providence for Restoration, and I would like to ask him about that.

Here is my second request. An article I wrote was published in Unification Thought Quarterly, number 2. I do not seem to have a final text of what I wrote, and that issue is not available online. I would greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to enable me possess that particular article as it was published.

Mr. Furuta, my strongest memory of you (which I often recount) is you finding me determined to pray silently and telling the I could practice my lecture with God as the audience, and He would order corrections. I jumped at the chance, of course, and found that while practicing that way my voice in quoting the words of Jesus was different than when I was simply narrating. I then gave the lecture imagining God hovering over the doorway at the rear of the hall. To show off, I added at the end, a quotation from a major speech by True Father about Jesus being our advocate at the Last Day. When I had finished, the spiritually open Helen Danby told me that Jesus had been attending my lecture, but that he had left at the point where I made the addition. Your attempt to guide me in my prayer life was, of course, one of very many times that we had give and take, and not the most important. I have been continuingly grateful for having known you, and am very pleased to have found that you have continued to play an important role in the understanding and promulgation of True Parents’ teaching.

In My Name,

Johnny

(John Andrew Sonneborn, Doctor of Ministry)