G. I. Gurdjieff: The Last Hour of Life
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Imagine, that you have only a few minutes, maybe an hour left to live;
somehow you have discovered exactly when you will die. What would you do
with this precious hour of your stay on Earth? Would you be able to complete
all your things in this last hour, do you have a conscious idea about how to
do it?
And letting go your last breath would you feel satisfaction from knowing
that you have done everything possible in this life to fulfil that you are
constantly present, always vibrating, always waiting, like the son is
waiting for the father-sailor? In the manifested world everything has its
beginning and its end. In the Real World everything is always present and
one beautiful day you will be allowed to forget everything and leave the
world "forever".
Freedom is worth a million times more than liberation. The free man, even in
slavery, remains a master of himself. For example, if I give you something,
let's say, a car, in which there is no fuel, the car cannot move. Your car
needs a special fuel, but it is only you who is able to define what kind of
fuel is needed and where to get it.
You have to define yourself how to digest my ideas to make them yours, so
that they belong only to you. Your car cannot work on the same fuel my car
is working on. I suggest you only the primary material. You have to get from
it what you can use. So, more bravely, sit down at the steering wheel.
The organic life is very fragile. The planetary body can die at any moment.
It is always one step from death. And if you could manage to live one more
day, it is only a chance accidentally given to you by nature. If you will be
able to live even one more hour, you can consider yourself to be a lucky
person. From the moment of conception we are living on borrowed time.
Living in this world you have to feel death each second, so settle all your
life affairs, even in your last hour. But how can anyone know exactly his
last hour? For the sense of security make up your things with nature and
yourself in every hour given to you, then you will never be met unprepared.
The man has to be taught this starting from the school: how to breath, to
eat, to move and to die right. This has to become a part of an educational
programme. In this programme it is nessesary to include the teaching about
how to realize the presence of "I" and also how to establish consciousness.
Question: How to act if you do not feel that there is something unfinished?
Gurdjieff aswered after a pause. He took a deep breath and replied:
Ask yourself who will be in difficulty if you die like a dog. At the moment
of death you have to be wholly aware of yourself and feel that you have done
everything possible to use all, within your abilities, in this life which
was given to you.
Now you do not know much about yourself. But with each day you dig deeper
and deeper into this bag of bones and start knowing more and more details.
Day by day you will be finding out what you should have done and what you
have to re-do among the things you have done. A real man is one who could
take from life everything that was valueble in it, and say :"And now I can
die". We have to try to live your lives so that we could say any day :"Today
I can die and not be sorry about anything".
Never spend fruitlessly the last hour of your life because it can become the
most important hour for you. If you use it wrongly, you may be sorry about
it later. This sincere excitement that you feel now can become for you a
powerful source of the force that can prepare you for perfect death. Knowing
that the next hour can become the last one for you, absorb the impressions
which it will bring to you as a real gourmet. When lady death will call you,
be prepared, always. The master knows how to take from each tasty piece the
last bit of the most valuable. Learn to be the master of your life.
When I was young I learned to prepare fragrances. I learned to extract from
life it's essence, ist most subtle qualities. Search in everything the most
valuable, learn to separate the fine from the coarse. One who has learned
how to extract the essence, the most important from each moment of life, has
reached a sense on quality.
He is able to do with the world something that can not be done by an
aboriginal.
It could be that in the last moments of your life you will not have the
choice where and with whom to be, but you will have a choice to decide how
fully you will live them. The ability to take the valuable from life - is
the same as to take from the food, air and the impressions the substances
needed to build up your higher bodies. If you want to take from your life
the most valuable for yourself, it has to be for the good of the higher; for
yourself it is enough to leave just a little. To work on yourself for the
good of others is a smart way to receive the best from life for yourself. If
you will not be satisfied with the last hour of your life, you will not be
happy about the whole of your life. To die means to come through something
which is impossible to repeat again. To spend your precious time in nothing
means to deprive yourself the opportunity to extract from life the most
valuable.
In this world, to live life through, from the beginning to the end - means
another aspect of the Absolute. All greatest philosophers were carefully
preparing for the last hour of their life. And now I will give you the
exercise to prepare for the last hour on the Earth. Try not to misinterpret
any word from the given exercise.
The Exercise
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Look back at the hour that has passed, as if it was the last hour for you on
the earth and that you have just acknowledged that you have died. Ask
yourself, were you satisfied at that hour?
And now reanimate yourself again and set up the aim for yourself. In the
next hour (if you are lucky to live one more) try to extract from life a
little more than you did in the last hour. Define, where and when you should
have been more aware, and where you should have put more inner fire.
And now open your eyes wider, and by this I mean - open more possibilities
for yourself, be a little more brave, than you were in the previous hour.
Since you know that this is your last hour and you have nothing to loose,
try to gain some bravery - at least now. Of course, you don't have to be
silly about it.
Get to know yourself better, look at your machine as if from the outside. ..
Now, when you are dying, there is no sense to keep your reputation and your
prestige.
And now onwards, until the real last hour, aspire with persistence to
receive the most you can from life that is of value, develop your intuition.
Take just a few moments each hour to watch at the hour that passed, without
judgement, and then tune yourself to extracting more from the following
hour.
If we look at each hour like at a separate life unit, you can try to do as
much as you can to use every unit totally. Force yourself and find the way
to make the next hour much more than the one before, but also be aware that
you have taken care of the debts you collected till now. Increase the
self-sensing and self-knowledge of yourself, and also increase the ability
to master yourself, this will change the work of your machine, which is
always out of your control. And these abilities can become the indication of
the real changes. And it is absolutely unimportant what the machine is
thinking about this.
...To live the rest of your life rehearsing your death hour by hour - is not
at all pathological. None can receive more from life than the cancer
patient, who knows approximately when he will die. And since he already
recognized how he wishes to spend the rest of his life, he will not have to
make the total change in it, but he will be able to go somewhere, where he
always wished to go, but would not do it in other circumstances.
The man who knows that he will die soon, will try to use to the maximum
every hour of the rest of his life. This is exactly what Christ meant when
he said that the last days will come soon - the days before the Last
Judgement. We are all standing in front of the Judge, but it is not the
others who are judging us, but we ourselves do the last estimation of our
life. We do not have to fail the most important examination, where the most
serious judge is ourself.
Each moment, taken alone, represents the particle of the eternal Creation.
Therefore each moment we can extract the most subtle substances, that we can
call "the essence of life".
Imagine yourself the substance "air" or the substance "impressions".
Finally, draw in your mind the substance "moment". Yes, even the moments of
time are the substances.
If we will be able to extract the finest substances from the coarser, sooner
or later we will have to pay for it. This law is called The Law of Balance.
That is why we will learn how to pay immediately for those what we receive
from life. Only then we will not have any debts. To pay immediately - this
is what is called "real doing". "To do" - is to think, to feel, to act, but
"real doing" - is to pay immediately.
To do - may mean only one thing: to extract the essence from each moment of
life and at the same moment to pay all the debts to the nature and yourself;
but only when you have "I", you can pay immediately.
Real life is not a change of activity, but a change of the quality of the
activity. Destiny - is destiny. Each one of us has to find himself in the
whole order of things. It is not too late yet to start doing it now,
although you have spent the greater part of your life in sleep. Starting
from today you can begin to prepare yourself for death and, at the same
time, to increase the quality of your living. But do not delay with the
start - maybe you really only have just one more hour of life.
Question: Can we share this with others? I think it is very important what
we have heard about this evening.
- You can retell it word by word, but until you will not do this for
yourself, it would mean nothing for others. Existence is the means, or the
instrument, for action. Think about this and you will find out why it is so.
Question: Therefore, we cannot pay the debts, if we do not exist, or if our
"I" is absent?
- Why do you have such a need to pay? Pay for what? If life is only a
coincidence, then there is no sense to go on. This does not mean that you
have to end your life with a suicide. Opposite, you have to put all your
effort into 'to live'. Ordinary man always lives, just going with the flow.
He is not just sleeping, he is absolutely dead. To really live, it is
necessary to support the efforts of nature, to take actively from life, and
not to act passively - wherever it flows.
Extracting from life the most precious, you have to be able to operate your
emotions. See how fairly you can estimate yourself. Look attentively at
yourself and you will see many remarkable ways to be fair. Each time notice
for yourself different moments when the desires appear. Act as before, but
always be aware of their presence. Transport to the world the part of your
blood, but one of the higher level.
At the end of each hour after you have estimated its usefulness, imagine
that you just woke up in the absolutely unknown in comparison to the
previous one gone by. It is important to note that the apparent continuation
of the last hour is in reality changing with every hour, although things and
people seem the same as before. With the time you will learn to see yourself
as a spirit of a special substance, who is coming from one world to another,
as an uninvited guest of nature.
Looking from this point of view evaluate everything you do in your life.
Looking at the results of all your efforts of the past and think what sense
they all have now, in the last hour of your life. Those who are engaged in
the Work, are dead to this world and at the same time they are more alive in
this world than anyone else. Work. something strange, imperceptible, but for
many it is impossible to live without it.
The ordinary way of understanding life is vanity of vanities. However big
the result is according to earthly measures, sooner or later it will fail.
Even the sand is being rubbed into dust by time. Even the most significant
people of history are being forgotten. To understand the real possibilities
of this world, it is necessary to find what we can reach in this world that
will be very useful in the Real World.
Attentively look at the lives of all the greatest people, those who were
commanding armies, who had power over others. What is the benefit for them
from all their great actions now, when they are dead? Even when they were
alive, all these great actions were no more than empty dreams. We are not
here to praise ourselves and to prove ourselves, the most disgusting in the
ordinary man is the ability to quickly satisfy his flesh.
The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves. They are
in a complete prison of their weaknesses. But right now we do not speak
about them, but about you.
Understand me right, I do not need followers, I am rather interested in
finding the good organizers, the real warriors of the new world. I
understand the weakness of the organization, because right now we do not
speak about the usual organisation which would consist of initiates.
I remind you once again, learn to live each of your hours with a bigger
benefit. Create a detailed plan of the last hour of your life. To understand
how one should die, you should grow deep roots into life, only then you will
be able to die like a human being, not like a dog. Although, it is not given
to everyone - to die. You can become manure for our planet, but it does not
really mean do die. To die to this world forever - is an honour. For this
honour you have to pay with Conscious Labour and Intentional Suffering. You
have to earn this right.
Try to imagine yourself relatively clearly the last hour of your life on
earth. Write a kind of a script of this last hour, as if you were writing
the script for a film. Ask yourself: "Is this how I want to dispose my life"
. If you are not satisfied with the answer, rewrite the script until you
like it.
Look at life like at business. Time is your money for life . When you came
into this world, a definite amount of money was given to you and this you
cannot exceed. Time is the only currency with which you pay for your life.
Now you see, how you used the biggest part of it in a stupid way. You have
not even reached the main goal of life - to have rest. You failed as a
businessman, and as a user of life - you deceived yourself. All your life
you thought that everything is given to you for free, and now suddenly you
discovered that - it is not free. You pay for using the time, that is why
each moment of your stay here costs something.
So how would it be possible for you to reimburse at least somehow these
losses? Check, if the deficit on your bank account is only temporary or is
it perhaps constant? Did you loose the time or could you invest it
succesfully? If you have spent all your money on vacations, then there is
nothing to do but to be sorry about the past.
For many years you have been spending you life as if your parents gave you a
bank account with unlimited credit. But now the amount is used and you see
that you are all alone and that there is none to rely on. There is no more
time on your bank account. Now you are forced to earn each hour of your
life. All your life you behaved like a child and spent time just like a
newly married couple on their honeymoon.
Our main enemy, which is hindering us from applying the necessary efforts -
is hopelessness. I know, you will have many excuses not to prepare yourself
for the last hour of your life. The habit is a big force, but starting once,
you can learn to do each time more and more.
Do not fiddle all day, force yourself at least one hour a day to make an
effort, otherwise you will loose everything. Think about the rehearsal of
your last hour as if it was ballet exercises - you have to do it all your
life.
I dedicate four hours a day for this exercise, but when I was young, I spent
on it two times longer.
Translation from Russian by Alexandra Kharitonova, with free English
rendering by Reijo Oksanen - unearthed by Ilya Kotz & Avi Solomon of the
Jerusalem Nyland Group
) starts to affirm just about everything else in the whole network of contexts and concepts that we deal with here. It is only a question of how much I want to be Objective and how much I really want to change. Dissatisfaction with the old is a great propellant.