Joy and Sorrow, Part II: Metabiology

The search for a path through life

Dealing with the subject of joy and sorrow from a technical and academic point of view, in the context of the Gurdjieff work, we can note that Gurdjieff says all joy proceeds only from a suffering or a sorrow already experienced.

While there are complicated metaphysics behind this, and the truth must be lived in certain knowledge — not believed in, and especially not absorbed and processed through the intellect alone – this means that we must experience suffering and sorrow in order to produce joy, and that this is one of the primary responsibilities of living beings throughout the cosmos.

It means that everything we think we know about joy and sorrow is incorrect.

Joy and sorrow ultimately are organs, not experiences.

They are the spiritual organs of Being which are extended into this material world with purpose. Both of these organs are needed to sense awareness and Being, and one grows from the other; one must grow the organ of sorrow within one’s self in order to produce the organ of joy. Once one has both organs, one can perceive awareness, Being, and the cosmos from a completely new perspective that is absolutely impossible without both organs. In this sense Joy and Sorrow are cosmological functions of perception, cosmological organs, required for the cosmos’ awareness of itself.

Gurdjieff gave a hint of what all this is about at the end of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson when he indicated that in order to perpetually sense his or her own death, a human being would need to grow a new organ.

This was an oblique and buried reference first of all to the fact that one can grow new organs; an outrageous outsider proposition to begin with, of course. The laws of biology dictate that we cannot just race about during our ordinary lifetime and grow new organs within our physical body. That fact alone indicates that he was speaking of growing metaphysical organs within our Being; and readers of my work will know I have made much of late about the fact that the spiritual has metaphysical as well as physical Being within its nature. (Note in passing that Gurdjieff’s organ kundabuffer was also a metaphysical organ.)