Freedom, school, the body, an alien, joy, understanding, an angel, and a fool

***

Like the cageless wind- unbound, directionless, going, and then gone-  I was free. I owned nothing, I lived nowhere, I felt naught.

And yet I was unfree, for I was born, and raised, and mangled in our schools like everyone else. But I, for one, ...I never belonged.

I am not inside the Body, the Body is inside me. There is no witness, there only is.

When I realized that I was only a visitor, an alien to this bizarre world, life suddenly became more marvelous, more unbelievable, more joyful, more absurd.

I have no understanding of life, and no plans on how to live it. I have learned nothing practical about being, but have only become more lucidly befuddled. And yet I have come far enough along this journey to now move with ease and diligence, though I know not where I am, nor where it is all going. I am life, that is enough. An angel walks ahead of me yelling to all that is manifest "Move aside, out of the way, a fool is coming through!" Mercy and nothing but, that is what gets me through.

When finally I saw through the eyes of pure ignorance, I realized I was not in the mystery, but that I was the Mystery, then finally I was released and let go.

As I said in the beginning, it was when it all came down and I, so to speak, let it go, that I became honest and breathlessly quiet. I didn't understand a thing. Not a hair or a cosmos. None of it.

It was all over before it began. How strange. How very, very strange.

Like a pilot, trying desperately not to crash into a village, did I direct myself into a singular, brilliant, catastrophic dissolution.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.