My grandmother spent endless hours in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes by hand. Although the dishes qualified as ‘a chore’, it is clear to me that a lot more was going on there. Washing dishes by hand, with care, was a kind of meditation or therapy for her. While convenience seems to be a relief, in too many cases we are also losing something that the task replaced once provided. If only we could do with our minds what my grandmother did with the dishes, I suspect we would be happier, calmer, and far better off than we are with ‘the convenience’ of the dishwasher.

I should mention that I long ago discovered that ‘shower thoughts’ are not merely a cliché: when we are in physical contact with water, and, particularly, when we are ‘cleaning ourselves or our dishes’ with water, our consciousness changes dramatically… perhaps more if we become aware of this. I often have reveries during showering or dishwashing that later prove to have been prophetic or exceptionally sensitive to streams of information that ‘most people don’t believe in’. It’s not surprising that people do not believe in what they have not experienced, but it is surprising that our beliefs can directly interfere with or shut down senses that are as natural to us as sight or touch, but are simply relegated to the scrap heap of ‘superstitions’.

For me, mindful contact with water radically amplifies a variety of nonordinary sensitivities of the kind that might be referred to, rather crudely, as ‘psychic’.