Suffering, chastening, God, Hell, blessedness, pain, emptiness, and a phantom limb

***

I recognize two types of suffering: firstly the pain of the outcome of the fall- ie. our horrid separation and abandonement from the heavens, and all the accompanying, malignant manifestations of that error, and secondly, what would be called chastening, the suffering imposed upon us by God, in order to extricate us from the first suffering.

Only in hell is pain the route to god.

Blessedness is twofold: the graced ability to recognize acausal, spiritual occurrences within and without manifestation, and the grace to have those acausal happenings lead one toward, not away from, oneself, and thus towards god.

It is our perspective which makes us state perspectives like “the sun is setting”, when actually it isn’t going down, but rather the earth is spinning and we are stuck on a spot soon to be out of the light.

But even that emptiness is not your own; a pit can exist merely because the earth was needed elsewhere. So, in this becoming which never completes itself, if the pain is as real as the absence, then perhaps the self which we call ourselves is simply a metaphysical prosthesis by which we might limp less torturously forward, or back. Perhaps the separate soul is a phantom limb.

***

These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.