And of course once in their lives every Moslem is supposed to make the pilgrimage to the sacred place, from which Islam comes. It is all deeply meaningful, it is deep in the psyche, it is not just a journey you make, it is responding to a deep need in your nature to find God, to find the place of God. In the Bible it says that Jacob laid down and had a vision, and the angels were going up and down, and when he woke up he said, 'God must be in this place'. That is typical, for it became a sacred place where he had his vision. So people are in search of the sacred all the time, and for Roman Catholics I would mention Lourdes, where there was this vision of the Virgin Mary, and millions of people go there year after year.
Extraordinary events take place and for many people it quite often is a sacred place.
It is a centre. And for Catholics today of course, Rome still has this sacred character, though perhaps not to the extent that it had in the past. First then our centre is a place, any place can become sacred, and that is why, again in India, when you build a house, you never finish it without consecrating it. And also you normally relate it to the four sections of space, north, south, east, and west. You relate it to the Cosmos.