I never did understand his confusing stories, and how everyone around me seemed so delighted and tickled to death to be listening to a self-contented man tell stories that would not make sense to my pet cat, let alone fellow human beings.

It all amounts to this: when Rawat tells a story, the first part's subject matter seems innocuous. But curiously, he's literally SHOUTING his story. Like, sitting on stage, he shouts at the top of his lungs: "A WEED GROWS IN THE DESERT," yelling the sentence three or four times for added effect, as if he was screaming for medical assistance above the trance music to ecstacy addicts at a rave festival.

All of a sudden, he whispers "and it gave shade" at least five times. Then, he says something psuedo-intellectual, like, "so it's like my gift of knowledge, it grows inside you even without water. EVEN WITHOUT WATER!" And the crowd applauds furiously, giving smiles and sighs of relief to each other that this desert weed still lives, even though it had no water to continue its thrilling life.

And, I'm thinking OK, I need to check my pulse. First, I emptied my checking account to travel to Miami and listen to a grown man talk childishly about how groovy it is to fly a plane or sit under shade-producing desert shrubs. It's actually quite simple: most people don't want to know how the food factory makes Chicken Tenders, and most people don't want to know what it's like to fly their commuter plane.

For some weird reason, by gauging everyone's reaction to this man's buffoonery, I felt unusually smarter than the other five thousand other people sitting in that auditorium. No, they can laugh uproariously at his joke about the scary, beefy fellow who was first to accept knowledge in Detroit, but I'm not gonna get suckered into thinking his story was any funnier than a crass internet fat joke. Sure, I drove fifteen hours to be in Miami, so the joke was on me, but I was not about to cave in to bad humour, even if the entire auditorium was rolling in the aisles.

In retrospect, his stories are not supposed to make sense. My wife, who is an active premie, admits that, for the aspirants, the stories are the hook for us fish swimming in the water. But, like the "bucket with holes" story, his tales really aren't supposed to make sense. No, they're intended to dumb us down and suffocate our doubt-makers.