Love Lies Here

The Astral Body, Part II

Photo: Man and Nature with Hope, Misery and the Saints: The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

The oddity of suffering for a greater purpose is that it is intensely personal; but it is the burden of the personal in taking on the burden of others that matters here. In this sense the example of Christ serves as the most perfect example, because in His model He showed us the precise sense and aim of astral suffering: to take on the suffering of others as your own, from an inner sense.

Although He demonstrated this outwardly through the sacrifice of flesh and blood, it calls us to an inward suffering of exactly the kind that Gurdjieff originally mentioned through the personage of his alter-ego Beelzebub: to take on a portion of the sorrow of His Endlessness.

This is a high and sacred task and the most rewarding of inward practices; to suffer for another. To not even suffer, for example, here and now for what another suffers here and now, but to take on suffering as a premise, to suffer throughout the length and breadth and width of Being; to suffer not within time but even in spite of it.

This is the suffering that calls; and the astral body is the body that can so suffer. Without it, suffering is terrifying, painful, and intense; but it cannot be sacred. Sacred suffering is of a different order and obeys the call of different cells, different molecules. It is made of the stuff of suns.

Love lies here where a new kind of suffering begins.