The Heart of Joy: Soliloquies on Sorrow

Notes For the Reformation: an Appendix, Part III: The Sorrow

What is the sweetest substance on earth?

And what is the aim of inner work?

These two subjects may not seem to be related; and yet they have the same answer.

Gurdjieff’s fourth obligolnian striving reads: The fourth: the striving, from the beginning of one's existence, to pay as quickly as possible for one's arising and individuality, in order afterward to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow of our Common Father.

Of course, his cosmology is complex, and he says a great deal about the connection between conscience and the concentration of the (molecular) particles of the Sorrow of our Common Father Creator. One gathers from this that these particles of Sorrow are an actual substance.

Without any doubt this is the sweetest substance of all on the planet Earth for human beings, this Sorrow. And it’s the actual Sorrow itself that is sweet.

It isn’t tasted in the mouth, because it’s a different kind of sweetness. It’s tasted through the organic sensation of one’s entire being as one begins to sense its cosmological nature.

Under these circumstances, one discovers that the entire body can be an organ of taste. That is to say, our higher being-bodies can feed themselves through all of our spiritual cells, rather than just through the nostrils or the mouth.

There are multiple stages in the development of this capacity, because one’s cosmological nature is not limited to a single higher being body, but to several of them.

The astral body, the lowest of the higher being bodies, is formed through a connection with organic sensation and operates under planetary laws—first of the moon, which is closest to earth, and then the other planets. This body is incorrectly named, because "astral" means "of the stars," and the astral body is actually under the influence of the solar system—not directly under the influence of the sun and its emanations. It is, rather, under the indirect influence of the sun. Its dominant influence, however, is the moon, due to its proximity—and this produces a certain range of particular results through the contacts between the conscious gravity of the moon and the inner awareness of the astral body.