Capitulation, decapitation, God, the drunk and sober mystery of life, and freedom

***

That essential capitulation, or decapitation, or crowning release came unswervingly, for I, God-blessed and blubbering, had been healed by rupturing mentally; I could not believe it. It? Life? Me? I? Good god, the impossibility of it all! I did not understand a thing. Not a thing. Whatever, and whyever, and whoever it is that we are? I did not know. Man, let me tell you, I flew up and fell, and was blown away in the breeze.

And so I wonder if there others habitually compelled by the mysteriousness of being as much as me? Are there others abandoned on this earth as impossibly as this?

Oh, it is all too sad and beautiful. I had walked amongst the scorching flames of hell, and was charred clean through, and then I came out bright and flying.

I dwell much more comfortably now in the perplexity, in the genuine obviousness of non‑discrimination.

I have found what cannot be confirmed; I have discovered lostness, and affirmed an arcane conclusionless conclusion.

            Admittedly, perhaps it was only a brief glimpse of the eternal above from the ephemeral below, but that moment- when I saw right through into the mystery of life- made me the craziest of all. Yet

I had entered again into a territory without a map; like coming upon an unknown wildland inside of me, in a millisecond of absolute forgetfulness, everything had been altered and yet it all remained completely the same. One moment I was me, existing somewhere, somehow, as somebody, and then, just like as if there was a mutiny within me, I came to, gaping and wide. And I smiled without smiling, wept without weeping, and gasped without taking a breath, for I realized that, once again …I knew nothing, nothing of anything, of the world, of myself, or of meaning, which made me ponder whether I- like the worn-out and disheveled seers of old, wandering aimlessly about, ruined by their half-baked visions- whether I would also fall helplessly away from all understanding and life, and whether I would also go on, and on, and on, as drunk as the ether ...and sober as the sun.

And in that state I recognized that whatever divorced me from the intimacy of my own strangeness, from the incontestable wonder of what is; whatever bound me into knowing; whatever rescinded my mind’s colossal absences‑ of incomprehension comprehending itself; whatever thieved those alien, incorruptible distances; whatever a-mused me ...that is what I abhorred.

Discharged from life’s pendulous invalidations, I have unseen, have disproved all things, and have found not‑finding. For I lost and found everything in the cataclysm of lucid ignorance. I woke up, yes, but I woke up in darkness, like one who wakes in the night, in a foreign place, and then stumbles about not knowing where he is, what he is doing there, not even who he is that is there.

I became free because I had again learned how to forget, how to unknow, how to see everything as if I had never seen it before, and so I broke through the knowledge by which I was tethered to this world.

I did not, at the outset, realize that the world became astounding only when I had ceased to understand it, but now I gravitated easily, in fact unavoidably, towards gratitude ...by not knowing what I am.

I had only just begun to find the configurations necessary for my life, in order that I could properly not understand it. For it is in the simplest of affirmations, in the least of concepts, that I lose my new non-self, and thus lose unfathomableness.

I therefore seek to not understand, but to live in the magical grace of the day. I do not writhe ecstatically from conventional euphorias; it is only when I forget what everybody else says life is, or is supposed to be, that it all becomes the crazy miracle it always has been and cannot help but be. I am amazed that myself and everything is. And I am amazed that others are not so amazed; I am astonished by the lack of astonishment.

***

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