April 2005

Chung Pyung - Heaven and Earth Training Center

I will always remember Chung Pyung for the sound of the drums. They are beaten during the hour-long liberation sessions three times a day – early in the morning, at mid-day and in the evening. During these sessions ‘lost’ spirits are sent to the spirit world.

The process is called ‘liberation’ because these spirits had been attached to the participants’ bodies and spirits, resulting in various degrees of negative interference. Thus both the spirits and the ‘carriers’ experience a liberation here.

Tens of thousands of people travel here every month. One reason is to participate in one of the regular liberation workshops. But recently a hospital has been opened. It attracts also non-unificationists, mainly from Korea and Japan.

A school and a university are in planning. A palace is under construction near by, in viewing distance on a small mountain adjacent to the compound.

Dae Mo Nim, the woman that runs the activities there, also calls the place the ‘Restored and Perfected Garden of Eden’. The official name is the ‘Heaven and Earth Training Center’. It is located in a famous Korean tourist region at Chung Pyung Lake, near the border to North Korea.

Sun Myung Moon’s birthday party counted close to 40000 visitors. But these kinds of numbers happen often these days.

Some people see angels here and other spirits. Jesus, Buddha, Confucius are said to come regularly. Not all people see spirits, I don’t. But the place has something fascinating anyway, some attractive quality, beyond the clean air and countryside.

The first time I came here was in 1982. At that time the place was a small workshop center with a lecture hall and sleeping quarters for a small staff. The grounds for the initial workshop center were virtually created ‘out of nothing’. When the Korean movement bought the area, the grounds were under water. Elder members tell the story how they collected rocks from a mountain near by and carried them to a boat. Then they rowed the boat a few hundred meters and dropped the stones into the lake. Then they got the next load, and the next, all day and part of the night, for weeks and months until the first ones reached the surface. Then they built the lecture halls there. In 1982 it was a real nice and quiet place.

I came again in 1997. The place was still nice, lots of countryside, snow at that time, but no longer quiet. At that time these spiritual workshops had started and they had built some large tents up the mountain, showers, laundries, sleeping quarters – all still quite primitive, but with floor heating. The workshop which I attended had just under one thousand participants, cramped into one tent, which was also used for sleeping – from midnight to 5:00 am. Luggage in another tent, cold shower every day, laundry, not bad for the circumstances. Members are used to suffering.

The focus really was on the spiritual side external circumstances were entirely irrelevant. Staff: “It doesn’t matter how you look. Nobody looks at you here.” Still, laundry and showers were tolerated.

Now the externals are quite different. The tents were first replaced by provisional steel constructs that stood for a few years. Today these have been replaced by multi story stone buildings, built to last. The main building is a large hall for major events, equipped with state of the art high tech. It can hold several thousand people, creatively stacked in unification manner. Other buildings have many smaller lecture halls.

There used to be five ‘holy grounds’ – trees where people went to pray. In the beginning people went to every tree several times a day. The first one stands in the center of the main compound, three others further up a hill, a fifth one on the top of a small mountain. Today the main activity has been moved to the Jeong Shim Won Prayer Hall just across the courtyard. But most people still walk up the mountain to the Tree of Blessing to pray. It’s a nice 15 minute no-nonsense walk up-hill.

What’s interesting is that the place doesn’t look like a place of worship. No statues, no religious icons. In the Prayer Hall there is a picture of Dae Mo Nim, the woman who runs the place from the spirit world – through a medium. I didn’t actually notice a picture of Sun Myung Moon.

The Tree of Blessing – the holy ground on top of the mountain – has a view to Chung Pyung Lake in the one direction. In the opposite direction lies the construction site of a palace. Once completed one of its purposes will be to serve as a gateway to the spirit world. An exact copy of it exists over there.  (The spirit world version is actually the original, because spirit is subject and cause.)

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the old man

February 12, 2005: 36000 people

Hospital (top) and Session Halls

Chung Pyung Lake

Palace Construction Site