I’m thinking of Xenon, who could walk into any temple, any House of God, any ashram or Holy Site, hermitage or what have you and teach what the various visiting worshipping seekers under the varying systems of belief would understand in their variously parochial way as the Word of God. ‘Truth is one,’ goes the old saw, ‘the sages call it by many names.’

When you’re at the hub it is all the same. You become the still point around which IT all revolves. Would you preach a particular Word of God? Study the make up of that particular spoke. Here’s one of wood and there’s extruded steel or polished aluminum or some sort of new-agey carbon composite. All merely conduits away from the centre, supporting the periphery if you will.

Anyway, I’m thinking how someone such as Xenon need first be slotted into an accepted, ‘traditional’ mode of belief in order to be ‘understood.’ And then I’m thinking of him as he is, quietly and unobtrusively going about his way in the back room of the Omphalos Cafe, content not to be slotted, even when he is fully aware of how uncomfortable his teaching—his almost unspoken tutelage, his intense querying mentorship— leaves the vast majority of people who stumble inadvertently into his little sanctuary.

That’s because we picture wise men—’Holy’ men—clad in robes. We typically imagine such a man as seated cross legged, hidden away in a sacred grove-like retreat somewhere in India or Tibet, one which we can access if only we pay a certain monetary token of our esteem and do a menial task or two in order to be instructed in humility.

It’s a cliche, trite and hollow as cliches are wont to be. A cliche that serves a purpose though, relieving us of something… a responsibility….

Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse? The West, you and I and all our civilization has achieved, has yet to give full and complete utterance to our unique and particular perspective on Life, what might be called our spiritually relativistic outlook.

But the day is coming.

Already voices have arisen. Tentative at first, but increasingly assured….

Life is ALL there is!