I've told the story about
how in the Amazon, when all this stuff was breaking loose,
I went through this period where
very calmly and deeply, and without having any need to tell anyone, I thought,
I came to the opinion
that I was, like, enlightened.
And it was this very low key thing, it was all about appropriate behaviour.
This was the cognitive hallucination that I was having, it was about appropriate behaviour.
And I had this idea: there is an appropriate way to do everything.
And if you do it the appropriate way, no energy will be lost.
And so you become like superconducting,
you become like some kind of super Tai Chi character, where you just do things so niftily
that there's no problem, whether it's plucking a flower or moving a boulder.
And I was told: when you think, sit on the ground. There were all these teachings,
and they were very simple, they were things like
"Sit on the ground, stupid!"
and, uh, you know..
"Use you fingers!"
that was a big teaching
"Use your fingers!"
So one of the things I was into, was:
How you wash the pot,
we had one pot, it was this little enamel pot,
and we would bake it over a fire, and we baked beans, and we baked rice
and all these terrible things that would get scum on the bottom.
and so it was a big deal about drawing lots for who washed the pot.
Well, I discovered, in my enlightened state, that we had been doing it all wrong
and that, if you would go down to the water with the pot,
and take sand,
and pat it, very very lightly in the bottom,
and then say: Please!
that then, all you've had to do was, pour water into the pot and swish it around
and empty it like that, and then when you looked in,
it would be like Drano,
you know, it would be just blinding white.
And I did this, several times, and I thought: How appropriate a miracle this is.
This is a real miracle, I mean, this is just simple stuff,
it's totally Here and Now,
it's absolutely Taoist,
it's completely... you know, on and on.
So then I had a critic in our crowd.
And so, I thought that I would enlighten the critic
by a wordless demonstration of my obvious command of the howling Tao.
So, I invited the critic to accompany me to the river,
and I said: Now, notice that I pick up the sand,
I pat it into the bottom,
I'm not agitating it,
I look into the sky and I say: Please!
And then, I put water in it, and I swish it around...
Voila!
"Is something supposed to happen?"
and I look and the crud adheres.
And then this person says, you know:
"I pity you."
"And I would pity you more but you alarm me."
