The spirit growing, destiny, compost for the gardener, human souls, and spiritual fish

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I realized that to deny myself for another would not help my spirit grow, and if my spirit did not grow I would be incapable of completing my destiny, and would perhaps be forced to return again and again as a lowly worm to this compost heap waiting for a gardener.  

I say this because nothing is more dangerous than to have ideas about what is, and what should be. At times I had to leave it all behind, all of it; better to shiver in the brittle chill of an arctic soul, than be coddled comfortably by the tepid minds of men. 

It seemed that part of my life had congealed into the symbiosis of heaven and earth; as the firmament fell and the ground swelled to meet it, the two waters converged into one. I was at the confluence: the earth fled through me to the spirit, the love shone through me to the stone. And human souls, given open ground to fulfill the essence of their mythical qualities, were transformed through the factory of my hollow nothingness, because I, who had become nobody, right in the howling hurricane of limitless somebodies ...I could take them on, let the world of their sorrow waft through my defenseless void, and then release their souls back out again.

            I had to cast my line down below and wait for a bite, then give a tug and hold on with all my might. That was when the real test came though- how to reel in the lunker without breaking the line, or being pulled down into the water myself. I can say honestly that I caught and lost some. I did my imperfect best to descend and rise, descend and rise, each time taking as many fish up as I could.

            To meet them in the dark of their own separate hell; to die and let them be born within you, each and every one; to live and to die as them, that they might live, and to know that this is not sacrifice;

            To receive their truth, and reflect back their lie.

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These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.