To forget, to be free, following dreams, sin the self, love, and empathy

***

Oh, how to forget? How to be free? How to cease and remain, and begin again as whatever?

As your vision softens from the facts, so shall you see the drama running on behind them. Yea, you will not see heaven, until you see through heavenly eyes.

Lose all thought of destination. Give up all your efforts, and capitulative nonsense. Life will pass like everything else that never passes passes. The chains we have bound ourselves in shall rust away from our tears.

You need only accept being lost and forgotten, and you need to accept that you cannot accept this.

Follow your dreams, because they are your dreams.

If you have not fallen to your knees in rhapsodic, awestruck gratitude, lost from the cares of the day, and broken open into the outside that's inside of you, you have not yet even heard your own name. If you do not know who you are in the sight of heaven, you do not know who you are.

Separation and sin are merely the way I doubt the One who eternally creates me.

The self is nothing but its own absence. Grab hold of it however you try, it will always slip through your hands, for anything you can touch is not it. The fault lies in the grasping.

Love lives at the source.

I came to this understanding through the agony of empathy, because I began to see that what I had suffered- everyone was suffering. And I saw that it was only by holding firmly onto each other that we could make it through this crazy life.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.