density, kindling temperature and desperation-induced willing of faith, sweep through the entire woods in a sudden blaze. This is the spirit of percolation. Computer simulations of percolating blazes generate a multiplicity of life times of forest fires near the singularity that represents the transition to a global conflagration. Mentioned previously is Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book about the characteristics of religious experience, Das Heilige, The Sacred, which described phases in the discontinuous transition from everyday life to the wholly other (ganz andere) reality of the world of the sacred. They include intense, numinous experiences of fearsome. time than the natural and secular which Mircea Eliade called profane. In his 1958 book, Patterns in Comparative Religions, this well-known historian of religion called the revelatory occurrence of sacred reality an hierophany. Eliade’s classic work, The Sacred and the Profane, contrasts the homogenous, spiritually formless and relative world of the profane with the results of passage through spatial and temporal singularities to a place and time that are not of this world. Poincaré said that the brain did not know of absolute space, but rather established a model of it through internal reconstructions of sequential sensory experiences that_accompanied our exploratory movements. Activity generates the world. It was Poincare’s habit to topologize the dynamics of motion in mathematical problems that lacked analytic solutions. In this way, simple algebraic operations replace some of the insoluble problems of the calculus. Eliade’s sacred space defining singularity in the plane that breaks profane homogeneousness, a center point that is no longer a circle, can be viewed also as Poincaré’s topological center. ‘eal physical movements around Such Singular fixed poinS. The operational object called groups defines this kind of algebraic, mathematical structure and motion. 133 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013633