What must happen in order not to die like a dirty dog as Gurdjieff warned? How do I get “behind” the dream? (for context, please re-visit last week’s post, Living the Dream.)
The first thing that has come to me, is the weighty realization that this question is very personal. Quote me all the Gurdjieff and J.G. Bennett you like, the only thing that’s going to matter to me, at my end, is what matters to me. What I’m hoping will matter will be a conscious death with no regrets.
What Gurdjieff’s declamation about dying like a dirty dog points to for me, is that the time to prepare for a conscious death with no regrets is now.
Those of us who are “searching,” who are on a path, may feel a pull towards answering a call. To figure out what I am here to do in this life. Maybe that’s what Gurdjieff meant when he said we must have an Aim. Once I identify my aim, can I fulfill it? I liken this to discharging Being Partkdolg Duty which is a pretty tall order, taken in Gurdjieff’s context. But the experience I talked about last week brought me up short. It made me think in terms of the context of my own life, here and now.
Aim Not To Die Like Dirty Dog
For instance, this blog grew out of attaining a life-long aim. That of writing a book, Real People, and becoming a writer. Yet I still have the rest of my life in front of me. What else do I have a deep connection with and need to address?
Possibly something to do with my 50-year relationship with my husband. Sometimes I’ve sensed we were sister and brother in another lifetime. If so, why have we been brought together again? What is it that needs to be worked out between us in this go-round? There’s something to learn here, and I believe it entails conscious labor and intentional suffering.
None of which can affectively happen unless I find a way to work consciously, “behind the façade” of my usual dream-like and reactional awareness. Enter “the integration of thought, feeling and sensation” as Anthony Blake succinctly put it. All of which has the earmarks of Work that I know how to approach through J.G. Bennett’s decision exercise. Which may be the very key to preparing myself not to die like a dirty dog.
…to be continued
I’ve often wondered why G used the comparison “dirty dog.” And then the aphorism “love animals first.” I suppose he meant those creatures sadly scavenging among garbage, carriers of diseases they know not what, unconscious they might infect others cos they’re so driven by instinct and instinct alone.
Still sad to see the fall of any helpless creature.
We can abide in the confidence that the efforts toward “the integration of thought, feeling and sensation” are cumulative. Few of us know the hour of our death and how often we forget how precious this life is we’ve been granted.
Mercy and Love go hand in hand. Sometimes we can feed that dirty dog and maybe it’ll clean up its act in time.
That’s the Hope! – thanks for your comment.
The post from James gathers my thoughts and feelings about the “dirty dog” phrase Gurdjieff used. I have been with 3 dogs when they died. Leila had cancer. Harald Harfoot died trying to herd the Waste Management truck, after leaping the fence that was supposed to protect him from traffic on Washington Street in Harpers Ferry. Koi Ji, Bill Goldstick’s Lhasa Apso that we adopted so that Bill could have a peaceful death himself, had a tumor in his ear.
I will always remember Harry’s death. My neighbor, Mike, alerted me that he had been hit. He was lying
on the kerb near the house. I sat down on the kerb and took his head in my lap. He looked up at me, closed his eyes, and breathed out. He did not breathe in again.
I said to Mike, “I hope that when the time comes, it is possible for me to let go like that.” Mike agreed, and carried Harry to the back yard for me. When John Henry came back, he buried Harry beneath the redbud tree. It was a good death, or, at least, so it appeared to me.
I have been with two people when they.died, and many people when they were very close to death. One death was grotesque, the other, at least to my eyes, very like Harry’s. I have always assumed—and may be wrong—that Gurdjieff’s phrase was either culturally based, (people in far Eastern Europe and Central Asia do not have a warm regard for dogs unless they are working animals) or intended to evoke reactions or shocks in us, to make us consider what sort of death we wish to have.
Thank you for your post, and for making me think again about death. A year ago, about to have a dangerous operation that, with a less skilled surgeon, could have resulted in death, it came to me that I had had a wonderful life, and that my best approach to the mystery before me was gratitude.
I still feel that way. Now, if I can learn before I fall off the perch, to stop arguing with my husband…