The world, spirit and flesh, a war, truth, the stream of life, an icebreaker, semiotics, and effort

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Now I am looking out at the world, and the world is looking in at me, and there is no tortured difference; they are the same thing, only different. Strange that. Very strange.

It is the war of the spirit in the no-man's-land of the flesh.

For truth lies not in the context of living, but in the hidden secrets of life itself. It is the sublime vigor, the vitality, the force, the spirit behind, above, and beneath all occurrence which is the real, and not the show- in which a person grows or negates himself- which parades itself before us;

The stream, as it is said, goes through you. You are the stream, the shore, the water, and more. You're the only One. You're all of it. There is no other. You are the Source of all things. You are Freedom, and you are Love, and life is a gathering of angels.

I also fear that everything I have written is completely wrong, but I am done now with the business of thinking, and the misery of words; I no longer belong to this entourage of semiotic fallacies; words cannot repair the world, they can only impair it.

Like an icebreaker in open water.

If you sit preaching to a hen about how to lay an egg, you'll soon enough get your eyes pecked out. And you'll go without breakfast to boot

You see, when all the wars inside of me were over, as I so poorly described in the preceding pages, and yet I was still alive, still conscious, still strong and ready for a fight- that is when I stumbled into 'no effort' like a weary soldier rushing into an infinite battle, for which he belongs to neither side. I came upon a neutrality to being; I was not attacked, nor did I oppose. But then neither could I leave; I could not be indifferent to what was indifferent to me. For now I was the only one within the milieu unassailed, and free to offer succor.          

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These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.