Worthy of the Dog

 

Sunrise, Piermont Marsh, June 2 2021

June 3, continued

We had a disagreement about getting a dog. 

This got me to thinking about dogs and what they represent.

Dogs are traditionally used to indicate creatures of a lower order, that think only of their own urges and yap and growl and bark. Gurdjieff likens us to a village filled with dogs and remarks that our dogs aren’t under control. (Paris Meetings 1944.) And much can be made of these rich analogies. 

Yet there are two ways in which dogs are on the whole far superior to men; and this is in loyalty and love. Human beings are rarely loyal and rarely loving; whereas for a dog, the whole reason that the planet created the species and put them next to us is because they are our teachers of loyalty and love. In these two areas, they know everything and we are the fools. Think about it; no other animal knows these qualities like a dog does. Not a single one of them. 

Dogs are masters. 

One of the big questions about a human being is whether they’re worthy of a dog. Most people aren’t worthy of a dog; we can’t even come close to their standards for loyalty and love. In order to deserve a dog, a good dog, one must have a wish about loyalty and love and have a wish to unselfishly learn about these two qualities in their purest form; because that’s what a dog brings to the table, apart from all of its other objectively lower qualities. You can’t learn about loyalty and love from a cat; any idiot who has had a cat or two can tell you that. You can learn a lot of very important things from a cat, but not those two things.

So in order to understand why one ought to have a dog in the first place, one needs to understand that one isn’t loyal or loving. Maybe the dog could teach one something about that. Even then, if one is selfish, the whole thing is going nowhere. The dog begins by demanding unselfishness; because this is the ground floor of loyalty and love. The dog has to be taken care of, even more than a baby; it depends on us for food, for shelter, it depends on us to take it for a walk to fulfill even its most basic function of going to the bathroom. We have to be entirely unselfish in our care for the dog, it has to come before our own interests. Human beings that don’t understand these things are already unsuitable as dog owners: they’re too selfish.

Of course it’s arranged this way. If loyalty and love aren’t founded on unselfishness, they might as well be built on sand. The first trickle of water will erode the ground they stand on and they’ll slip away, taking the whole imaginary structure with them. A dog owner, once they’re fully committed and all in and unselfish towards the dog, has already learned something about the fundamentals. Then perhaps, one can begin to learn about objective loyalty and objective love, each of which is entirely unconditional and not based on intellectual thought and rationalizing. These two qualities must be pure — unselfish — if they’re to be real, and we as humans are required to work towards that, unlike the dog, who begins in that purity and knows it like it knows the marrow of its own bones.

A dog is a lower creature; and of course God is the highest Being, a Being so high that He/She is not created. Yet God is exactly like the dog, in the same way that God exists universally throughout the bottom of creation as well as universally throughout its apex.

God is unconditionally loyal to humanity and unconditionally loving: this was what Christ tried to teach us. Even if you murder the dog, the dog still understands what love is, because you can’t take love out of the dog. This is, of course, by way of analogy: of course it’s possible to abuse an ordinary dog so much that it is ruined. Yet if it happens, this is man’s doing, because by nature the dog’s ability to be loyal and to love is in its own essential right indelible. You can ruin one dog in this way, but you can’t ruin the whole dog, because the whole dog is all dogs and it still contains all of loyalty and all of love within what it is.

I speak of murdering the dog here because that’s the daily intention of our selfish being. We actually have an intention to murder loyalty and murder love within our selfish being, because love and loyalty require selfishness to be put aside — and selfishness always wants to be the center of attention. 

Think about this for a little while. At the root of our action, at the beginning of what we do as selfish creatures, we want to kill the dog. Swedenborg didn’t put it in these terms, but he well understood that given its way, the evil in us would have the death of loyalty and love served for every meal, and as snack foods in between. It takes a special kind of work to preserve loyalty and love: the dog can do it without effort, but for us, it isn’t so easy. We must continually put ourselves aside in order to be more like a dog.

In this way, being more like a dog, we become closer to the lower part of our self. We humble ourselves, we bow our head and bend our knee to the Lord, and we most fully acknowledge our role as lower creatures. 

If then, having recognized our nothingness, we devote ourselves to loyalty and love in the same way that the dog does—if we do it with the same consistency that the dog understands far, far better than we ourselves do— then maybe we’ve learned something. In these two areas of loyalty and love, the dog is the master and we are the servant.

This story of the dog could be extended in many directions, because as we are we do have a pack of dogs in us, but they're wild dogs. They haven’t learned order and respect. They can become some of the most important part of ourselves, but only if we work with them in order to help that come about.

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.