to perish like a dog

of course gurdjieff's expression is a put-down, but i was thinking more about it. in particular, i remember someone absurdly suggesting that a child amongst us was the least enlightened of a group! yet while a young child is more awake than most of us can ever hope to muster, s/he is indeed not fully developed.

a dog is not particularly "asleep" either. they are true and intelligent and natural. gurdjieff indicated to someone (somewhere!) that dogs recognize something in man which the dog does not have (even if we don't recognize it!).

on a fourth way forum one participant indicated that gurdjieff said "Without aim, man no better than dog." (i haven't verified that gurdjieff said but don't particularly question it).

i don't know how true it is that dogs are two-centered beings because they certainly are intelligent. but perhaps it is an emotional intelligence. after all, it is hard to imagine a dog acting against what it "thinks" is proper. perhaps that's what the pavlovian experiments were about. humans have perfected the art of separating what feels right and action or thought. if only there were such a thing as an "institute for harmonious development of man" ... but i digress ....

someone once asked gurdjieff if there's anything that survives after death. gurdjieff responded that for the person who faints when they get a paper cut, what could survive death!? dogs probably don't ask those questions.

i once confronted a friend with the assertion, "besides all this theory about suffering and friction, what about emotional pain, what about the experience of it right now, what is it?" he responded, "first of all, it is real. it is not imaginary suffering. but that doesn't have to end with that - we're three-centered beings and our intellect can lead to transformation" - or something like that. along those lines another friend, perhaps saying something she read from nicoll, once told me, work ideas are "enzymes" to digest experiences.

so i'm thinking along the lines that inasmuch as our thinking function just moves, reacts, etc., it is all in vain and our experience doesn't go as far as it might and doesn't accomplish anything.

but more than that, like my friend alluded to, the intellectual center's reconciling might have a creative potential - to facilitate further digestion of experiences and to foster the crystallization of something more. things that are "perishable" decay, but gurdjieff's teachings point towards transformation and creating something that endures. perhaps harmonization of the intellectual center with other centers fosters such processes. perhaps dying like a dog is not in itself loathsome except to the extent that it is the waste of a precious opportunity to make something for one's self.

it is difficult to imagine that ouspensky, with his prodigious intellect perished like a dog. surely he made super efforts and applied all the theory; gurdjieff did say that no effort is wasted. there's missing pieces here. but then again, even ouspensky himself was frustrated by his application of theory and how far it took him.

i thought i was done, but apparently i'm not. maybe i'll get the hang of it. i did a search for the phrase and came up with this (strange) link:

In John Bennett's Talks on Beelzebub's Tales, he recalls one night spent in Gurdjieff's Paris apartment shortly before the latter's death। There was a typical gathering of students: among them English, Americans, French, Greeks—more than fifty people assembled in a small apartment to have dinner with Gurdjieff and to listen to him speak. Gurdjieff offered a toast which in its simplicity seemed forceful: "Everyone must have an aim. If you have not an aim, you are not a man. I will tell you a very simple aim, to die an honorable death. Everyone can take this aim without any philosophizing—not to perish like a dog." "As always," Bennett recalls, "he suddenly turns the conversation to a joke and in a minute the room is shaken with laughter at some story about the peculiarities of the English. But the impression remains of the overwhelming seriousness of our human situation, of the choice which confronts us between life and death."

What seems simple, not to perish like a dog, is for Gurdjieff the most difficult aim a person can have. And making us aware of the choice between life and death, or between kinds and qualities of death, is a main concern of Beelzebub's Tales. In the Tales, however, the choice is presented in far more complex terms: we can either live our lives and die our deaths passively and mechanically, for the sole purpose of unconsciously supplying the Cosmos with required energies, whereby upon death we sacrifice our individuality; alternatively, we can live in such a way as to supply required Cosmic energies consciously, and of sufficient quantity and quality, so that death carries the potential of amounting to more than a payment of transformed energy, and we gain the possibility of becoming "immortal within the limits of the Solar System."

The choice between life and death as expressed in these terms is related to Gurdjieff's Theory of Reciprocal Maintenance, which embodies his answer to the question, "What is the meaning and purpose of life on Earth, and in particular of human life?" Like all organic life on Earth, human beings are apparatuses for transforming energies which are required for some other purpose. However, as a more complicated type of transforming apparatus than plants or animals, human beings possess some choice regarding how to supply the energies required by their existence. They can transform energy consciously or unconsciously, in greater or lesser quantities, and of varying qualities, thereby influencing the purpose and outcome of their deaths. These are among the choices of which Gurdjieff wants to make us aware in his Tales.…

if such an on-target post already exists, what is my business posting in the first place?

and if here, as in probably all my posts, my attempt to integrate ideas and experience results in unlikely intellectual interpolation and extrapolation yielding something altogether improbable (even as upon ouspensky meeting gurdjieff, gurdjieff referred to ouspensky's tertium organum as something altogether impossible), even if it does contains a grain of truth, isn't that wiseacring?