Her stride lengthened. Sweat broke out on her brow. She found she was panting. She forged ahead at a determined pace, her thoughts wrestling with synaesthesia, that blurring confusion of the senses. Synaesthesia, she decided, was an altered state of awareness and not of itself a mystical experience, and therefore belonged to the mundane and not the spiritual. Although she knew that it was the individual’s response to an experience that made it mystical and not the experience itself. A bell might ring a thousand times a day, then someone happens by and has a unique engagement with the bell ring. Light shining through trees, a certain song, anything can trigger a mystical experience in one person on one occasion and never again. Upon repetition, the awe recedes and the exceptional becomes or
