Honestly I do not even like using the word ‘shaman.’ The word, like many today, has suffered degradation.

The Shaman, I mean the genuine article—and I’m not talking about the sort of modern day make-believe clown who dons all the cliche feathers and fur paraphernalia, including bear claws, deer heart and skin drum—is he who has gone on his own unique and primal journey. The shaman is he who has left the security and comfort of conventional society behind in order to tap into the deepest sources of Life both within and without us. 

This is where we always fall back on our human predilection to revere the unchanging past. We are comfortable with what we know. We have images in our heads of what our ‘sages’ should look like. We have Indian gurus wearing loin cloths and practicing yoga, Chinese wise men in long wide sleeved robes, conical hats and Fu Manchu moustaches, Japanese sensei wearing Home Depot like carpenter’s bibs, Native American medicine men in beads, feathers and paint, and Siberian shaman in animal skins and carrying a reindeer thigh bone and a skin drum. You get the picture, because we all more or less have these sorts of images in our heads. 

  But the pictures we cling to in our heads are misleading. 

  Again, the shaman is he who has gone on his very own unique and primal journey. Dress does not matter. 

  But here’s the thing, the challenge, both for the potential shaman and for us—because we absolutely require the shaman’s timeless wisdom today in order to regain our balance with regards to both nature and ourselves—is that we all go to the same schools. We are all raised in the same secular rationalistic manner. And those shaman-in-the-bud who are unfortunate enough to attend a religious school are even worse off! 

  The harsh reality is that the shaman individual journey towards Truth, enlightenment, Satori, whatever you want to call it—I simply label it Life—is stupendously difficult today. Unimaginably so. The tradition, and thus the mentoring of young shaman inclined souls, has been completely eradicated. It’s gone. 

  Sure there are individuals today. Many of them. There always will be. But they are utterly on their own and the work and indeed the ordeal involved in sloughing off the programming that has already taken place by the time every one of them has reached their teens is virtually insurmountable.

  Not only must they achieve individuality, but where are the potential shamans to turn to after they have done so? Who is there to guide them today? No one, save between the covers of books. Even then, who is there to point them towards the right books? Because there are right books but there are far more wrong books. 

  So many flounder and come to grief along the way. So many. 

  Why the Omphalos Cafe? 

  I feel a responsibility to open its doors again. 

  Plus it is a great deal of fun.