In his essay "Notes for a Study Day with the Bishop of Oxford", from his book *Daemon Voices*, Philip Pullman describes his experience of spirituality: > The sense that the whole universe is alive, not just inanimate, but alive and conscious of meaning, is one that I’ve felt on two or three occasions, and they made such a deep impression on me that I shall never forget them. One happened during a stormy late afternoon on the coast of north Wales, where I grew up as a teenager. Another happened on a winter evening in London when I was in my middle twenties, just coming home to our flat in Barnes from the library in Charing Cross Road where I worked. I’ve never taken any drug stronger than alcohol or cannabis, and not much of that, so I can’t compare it to a drug-induced trance; and there was nothing trance-like about it – I was intensely and ecstatically awake, if anything. I just saw connections between things, similarities, parallels; it was like rhyme, but instead of sounds rhyming, it was meanings that rhymed, and there were endless series of them, and they went on for ever in every direction. The whole universe was connected by lines and chains and fields of meaning, and I was part of it. It lasted about half an hour in each case and then faded. I’ve hardly ever talked about it, because it seems like something whose significance is private. --- Related: [[Bonitta Roy on animism]]