McNeill experienced that after he was drafted into the army in 1941. In boot camp he was taught to march with the other men in his unit. He began to experience strange sensations while marching: “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved.4 A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.”
