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It was a pretty packed carriage - not summer evening rush hour veal-crate packed,

but pretty full all the same, and somewhere along the Piccadilly line between I think Hyde Park Corner and Green Park, or at least one of the longer stretches of inter-station track, something funny happened.

Everyone in the carriage got the sudden sensation that we were going slightly too fast. It wasn¹t like we were hurtling out of control, but there was the odd feeling we were just that little bit over the tunnel speed limit that meant we weren¹t going to slow down for Green Park but were going to carry on up the track, at the same just-too-fast speed or possibly even faster, the possibly unconscious driver leaning on the accelerator, until we jumped the tracks or went through the barriers all the way along the line at Upminster. And I say everyone because I felt it and I know the rest of the carriage felt it - and on top of that I know that they know that I felt it, and so on. There was a tension in the air - nobody spoke, just looked straight ahead or glanced towards each other - and, just there, there was this tacit, spiritual connection between us.

If I may be so presumptuous, I¹d say that like many people my age, with my education, social background and general lack of respect for anything over thirty years old, I have a deep distrust of words like 'spiritual'. I don't believe in a God, and have no time for any kind of organised religion. Be they Anglican, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic, Wiccan, Moonie, Seventh Day Adventist or Mormon (yeah, they came round my house too), their very prevalence is a turn-off. Modern religion places much stress on uniformity and mass homogeny - exactly the sort of things my precious fin-de-siecle yoof culture fears most. Similarly, my knowledge of science and my own reasoning about the world around me leads me to distrust any weirdy-beardy New Age notions of spiritual connection. But 'spiritual' is exactly the kind of word that springs to mind when I think of that experience underground, and saying to my peers that I had a spiritual experience is akin to saying I was abducted by male people of small stature and a greenish hue.

So, to reconcile these two and make some sort of point out of it - because, to force another conclusion, my culturing also dictates I should draw a little lesson from all of this - what place does spirituality have in a modern world of Waco and Littleton, science and faith, Prozac and Viagra, leisurewear and matching luggage? My experience on the tube was not 'spiritual' in the old sense of a personal communion with a higher power, but it was significant because I connected on a new and interesting level with people I didn't know. We were connected because, as completely different people, utterly unknown to each other, who would spend all off ten minutes out of 75 or so years in the company of one another, we shared a single thought. No matter that this thought was: "The train is going too fast", or it's mildly panicky follow-up: "We're all going to die", a modern definition of spirituality can be found in our physical, social, and intellectual interactions with other people. Whether in Real Life or over the electronic wavebands, the buzzword of the last ten years and the aim of the next is communication; communicating with ourselves, with our families, with our next door neighbours, and with the world at large. And that is a modern spiritual experience.

The train began to slow, oh, all of twenty seconds after we started to feel weird, and we slowed into Green Park. We didn't die, though we did feel just a little bit silly. All of us.

Copyright © 1999 James Bridle