I was never going to leave. I would never abandon either of you. However, now that we are gathered together, I think we can move on. There are other matters on my mind. Last night we talked about a certain quest. I made a promise. And I mean to keep it. However, I was to clarify certain things…about the quest and what we hope to gain from it. To acquire, to own, and to make a profit are the sacred and unalienable rights of the individual in the age of information. What the sources of property are does not matter; nor does possession impose any obligations on the property owners. The principle is: “Where and how my property was acquired or what I do it is nobody’s business but my own; as long as I do not violate the law, my right is unrestricted and absolute. This kind of property may be called private property (from Latin privare, “to deprive of”), because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private ownership is supposed to be a natural and universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history (including prehistory), and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which economy was not life’s main concern. In an industrial society these are: the wish to acquire property, to keep it, and to increase it, to make a profit, and those who own property are admired and envied as superior beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

 Prior to the end of the First World War, everything one owned was cherished, taken care of, and used to the very limits of its unity, and in modern times people are starting to become a society that likes to hang on to things, keep the same care for six years or more, live in the same house for thirty years or more, and keep the same career for a lifetime. People are also becoming more sincere. They do not polish their egos all the time in order to be a desirable object on the market. They do not protect their image by constantly lying, with or without knowing it; they do not expend their energy in repressing truth, as some used to. And frequently, they impress their elders by their honesty—for their elders secretly admire people who can see or tell the truth. Among them are politically and religiously oriented groups of all shadings, but also many without any particular ideology or doctrine who may say of themselves that they are just searching. While they may not have found themselves, or a goal that gives guidance to the practice of life, they are searching to be themselves instead of having and consuming. Today, millions of people in America and Europe try to find contact with tradition and with teachers who can show them the way. Quite a large number of groups and individuals are moving in the direction of being, and they represent a new trend transcending the having orientation of the majority, and they are historically significant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

It will not be the first time in history that a minority indicates the course that historical development will take. The existence of this minority gives hope for the general change in attitude from having to being. This hope is all the more real since some of the factors that made it possible for these new attitudes to emerge are historical changes that can hardly be revered: the breakdown of patriarchal supremacy over women and of parents’ domination of the young. The life pilgrimage of the human being requires developing the capacity to love outwardly and creating independently. This is no simple job to be initiated by a sudden resolution and performed in one great burst of freedom, nor is it accomplished by one big blow-up against one’s parent. Actually in real life it is a matter of long, uphill growth to new levels of integration—growth meaning not automatic process but re-education, finding new insights, making self-conscious decisions, and throughout being willing to face occasional or frequent bitter struggles. A person in psychotherapy often must work through one’s patterns for months to discover how much one has been tied without knowing it, and to see time and again that this enchainment underlies one’s inability to love, to wok, or to marry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

One then finds that the struggle to become a person in one’s own right often brings considerable anxiety and occasionally some actual terror. It is not surprising that those who are fighting to break such chains go through terrific emotional upsets and conflicts, and sometimes experience temporary madness. The conflict is in essence that of moving out from a protected, familiar place into new independence, from support to temporary isolation, while at the same time one feels one’s own anxiety and powerlessness. The struggle takes a severe (that is, neurotic) form when the individual has been unable to grow at previous stages in one’s development; thus neurotic conflicts have grown, and the eventual break is more traumatic and radical. The child must face and adjust to, by hook or crook, the World one is born into. However gradually in anyone’s development the authoritarian problem becomes internalized: the growing person takes over the rules and plants them in oneself; and one tends to act all one’s life as though one still were fighting the original forces which would enslave the individual. However, it now has become in internal conflict. Fortunately, there is a happy moral in this point: since the person has taken over the suppressive forces and keeps them going in oneself, one also has in oneself the power to get over them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

For adults, then, who are engaged in rediscovering themselves, the battle is centrally an internal one. The struggle to become a person takes place within the person oneself. None of us can avoid taking a stand against exploitative persons or external forces in the environment, to be sure, but the crucial psychological battle we must wage is that against our own dependent needs, and our anxiety and guilt feelings which will arise as we move toward freedom. The basic conflict, in fine, is between that part of the person which seeks growth, expansion and health against the part which longs to remain on an immature level, tied still to the psychological umbilical cord and receiving the pseudo-protection and pampering of the parent in exchange for independence. Intentionality is shown in the act itself. By my act I reveal myself, rather than by looking at myself. The imputation that is correlated with intentionality is not a speculative matter, but an act which, because it always involves responding, is responsible. Since the apostle Paul was attacked because of his doctrine that faith in divine forgiveness and not human action makes mortals acceptable to God, the question of faith in relation to love and action has been asked and answered in many ways. The question and answer mean something quite different if faith is understood as the belief in things without evidence or if faith is understood as the state of being ultimately concerned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

In the first case, it is natural to deny any direct dependence of love and action on faith; in the second case, love and action are implied in faith and cannot be separated from it. In spite of all distortions in the interpretation of faith, the latter is the classical doctrine however inadequately it was expressed. One is ultimately concerned only about something to which one essentially belongs and from which one is existentially separated. There is no faith, we have seen, in the quiet vision of God. However, there is infinite concern about the possibility of reaching such quiet vision. It presupposed the reunion of the separated; the drive toward the reunion of the separated is love. The concern of faith is identical with the desire of love: reunion with that to which one belongs and from which one is estranged. In the great commandment of the Old Testament, confirmed by Jesus, the object of ultimate concern, and the object of unconditional love, is God. From this is derived the love of what is God’s, represented by both the neighbor and oneself. Therefore, it is the fear of God and the love of Christ which, in the whole Biblical literature, determines the behavior toward other human beings. The consciousness of ultimate identity in the One makes identification with all beings possible and necessary. This is not the Biblical concept of love, which is person-centered, but it is love in the sense of the desire for reunion with that which one belongs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

In both types of faith, love and action are not commended as something external to faith (as it would be if faith were less than ultimate concern) but are elements of the concern itself. The separation of faith and love is always the consequence of a deterioration of religion. Is there a such thing as love without faith? There is certainly love without the acceptance of doctrines; history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines. Faith as a set of passionately accepted and defended doctrines does not produce acts of love. However, faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the separated. The question, however, remains whether or not love is possible without faith. Can a mortal love who has no ultimate concern? This is the right form of the question. The answer, of course, is that there is no human being without an ultimate concern and, in this sense, without faith. Love is present, even if hidden, in a human being; for every human being is longing for union with the content of one’s ultimate concern. As in faith, emotion is connected with the experience of love. However, this does not make love itself an emotion. Love is the power in the ground of everything that is, driving it beyond itself toward reunion with the other one and ultimately with the ground itself from which it is separated. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7