Creator and creation, the ego, God, shame, failure, and pain

***

            I found, to my consternation, that you have to take the lessons as they come, and not expect that what was right at one point in your life is necessarily correct in another. It is strange how contradictory the path upward is at times, strange how all the rules are thrown out the window once one walks out of the house.

Then I knew what it meant to 'fall into being', to divide the Creator from the Creation, to trap the self on the other side.

             For all egos have this stupendous image of themselves which convey the fabulous deceit suggesting that they are exactly who they have chosen to be, that they are the masters of their own lives and destinies and independent of external fluctuations and abnormalities, and the egos will live within these well protected, and well appointed closets, carrying themselves around all the while projecting out such precarious images,

            I came to understand why people- including myself- would do anything they could to avoid turning to God within, to their own most inward self; because to turn to God is to turn away from the world, and that is too much to ask of most people who, like addicts seeking another fix, run towards whatever distraction will take them away from themselves- away from the knowledge that they, and they alone, are responsible for their lives, for all of its losses, and shame, and failure, and pain, and rare is the person who can bear the grievous and glorious truth of that realization.

            Most people will do anything but lose the right to blame another for their station- and an external God has been the best of all scapegoats; better to continue to suffer, and hate, and worry, and toil, than to have to fess up to the one thing most of us have spent our whole lives avoiding- accountability.

***

These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.