A few times since The Death of the Dog, I have found myself as someone else. Or rather, I have come to be the witness of this person who is doing or saying things and I am not that person... but I am not the witness either because the witness is not a person. The witness is a perspective that is not a self. It is a viewpoint.
Perhaps I click into the realisation of no-self, but do so clumsily and feel disoriented at the loss of something that is taken for granted unless I am meditating.
The Death of the Dog is a reminder of mortality. Mine. The cats'. Christ, even the crows'. We all just borrow life for a while. We are conduits for life and, what an incredible blessing, are able to do what we want with it. But it is a temporary gift that we never own. That we have no right to.
Even the body. It's not mine. It is a survival unit for life... It is life that makes the rules. That grants the favours. That offers us ourselves in its presence for a time.
This life is not my life. What I do is all that I am. My being is life's; my doings are mine. Or, my doings are me. I am a catalogue of enactions.
When life left the dog, was the dog there? Was the body the dog's body?
If the do was no longer enacying, there was no dog. Nothing for whom that body was a body.
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