the pinnacles of sainthood.
The following excerpt is from ROOTS AND WINGS: adventures of a spirit on earth, by Jack Haas, "The Kerouac of the new millennium." (FW)
People say that I became old too soon, that I surrendered too early, but that is the view of those accepting a world in which men tear each other to pieces for scraps. I simply stopped caring, and turned away.
By the time I was thirty years old and living in India, I felt like an eighty-five year old man, sitting on his porch, staring off to nowhere, having lost all aspirations to take part in the world.
I guess I fell away from it all too easily, lost my grip or something. What happened, I suppose, is that I could see how everything made by mankind was corruptible, that it was all in a state of chronic crumbling, and it was only through mankind's frantic efforts that things appeared to be well-ordered and in a state of homeostasis, but if you took away society's exhaustive labors for even a single day, the whole unsupported edifice would begin to tumble. And, as I saw it, nothing humans had produced was worth serving nor maintaining, and I was not willing to assist in the demented efforts to uplift and keep replacing the cards as they continued to fall from the house. I preferred to see it crumble. I preferred destruction. I preferred to see the orderly and yet intensely precarious structure fall into ruin, and see then what my fellow humans really were made of. ...
Jack Haas is a wilderness explorer, world traveler, and independent researcher and writer. He is the author of four highly acclaimed books: THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, ROOTS AND WINGS: adventures of a spirit on earth, THE DREAM OF BEING: aphorisms, ideograms, and aislings, and IN, AND OF: memoirs of a mystic journey.
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