The family is sacred to the ultimate concern and is the most important social unit in time and eternity. The ultimate cause established families to bring happiness to its creations, allowing them to learn correct principles in a loving atmosphere, and prepare them for eternal life. The home is the best place to teach, learn, and apply virtuous principles. It is where individual learn to provide love, food, clothing, respect, shelter, security and other necessities they require. The mother and father, as equal partners, should help each family member. However, sometimes things do not go as planned. Because we live in a World with many influences, people may become criminals. Men and women can both become involved in crime. When it comes to burglaries, for the females who worked as partners, this could involve a variety of tasks. Many of these tasks were indistinguishable from those traditionally associated with men, such as gaining entry, searching the house, carrying goods outside, and disposing of them. The following interview segment describes some of the tasks performed by a female acting as a partner. Although this was her first offense, she heled to find the transportation to reach the target (by stealing a truck) and took part in the actual break in: “Well, it wasn’t up on me, somebody else who was in there different, not state, in a different county. He just came up and told me he knew about it, a rich guy that was gonna be gone for the weekend. He knew this person, knew who it was, and he knew about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

“When he left that night about two or three in the morning, we went down there. We had stolen a truck, we had stolen my ex-boyfriend’s father’s truck, went down there. We tried to get in, but we couldn’t get in. Everything was locked. Right…We couldn’t get in for nothing, so what we does was, we had some sh*t in back of the truck and we took some tape. Then we put it over the window real tight, then we busted it, and then we took the tape down and the window was shattered. It had no window in it. So—everybody used gloves of course—so we went in there, you know, and we knew when we went, we knew nobody was gonna be home. There wasn’t a house around for two blocks, each way you went. So…my first one was basically the easiest one.” The target often was located by a female partner, who also took the lead in planning the offense. In these cases the women had a substantial say in determining how the proceeds of the crime were divided: “…whatever you chose to give to the other person. We tried to split everything equally. We were all good friends, you know, so I got the best deal out of it because of the fact that I needed the money more than everybody else. Me and my sister needed the money more than everybody did and…we were the ones that said hey, we pointed it out, we found a way to get in, we knew where everything was, we told them how, we had everything planned out down to the TV. This is where this is at and this is where this is at.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

The roles played by female burglars are dynamic and can chance over time. Many of the women who currently participate in offenses as partners started out as accomplices. The woman quoted below clearly has an equal relationship with her co-offender, but this was not always the case: “The first burglary I ever committed, I was in the house and I was smoking weed at the time. A friend came in and said ‘I want to go in this house.’ I said ‘Okay, it was around the corner….what part am I going to play?’ He says ‘All you got to do is watch the doors for me. The bags I bring down, take them out, and you also drive the car for me.’” As should be obvious from above, women who work as accomplices in burglary play much more limited roles. They seldom participate in planning the crime, and often do not even enter the dwelling. Some claimed to prefer working with others because they lacked the skills needed to be a successful burglar: “I can’t do all by myself…I haven’t mastered that yet.” Others simply felt more comfortable when relying on a colleague’s expertise; they were uncertain about their ability to work alone. In the following case, a woman reports that she deferred to her boyfriend’s judgment in determining the suitability of a given target. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

“He can look at them and tell. He’s better at it than me. Sometimes I give him tips to go on, but he checks them out. I feel safer for him to check them out.” A common work assignment for accomplices was acting as a lookout or driver. Several of the women stated that driving was their primary job in burglaries: “Well, see, me and my boyfriend had been together for a year, and he done them all the time. Well, not all the time, but it was no big deal, and all I had to do, all I ever do, is drive. I just go like he’ll go, him and his friend. He don’t do ‘em every week or anything like that. Like it’s not really ‘cause we need the money or anything either. Like he’ll go during the day and he’ll look at a house and he’ll find one, and then he’ll tell me about where the house is…all I have to do is drive to the place and wait for them to start bringing out the stuff, and then drive off.” Other said that they typically kept a lookout for their colleagues: “They came and picked me up with a stolen automobile. I didn’t know that it was stolen. We went out there to this house and they got out. I just assumed—I didn’t know what was going on at first. We got out and they went in first, and then they came back out. One of the men came back out and told me to come in and to keep an eye out to see if anybody was there or anybody comes down the sidewalk or if anybody drives down the street or anything.” In both of these cases the women, as accomplices, did not choose to perform these secondary tasks. Instead the tasks were assigned to them by a dominant co-offender. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

What light does this quantitative and qualitative information shed on the nature of female criminality? Our sample was not generated randomly; with this fact in mind, the quantitative findings suggest that women involved in residential burglary do not differ significantly from their male counterparts on a number of relevant dimensions (exempli gratia, drug and alcohol use, degree of offense specialization). Nevertheless, the results show that some important differences may exist as well. Compared to the males, for example, the females more often committed burglaries with others, began offending at a later age, and had less contact with the criminal justice system. Further examination of these apparent differences is warranted. The qualitative data demonstrate that women’s involvement in residential burglary is marked by diversity and that the debate about whether women play a primary or a secondary role in the offense is probably a red herring. In fact, as among males, some assume primary roles exclusively, some adopt secondary roles exclusively, and others move from one type of role to another s they become more experienced. This observation has important implications for research into women’s involvement in crimes committed more often by males. To be sure, a much lower percentage of women than of men participate in residential burglary. Even so, our qualitative data reveal substantial similarities be tween males and females. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

This fact suggests that the activities of women who do engage in such offenses may be explained by some of the same factors that explain men’s participation. When it comes to the stole property system (SPS), we must consider the law of supply and demand shape the SPS. This term refers to the loosely formed relationships that bring about the theft of property and the subsequent repackaging and resale of these goods via the “black market.” We use contacts with law enforcement authorities to formulate a revised view of property crime. Instead of viewing burglaries as isolated incidents of theft, we argue that we should conceive of the acts and actors involved as spanning a more broadly defined set of roles and behaviors. They identify the thief, fence, and person who buys the stolen goods as key players in the SPS. They also identify multiple stages in the process: research and planning, extraction, exchange (id est, conversion of the goods to money), marketing, residtribution/resale, and evaluation. Moreover, the roles and behaviors of the various players are said to be interchangeable and flexible. In the end, we reconsider the way that we think about property crime. We become more sensitive to the potential for business concepts such as division of labor, entrepreneurial spirit, supply and demand, and marketing to manifest themselves in the World of property theft. In doing so, we are able to drive home the complexity and fluidity tht can beset property crime events. Moreover, we illustrate how the criminal calculus can lead to mutually beneficial relationships and roles that allow the criminal subculture to expand and innovate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

Perhaps no area of contemporary criminal activity holds more potential for improved understanding and successful intervention through analytical reorientation than does that of property theft. This area of crime is by no means new, a situation which may in fact constitute the greatest barrier to fresh thinking on the subject. Centuries of experience with thefts of property have give us a fairly strong conceptualization of this crime area, a conceptualization which centers almost exclusively on the thief. There is of course nothing illogical or erroneous about a concern for this individual; it is one after all who steals property. What is argued here, however, is that an exclusive concentration of the thief yields a myopic view of the process of theft, a view which draws the boundaries of the crime too tightly around that individual. It is a view which tends therefore to consider each incident of theft as a unique event, determined and constrained by the motivations, needs, and skills of the perpetrator. This “conventional view of theft” (if we can use this phrase) prescribes a response to this crime which largely consists of a fairly sophisticated sorting process, linking one individual (or one group of individuals) with each event as it occurs. Such an “individualistic” approach to crime and criminals is not, of course, confined to the property theft area. For example, we suggest that it is the most prevalent approach to crime in general. Consistently, both the popular and scientific tendency is to view the criminal’s behavior as a problem of individual maladjustment, not as a consequence of his participation in social systems. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

Perhaps it is for this reason that in criminology we have had thousands of studies that have sought some damaging trait in the personalities of individual criminals, but very few studies of the organizational arrangements among criminals who commit crimes in concert. The tendency toward an individualistic interpretation of criminal behavior cannot be laid to the idiosyncrasies of either the public or the scientist, but rather is undoubtedly influenced by the nature of the legal systems, with their concepts of individual responsibility an intent, upon which most democratic societies are based. However, while such an interpretation may conform well to the needs of a legal system, it may have the additional effect of causing us to ignore some important dimensions of contemporary criminal behavior. It is the perspective that property theft is one area of criminal behavior that has sorely suffered both conceptually and practically from a failure to probe the relationships among criminals (and)…the structure and operations of illicit organizations. Perhaps the mot glaring evidence of this failure concerns what the President’s Crime Commission called “little research…done on fencing,” id est, on the criminal receiver of stolen property. This crime figure, although tallying an impressive list of protestations to one’s importance over several centuries has remained little explored, while one’s relationship with the thief has been virtually ignored by the criminologist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

However, if the popular and scientific tendency has been to overlook the fence, the police detective assigned the responsibility of dealing with property theft has not found it possible to do so. Instead, as the authors discovered in the course of an ongoing study of patterns of criminal receiving, police detectives possess a great deal of information about the fence. Other researchers have reported similar experiences. Because the police know about the fence does not imply that one’s activities are either successfully or efficiently interdicted, for the police agency is as influenced by an individualistic approach to crime as is the social scientist. Thus the bulk of enforcement resources and activity against theft is directed to the thief, and the situation in which police effort is devoted directly and exclusively to the fence appears to be rare indeed. The criminal receiver remains a curiosity to the criminal justice system, being infrequently arrested and even less often convicted. The model of property theft employed here—the Stolen Property System—is an operationally based one, derived from the author’s research into patterns of criminal receiving in a large urban area of the northeastern United States of America. As a part of this study, access to police intelligence reports on the activities of burglars and fences has been obtained, as well as records of these activities maintained in a special investigative unit in the office of the district attorney. Now, as burglaries are crimes of economics, this indicates that economics plays a kay factor in our lives. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

China is an economic power house, and it growing production and export power enhances its financial strength as well. This is natural. However, compared to its sensational emergence as a leading manufacturing and trading nation, the process of its ascending to the position of a major financial power is more fragmentary and complicated. China has by far the largest foreign exchange reserves in the World, about three times as large as Japan, which is number two. It is also rapidly emerging as the leading international lender. In contrast, China’s role as a foreign direct and portfolio investor is still considerably smaller than that of America, major European countries, and Japan. For the time being, the story of China’s growing financial clout is, first and foremost, the story of the unprecedented increase of the financial power of the Chinese state. As of the end of 2021, the gross financial assets of China increased 13.6 percent to USD $29,689 billion. That is an increase of USD $25,563 billion since 2010. In December 2022, the reserves of China stood at USD $3,120 billion. The exact composition of China’s foreign exchange reserves is classified information. Foreign direct investment into China totaled $42.5 billion between July and December 2022. That constituted a 73 percent decline on the year. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

China’s net international investment position reached USD $2,531.328 billion in December 2022. As of the year 2022, the United States of America’s net international investment position was USD -$16.12 trillion. The United States of America is currently the World’s largest debtor nation. Thinking about the pre-cybernetic machine—with minor exceptions, state socialism had led not to affluence, equality, and freedom, but to a one-party political system…a massive bureaucracy…heavy-handed secret police…government control of the media…secrecy…and the repression of intellectual and artistic freedom. Setting aside the oceans of spurting blood needed to prop it up, a close look at this system revealed that every one of these elements is not just a way of organizing people, but also—and more profoundly—a particular way of organizing, channeling, and controlling knowledge. A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback, and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel, and commands flowing downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation, since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, above all, about knowledge. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

The overpowering bureaucracy that socialism created in every sphere of life was also, a knowledge-restricting device, forcing knowledge into pre-defined compartments or cubbyholes and restricting communication to “official channels,” while de-legitimating informal communication and organization. The secret police apparatus, state control of the media, the intimidation of intellectuals, and the repression of artistic freedom all represent further attempts to limit and control information flows. In fact, behind each of these elements we find a single obsolete assumption about knowledge: the arrogant belief that those in command—whether of the party or of the state—know what others should know. These features of all the state socialist nations guaranteed economic stupidity and derived from the concept of the precybernetic machines as applied to society and life itself. Second Wave machines—the kind that surrounded Mr. Marx in the 19^th century—for the most part operated without any feedback. Plug in the power, start the motor, and it runs irrespective of what is happening in the outside environment. Third Wave machines, by contrast, are intelligent. They have sensors that such in information from the environment, detect changes, and adapt the operation of the machine accordingly. They are self-regulating. The technological difference is revolutionary. While Mr. Marx, Mr. Engels, Mr. Lenin all bitterly assailed the philosophy of “mechanical materialism,” their own thinking, reflecting their era, remained steeped in certain analogies and assumptions based on pre-intelligent machinery. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

Thus for Marxian socialists the class struggle was the “locomotive of history.” A key task was to capture the “state machine.” And society itself, being machine-like, could be pre-set to deliver abundance and freedom. Mr. Lenin, on capturing control of Russia in 1917, became the supreme mechanic. A brilliant intellectual, Mr. Lenin understood the importance of ideas. However, for him, symbolic production, too—the mind itself—could be programmed. Mr. Marx wrote of freedom, but Lenin, on taking power, undertook to engineer knowledge. Thus he insisted that all art, culture, science, journalism, and symbolic activity in general be placed at the service of a master plan for society. In time the various branches of learning would be neatly organized into an “academy” with fixed bureaucratic departments and ranks, all subject to party and state control. “Cultural workers” would be employed by institutions controlled by a Ministry of Culture. Published and broadcasting would be monopolies of the state. Knowledge, in effect, would be made part of the state machine. This constipated approach to knowledge blocked economic development even in low-level smokestack economies; it is diametrically opposed to the principles needed for economic advance in the age of the computer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

The Third Wave wealth-creation system now spreading also challenges three pillars of the socialist faith. Take the question of property. From the beginning, socialists traced poverty, depression, unemployment, and the other evils of industrialism to private own-unemployment, and the other means of production. The way to solve these ills was for the workers to own the factories—through the state or through collectives. Once this was accomplished, things would be different. No more competitive waste. Completely rational planning. Production for use rather than profit. Intelligent investment to drive the economy forward. The dream of abundance for all would be realized for the first time in history. In the 19^th century, when these ideas were formulated, they seemed to reflect the most advanced scientific knowledge of the time. Marxists, in fact, claimed to have gone beyond fuzzy-headed utopianism and arrived at truly “scientific socialism.” Utopians might dream of self-governing communal villages. Scientific socialists knew that in a developing smokestack society such notions were impractical. Utopians like Charles Fourier looked toward the agrarian past. Scientific socialists looked toward what was then the industrial future. Thus, later on, while socialists regimes experimented with cooperatives, worker-management, communes, and other schemes, state socialism—state ownership of everything from banks to breweries, rolling mills to restaurants—became the dominant form of property through the socialist World. (So complete was this obsession with state ownership that Nicaragua, an imitative latecomer to the socialist World, even created “Lobo Jack,” a state-owned disco). Everywhere, the state, not the workers, thus became the chief beneficiary of socialist revolution. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

 Socialism failed to meet its promise to improve radically the material conditions of life. When living standards fell in the Soviet Union after the revolution, the decline was blamed, with some justification, on the effects of World War I and counterrevolution. Later the shortfalls were blamed on capitalist encirclement. Still later, on World War II. Yet thirty years after the war, staples like coffee and oranges were still in short supply in Moscow. In the period preceding Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika, the diet of a middle-class researcher at a state institute in Moscow was heavily based on cabbage and potatoes. In 1989, four years after the start of Mr. Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, the U.S.S.R. had to import 600 million razor blades and 40 million tubes of shaving cream from abroad. Remarkably, though their number is declining, one still hears orthodox socialists around the World calling for the nationalization of industry and finance. From Brazil and Peru to South Africa and even in the industrialized nations of the West there remain true believers who, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, still regard “public ownership” as “progressive” and resist every effort to de-nationalize or privatize the economy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

It is true that today’s increasingly liberalized global economy, uncritically hailed by the great multinational corporations, is itself unstable and could suffer a massive coronary. The distended debt balloon on which it rests cold be punctured. Wars, sudden interruptions of energy or resources, and any number of other calamities could cause its collapse in the decades ahead. Under catastrophic conditions, one might well imagine the need for temporary emergency nationalizations. Nevertheless, incontrovertible evidence proves that state-owned enterprises mistreat their employees, pollute the air, and abuse the public at least as efficiently as private enterprises. Many have become sink-holes of inefficiency, corruption, and greed. Their failures frequently encourage a vast, seething black market that undermines the very legitimacy of the state. However, worst and most ironic of all, instead of taking the lead in technological advance as promised, nationalized enterprises, as a rule, are almost uniformly reactionary—the most bureaucratic, the slowest to reorganize, the least willing to adapt to changing consumer needs, the most afraid to provide information to the citizens, the last to adopt advanced technology. For more than a century, socialists and defenders of capitalism waged bitter war over public versus private property. Large numbers of men and women literally laid down their lives over this issue. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

What neither side imagined was a new wealth-creation system that would make virtually all their arguments obsolete. Yet this is exactly what happened. It is super-symbolic. It is knowledge. The same knowledge can be used by many people simultaneously to create wealth and to produce still more knowledge. And unlike factories and fields, knowledge is, for all intents, inexhaustible. Neither socialist regimes nor socialists in general have yet come to terms with this truly revolutionary fact. An established firm in an industry stands to gain by keeping out new competition. Then it can raise prices to monopoly levels. Since monopoly is socially harmful, the antitrust authorities try to detect and prosecute firms that employ strategies to deter rivals from entering the business. In 1945, the Aluminum Corporation of America (Alcoa) was convicted of such a practice. An appellate panel of Circuit Court judges found tht Alcoa had consistently installed more refining capacity than was justified by demand. In his opinion, Judge Learned Hand said: “It was not inevitable that it [Alcoa] should always anticipate increases in the demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before other entered the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

This case has been debated at length by scholars of antitrust law and economies. Here we ask you to consider the conceptual basis of the case. How could the construction of excess capacity deter new competitors? What distinguishes this strategy from others? Why might it fail? An established firm wants to convince potential new competitors that the business would not be profitable for them. This basically means that if they entered, the price would be too low to cover their costs. Of course the established firm could simply put out the word that it would fight an unrelenting price war against any newcomers. However, why would the newcomers believe such a verbal threat? After all, a price war is costly to the established firm too. Installing capacity in excess of the needs of current production gives credibility to the established firm’s threat. When such capacity is in place, output can be expanded more quickly and at less extra cost. It remains only to staff the equipment and get the materials; the capital costs have already been incurred and are bygones. A price war can be fought more easily, more inexpensively, and therefore more credibly. This makes sense in the logic of strategy, but will such a device work in practice? There are at least two qualifications that limit its success. First, if there are many firms already in the industry, then discouraging newcomers gives more profit to all of them. Will any one firm bear the costs of capacity when it gets only a part of the benefit? #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

This is a standard prisoners’ dilemma. If one firm is large enough, it may in its own interest provide such a service to the rest of the industry. Otherwise the firms must collude in building capacity; this may be hard to hide from the antitrust authorities. In the Alcoa case, only may not regard the dilemma of whom will install capacity as a serious problem, because Alcoa had a 90 percent share of the primary aluminum ingot market. However—and this is the second qualification—is that the relevant market? Even if there are no other producers of primary ingots, secondary production from scrap is a source of competition. So is Alcoa’s own future production. Many aluminum-based products are highly durable. If Alcoa puts more aluminum on the market in the future, then the values of these durable goods will decrease. If the company cannot credibly guarantee the users that it will restrict its own future, output, they are willing to pay for aluminum now. This is just like IBM’s problem of pricing mainframe computers. The solution of renting is much harder here: you cannot rent aluminum as such; Alcoa would have to extend its operations into all sorts of aluminum-based products. In accordance with the directions of the ultimate concern, and in view of the critical time through which the World is passing, every expression, “view,” or theory which we hold concerning things should now be examine carefully, and brought to the proof, with open and hones desire to know the pure truth of the ultimate concern—as well as every statement that comes to our knowledge from the experience of others, which may throw light upon our own pathway. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

Every criticism—just or unjust—should be humbly received and examined to discover its grounds, apparent or real; and facts concerning the verities from every self-actualized being should be analyzed, independent of their pleasure or pain to us personally—either for our own enlightenment or for our equipment in the service of the ultimate concern. For the knowledge of truth is the first essential for warfare with the lying offenders, and truth must be eagerly sought for and faced with earnest and sincere desire to know it and obey it in the light of God: truth concerning ourselves, discerned by unbiased discrimination; truth from the virtues, uncolored, unstrained, unmutilated, undiluted; truth in facing facts of experience in all members of the hierarchy of self-actualization. Sometimes we are we can be too engrossed in our own internal struggle to intervene and prevent someone else from being hurt, but gradually the fragments and splinters and hurts began to disturb us. We may experience internally the broken moments, shattered dialogues, and cruelty of neutral faces. Here were people committed to the rescuing of “dropouts” and “rejects” from the public school, blatantly ignoring the crucial feelings being expressed. In this room, in the many passing hours and in that moment were people who hungered for a vital, active, listening human presence. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

However, what they get are intellectual arguments and words with little or no feeling. What they get are dead faces and lifeless bodies. Within one is growing an indignation against these denials or elemental human values until at last one’s own existence, one’s own isolation, one’s own desire for a solitary state crumbles away and vanishes. For the first time in weeks, one may experience intense and vital feelings from within, a full response to others. One’s anger mounts at the surface way in which fundamental matters are handled, at the ignoring of potential for intensity and depth, and at people committed to serving abused and rejected children failing to reach out, recognize and affirm each other. It may take one back to another time and place. This may cause of to reflect on the coldness and indifference others have to the personal struggles and feelings, an avoidance of intensity and depth in interactions, an intellectualizing and professionalizing or values and concepts of the ultimate concern. Mystery, spirit, feeling, the human sense, the unspoken and ineffable, the sense of awe and wonder, aesthetic appreciation—all might be missing. What else is the ultimate concern but a willingness to submit to the unknown, to learn from the unseen and intangible what we must fulfil? Where else do powers of life, actions to living in the deepest and fullest sense, come but from felt presences that awaken us to a fuller realization of what it means to be unique and human. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

There will be pronouncements, lineal objectives and goals, definitions, rules, all carefully edited and articulated. We must be concerned with deviance and social injustice, and be aware of the importance of using political and economic powers to being about beneficial social changes. We have to speak about poverty and war, the end of killing and hunger. However, these are devotions to abstractions: for there before us are instances of human suffering, and individuals struggling to rise, and they are being met with indifference, with a refusal or inability to listen and respond. Some may speak glibly of the value of love in enlightenment, but these words do not strengthen and affirm, not support or encourage individuals in their search and struggle. The words are empty. The soul of life dies quickly in the presence of doctrines, rituals, and intellectual reactions. The central concern, the only immediate and intense here-and-now feeling, is a fear of the people who rate us, an incessant anxiety boarding on paranoia that they are being judged in every detail and nuance. Without exception, the fear of being tossed out, or of being put on probation, is paramount. The way to success  is to be silent, to speak in abstractions, to avoid action in any living, breathing terms. They will be startled at one’s indignation, at one’s efforts to arouse genuine caring, interpersonal involvement, and decent human responses. When we examine the sacred of the “is” namely, actual purity, or the present reality of the revered it is the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

The mysterium tremendum et fascinosum is the experience of ‘the ultimate’ in the double sense of that which is the abyss and that which is the ground of man’s being. The mysterium tremendum et fascinosum is the beneficial side of sacredness; it attracts because, as the ground of being, it implies the fulfilment and the beatitude of the creature. The negative side is  the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum which terrifies because, as the abyss of being, it implies an infinite, unbridgeable distance between the finite and the infinite. In the ecstatic experience of revelation one feels both the elevating power of the divine presence and its annihilating power. This is the experience of the actual sacredness of the ultimate concern. A man who has never tried to flee from the ultimate concern has never experienced the ultimate concern that is the ultimate concern. The ultimate concern of our own making, fashioned after the image of man, is easy to live with, but man cannot stand the ultimate concern that is really the ultimate concern. Man tries to evade the ultimate concern, and hates it, because one cannot escape it. The protest against the ultimate concern, the will that there be no ultimate concern, and the flight to nihilism are all genuine elements of profound philosophy. Such is the shaking power of the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. The eyes of the Witness we cannot stand are also the eyes of One of infinite wisdom and supporting benevolence. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

The center of being, in which our own center is involved, is the source of the gracious beauty which we encounter again and again in the stars and mountains, in flowers and animals, in children and mature personalities. The scared can be viewed not only from a phenomenological point of view, but also from an ontological one. The sacred contains the meaning of individuals and of the whole, and is the ground of meaning. It is also the abyss of meaning because it transcends every individual meaning and cannot be fully grasped in any act of meaning. Unconditioned meaning is the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, the abyss and the ground of the meaning of things, not only in so far as they are, but also in so far as they ought to be. Against this ontological background, the sacred is not unperceptible, but it is not objective. The sacred is contemplated not as an object; it I contemplated as transcendent meaning. To be sure, there exist also sacred objects to see them as purity is to grasp through them the meaning of the unconditioned. The sacred is being-itself or the power of being. What is required in the professional sense is the fullness and depth of a truly human commitment to self and others, and the love that connects one man with other men. This love must be allowed to develop because love is immediate and grows out of a willingness to enter into interpersonal dialogue and communication, out of the willingness to permit the unknown in one’ self to connect with the unknown in others. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24