Two Quotes That Make Me Laugh… (Now)

  Yesterday I was on a plane to Halifax, where after a three night stay I’ll be boarding a train for a 22 hour ride back to Montreal (in a solo cabin), when I read these lines in a dog-eared copy of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf:   

  “When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads.”—Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

  If anyone around me on that plane could have pried their eyes from their cellphones for a moment they might have wondered why I was laughing. 

  “Oh God,” I chuckled to myself, “that was me!” 

  It is the wild raucous yawp of the contemporary Shaman-Type mired in our Western middle class soulless convention and conformity! 

  Believe me over the years it cost me quite a number of jobs, and sadly in the end my very marriage. And it reminded me of another passage in another early modern classic of literature. 

  “I should put the two quotes side by side in a blog post,” I thought to myself. Unfortunately it would have to wait until I got home because I hadn’t the second book or quote with me. 

  A funny thing happened though. I arrived in Halifax, dropped my bag in the hotel, and went out to explore the town. After strolling the Halifax Harbourwalk from end to end I found a coffee/bookshop (my favourite!) and sat down for tea. Nearby a tall soft looking mutton chopped young fella with a man bun reached up to a shelf and before he could get a firm hold on it a copy of Moby Dick had fallen to the floor. 

  Just what I needed! 

  “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  “Involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses…” Hehehehehe….

  Well, long ago when my hypos got the best of me I didn’t go to sea, I went to land. That is, I hired on and drove truck, preferably through, up and over the mountains. 

  And thankfully I read other Shaman-Types who had gone before, such as the two Herman(n)s, Hesse and Melville….

Equanimity…..

  “Perform your duty with equipoise, oh Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called Yoga.”—Bhagavad Gita

  Now and then I doubt this whole blogging game. I sometimes even ask myself: “What point this posting everyday, casting my polished pearls to…?” 

  No wait, don’t go down that road Jeffy-Boy. 

  It’s all a gift and that is truly the spirit in which the Omphalos Cafe is published. 

  So I had thought to post each and every day for a year, mostly as an exercise in writing, though also as an experiment in seeing what might become of it. Obviously the everyday part has gone by the wayside. Granted I’ll still be doing it, and naturally still believe in the overarching or underlying message, just not every day. 

  Plus I have a whack of travel in store and look forward to taking the Cafe on the road and going global with the Good Words and photos. 

  So let me alter the above Bhagavad quote a tad:

  “Perform your duty with equipoise, oh Omphalos Cafe, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called Yoga.”

  “Such equanimity is called Yoga?”

  What? Yoga is not strictly the limbering up, stretching, competitive contortion gymnastics common today, often to the accompaniment of a soothing lulling pseudo sciento-spirituo word salad? 

  Yoga, according to the Bhagavad Gita, simply the performance of one’s tasks or duties in the equanimity that comes from detachment from results or rewards? 

Aummmm….

  That’s pure Zen. 

A Day Off….

  Yesterday after 110 days of uninterrupted posting I took a day off. It was about time I’d say… and Time I suppose. 

  For a while there I had the idea of seeing what would happen if I posted daily for say a year, and whether or not a readership could be grown without resorting to any sort of social media promotion. 

  However, an obligation to publish something on a daily basis, regardless of objectives, is not what the Omphalos Cafe is about when you get down to it. 

  Besides, who really wants a large readership or following in this day in age anyways? Best remain on the sidelines or in the background free of restraints or responsibility for others. That’s my thinking at any rate.

  In short, this ain’t about followers; it’s about fostering leaders!

  As I’ve said before, the Cafe is a quiet place, a place apart, removed from the hurly-burly hustle and bustle of our frenetic modern world. I picture it as a place certain individuals can retreat to in order to gain perspective in their own lives and in the world at large. It can provide an opportunity to recalibrate and rebalance and perhaps to reassess our stance and place in this ever changing, ever evolving world in which we live. 

  I see it as a sort of matless yoga studio where our psycho-spiritual core is limbered up and stretched, contorted and realigned for a more fluid engagement in Life going forward! Once the session is over you roll your metaphorical mat up and go about your business. But maybe, just maybe, as your training advances and you graduate up through the Omphalos ranks your business will gradually change. 

  Who knows?

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes….!

  “The decisions being made in today’s world that really matter are not being made in Paris, London, Berlin or Rome—as they were a hundred years ago—but in Beijing and Moscow, in Tehran and Riyadh, in Delhi and Islamabad, in Kabul and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, in Ankara, Damascus and Jerusalem. The world’s past has been shaped by what happened along the Silk Roads; so too will its future.”—Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads

  As I’ve said before, I don’t do politics here at the Omphalos Cafe. 

  But I am interested in the Flow of history, where we’ve come from and where our beliefs and our belief systems have come from. Our ‘inner world-scapes’ you might say, how we perceive the world and our place in it. 

  A hundred years ago? Sure, 1926, decisions were being made in Paris, London, Berlin and Rome, but after the insane carnage of the First World War the centre of the political, industrial and financial world was shifting more and more towards Washington and New York. And to the surprise and dismay of a great many Westerners even further west, across the Pacific Ocean to the Far Eastern capital of a small group of islands only recently industrialized off the Eurasian land mass: Tokyo. 

  Now, America industrializing and rapidly reaching out into the world for access to resources and markets in which to sell its products was only to be expected. It was after all Western through and through. 

  But Japan was entirely different. 

  First of all back then in Western eyes—that is white and Christian eyes—all other races on the planet were inferior. Hence planting a standard, whether religious or national, and claiming dominion over land, peoples and available resources was just all part of the ‘white man’s burden.’ And Western men did not hesitate in assuming such an onerous burden, especially when they considered the riches accumulating for themselves and for their country back home. 

  Japan was one of the first non-white nations to recognize the game being played for what it was and resolved to join the party. In doing so, first as a militarized Western-like Empire and then after catastrophic defeat in the Second World War as an industrial and technological trading colossus, it became an example for all other aspiring non-Western nations across the globe.

  So now eighty conflict ridden years after the Second World War wrapped up the world has radically evolved. 

  Frankopan in his The Silk Roads and The New Silk Roads is right: the decisions today that really matter are being made in cities across the vast Eurasian land mass lying between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific. 

  But what he failed to mention was that two more cities were joining Paris and London, Berlin and Rome in ever so gradually being partially or wholly left behind by the current of contemporary world affairs: 

  Washington and New York. 

  Maybe in the long run that is a good thing…

  For in the grand scheme of things…

  There is a Oneness and Unity to All….

The Vocation….

  “The old god is dead, with his little world and his little, closed society. The new formal center of belief and trust is mankind. And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each—as it was mythologically in God—to master the principle of hate, the Waste Land alone can be our destiny and the masters of the world its fiends.”—Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology

  The old god may be dead, but the world that took shape around his conception and belief remains with us to this day. 

  Western science, born of a millennia of inquiry, an inquiry that was prohibited from delving into anything pertaining to Life—for that was the exclusive domain of God and his Christian Apostolic Church—prevails across the globe today. 

  However, science alone as many have warned, unharnessed to a spirit of love and compassion for our fellow human beings, and leaving Life itself out of the picture, threatens our world with the prospect of becoming Campbell’s fiend-ruled Waste Land.

  Today that science, embraced by the majority of peoples around the world successfully clamouring for a foothold in the First World, has partially pried open the doors of all those heretofore ‘closed societies.’ But inwardly, where Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity reside, not to mention the innumerable nationalisms, the doors of societies largely remain firmly closed. 

  And this is where my simple modest attendance here in the Omphalos Cafe comes in. For these days when the conversation turns to the challenges facing humanity and the many conflicts raging across the globe I typically fall silent. “What point seeking and discussing solutions,” I ask myself, “when it is WE who need to reform? When it is WE who need open our hearts to a wider and deeper INWARD realization of our Oneness with all?”

  “And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each…” writes Campbell. 

  I say it can! 

  But it is a longer process than people would have us think. First we need become humble again. Next we need foster and nurture a certain type, the Shaman-Type. For he is the mythological awakener! And this isn’t a one or two year course. It is a lifelong commitment, a calling—from the gods if you will—a vocation. Then comes the apprenticeship, the learning of what has come before and an understanding of where we are at today and how we got here. 

  It may even be a multi-generational process…

  Best get going then…

  Don’t you think?