The flame of self, God and not-God, life and death, beauty, and saying goodbye

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            We are like the little flame on the head of a match which, after lighting what becomes an uncontrollable forest fire, can neither believe that we have created the blaze, nor that we are the fire.

            Due to the perceptual limits of the human psyche- which requires the appearance of opposites in order to recognize qualities (i.e. we need darkness in order to know light, warmth to know coldness, evil to know good, etc.)- it is the homogenous ubiquity of God- because God is all in all- which itself makes God imperceptible, for there is no not-God by which God could be ‘known’.

            Just as we fly in planes- one-thousand miles per hour, thirty-five thousand feet above the earth- though we are not flying, so do we live in God without knowing it.

Life is all about little deaths, and huge goodbyes. Let me tell you, I have said some whopp'in goodbyes in my life. I guess we all have. Those little deaths are not so little, for death is death, it is no small con-sequence. And yet everything is cyclic and eternal. Know what I mean? No? Neither do I. That's the bloody beauty of it though- to not know, but to die and be born again always, that's the only way back to Beauty.

When you feel the pain of life right down through to your core, until it grips you and holds you and murders you, that is when you die, and live, and keep going.

When you have perished completely, and nothing remains of your old self, then shall you rise back up again, hoist your sorry carcass along, and prepare again for another death.

You need only learn how to perpetually die- death must become your greatest of talents. For it is only in the individual's personal perfection that beginnings never end; the continual removal of accumulated taint, death upon death, until all that you are is death, that is what it takes to be living.

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These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.