Conscious and unconscious, mystery, souls in hell, a deluge, a voice, and the infinite

***

The unconscious manifests, the conscious perceives. Man is neither conscious nor unconscious, he is both. The one appears as two. You are awake and asleep, whether you are awake or asleep.

The outside looking at the inside looking out.

What is sequential appears continuous.

Better to be bound in the world with your mind fixed longingly on the mystery, than to be bound in the mystery with your mind fixed longingly on the world.

He who would petition for the release of souls from hell, must necessarily go to hell to do it.

The arc before no deluge; one exhausts oneself, building a great ship to sail across a puddle.

Discontentment is the expectation of contentment.

Only impossibility is infinite. And man... man could be infinite, if he could only bear being impossible.

It belongs to the praise and blame of surgeons; a grotesque absolution- a man is disfigured, in order to be saved.

Whose vision would not search, if a man entered a crowd and, rapt, pointed conspicuously upward?

 I, for instance, realized that the voice speaking to me did not know what words it was saying, but I heard everything, and... I understood.

***

These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.