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inside Paris’s towering, echoing, Notre Dame Cathedral, hearing Latin chants in the dank sweet smell of old church and chained, swinging canisters of smoking incense as the pipe organ roared? Those realities that George Berkeley, the 1721 author of Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, the theist whose name was given to a mostly agnostic Northern California city, saw as grounded in the spirituality of God’s infinite mind and broadcast as universal ideas through our derivative, finite minds. Rational religion and mystical religion joined in faith by the presence of implicit and universal mathematical structure | spent about two years at a mathematics institute in France, Institute des Hautes Etudes, IHES, sitting at the guru feet of the mathematical great and metaphysician, Rene Thom. His mathematical pallet was breathtakingly broad, a taste of what in past centuries was called natural philosophy and what seemed to me to be about the unapologetic geometrization of the Intuitive God of the Mind. Natalie Angiers, erstwhile mathematician, now reporter and atheistic hard ass, writing in the New York Times, called Thom’s ideas the talk of “...an Emperor without clothes...” The Kantian theme of the personal a priori status of an intuitive geometry, an already in us representation of all that’s out there, was implicit in his Catastrophe Theory research program and was published first in his classical Structural Stability of Morphogenesis (1977) and made more overt in his later (1990) Semiophysics. To get a feeling for the rational-logical versus mystical-intuitive spiritual issue in a mathematical context, consider the following: most of us remember the struggle to unify the strange and difficult cognitive duality of the high school geometry experience. On one hand, shapes and their relations and rearrangements could be intuitively grasped, even manipulated; on the other hand, we were taught that these mental images and the results of their intuitive transformations were not to be trusted. In mathematics, as in my belief in the fireworks of primary religious experience, seeing is not necessarily believing. In my high school geometry class, what was to be believed was what followed from the proper practice of the tightly organized, Euclidean system of axioms, postulates and the derivative logical 178 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013678