Hello, I’m your host Kristine and welcome to Woo Myung Cast, where you can listen to Great Teacher Woo Myung’s words of wisdom.
Today’s story is called <A Diary of an Old Man>.
I write in hope that many young people of this generation learn something from my writing. I was born in New York in 1938. After I graduated from high school, I immediately entered the workforce and got a job as a postman. At the young age of 24, I met my wife and married her. We had 3 kids – 2 girls and a boy. Thanks to my diligence at work, I became the postmaster, in charge of a post office. Back then, it was a very reputable and honorable job. My kids went into good universities and got married. Around when they were grown up, I became a grey-haired old man. I have gotten cancer and I am very sick. I feel like it was only yesterday that it was my first day at the post office. At the young age of 24, I enjoyed working and was filled with many hopes and dreams about life. Now I am so old and have only a limited amount of time remaining and I still don’t know when my time will come. It seems it is all about life for mankind: to be born, go to school, have a job, marry, have babies, age, and die. What is called life has passed by in a moment. It went by too quickly. So I am sad. I want to tell young people not to be proud of being young because the life is just one moment. I was a handsome young boy with bright skin, and it seemed like only yesterday… Keep in mind that life is something you stay in and leave after just a short while.
From teacher Woo Myung’s book, Stop Living in This Land Go to the Everlasting World of Happiness Live There Forever
The Reason Man is Born Into This World
Innumerable people have come and gone in this world but there is no one who knows where they have come from or gone to. In any case, those people have all disappeared from the world. There is little difference between a mayfly that passes away after a day and man who passes away after seventy or eighty years. From the universe’s point of view, man disappears after a fleeting, meaningless life. And only man dies holding onto all the stories from his life. When one looks back on those stories after much time has passed, it is all meaningless. When the Creator created man, he created man to resemble himself but man made his own self-centered world by copying what is in the Creator’s world. This enabled civilization to progress but man lost his original nature and lived selfishly.
Man’s greed led to the accelerated population of the world. When the world is populated to capacity, the Creator will come to the world to save man. If mankind had lived without greed, they would have died out naturally. Human life, like the life of a mayfly, is meaningless but it is the will of the Creator to harvest man when the human population is at its densest – that is, to save people when there are as many people living in the world as possible. Now is the time of the harvest. Instead of dying full of regrets and resentment, man should live forever in the land of God by becoming one with the mind of God. The reason and purpose man comes into the world is to live forever.
Dear people who disappear like smoke, without meaning: Just once, think deeply about yourself so that we may go together to live in the eternally living land. There is no meaning in human life; nothing remains from it and everything from it disappears. Now is the time, now – when God, Haneol-nim, Buddha, great compassion and love comes to the world and takes man who would otherwise disappear to the living land of Truth; when man can have the mind of God and be reborn in the mind of God by cleansing his mind; when man can be saved. Is there anything in the world more important than this? This is the reason man comes into the world.
We hope you enjoyed today’s insightful poem by Great Teacher Woo Myung.
Thank you for listening and please show in us next time on Woo Myung Cast where the more you listen to Great Teacher Woo Myung’s writings, the more you gain wisdom. This Woo Myung Cast is sponsored by Maum USA. If you would like to learn more about Great Teacher Woo Myung, please visit Woomyung.org.
