Goals and dreams, surrender and exhaustion, Zen and God

"If you can give up your former knowledge and understanding, thus making your heart open, not keeping anything at all on your mind, so you experience a clear empty solidity where speech and thought do not apply, you will directly merge with the fundamental source, sinking into the infinite, spontaneously attaining inherent wisdom that has no attainment."

Zen Master Yuanwu (Zen Essence, p37)

To revel in the revelation, is to find peace in the capitulation of all undertakings, all talents, all goals, all dreams. It is to recognize that these are at times better fulfilled in their abdication, than in their completion.

"The mind deprived of its obstacle can create no more and nothing is left but... unrelated facts and aimless mind, the burning out that awaits all voluntary effort."

Yeats (A Vision, p189)

Having surrendered knowing by forgetting, the rest is easy- for now that we are made incapable by ignorance, everything that we used to do, or wanted to do, is left null and void- we have burned away all 'that awaits voluntary effort."

"Everything has already been accomplished, and so, having overcome the sickness of effort, one finds oneself in the self-perfected state."

Dzogchen

Exhaustion, capitulation, surrender; to have even the slightest amount of energy left to participate in the lie, is to not have seen it as completely erroneous as it is.

This 'exhaustion' is perhaps the only way that we will finally surrender all our ideas and efforts- when we are worn thin from running after our own tails, chasing our own shadows, and failing over and over again to find comfort, truth, joy, God, or what have you, in the mirage of the world's conceptions. Then perhaps we will come upon what the ancients meant by faith; faith in life- in the fact that we live, and yet know not how it is possible.

In the end we find that only in the non-act of conscious indifference, or passionate ambivalence, is true objectivity possible, because 'want' has dried up, and the eye sees 'what is' without bias or disdain. 

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These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.