The Heart of Joy: Soliloquies on Sorrow

Notes For the Reformation: an Appendix: Part VI, The Growth of feeling

… From the point of view of understanding the different categories of man we may say that there exists the conscience of a man in whom there are no contradictions. This conscience is not suffering; on the contrary it is joy of a totally new character which we are unable to understand…

if these moments of conscience become longer and if a man does not fear them but on the contrary cooperates with them and tries to keep and prolong them, an element of very subtle joy, a foretaste of the future 'clear consciousness' will gradually enter into these moments.

Gurdjieff, as quoted by P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous.

Discussing emotional growth in the Gurdjieff work is difficult, because what we call “emotional” growth isn’t so much emotional as a life goes on and deepens. It changes its center of gravity from the emotional, which we can roughly define as outer, to feeling, which we can roughly define as inner.

It’s important to draw these two distinctions because the word emotion is used in modern psychology and in modern language to denote both inner and outer emotional attitudes and experiences; and they are not equivalent.

If we try to define the difference a little better perhaps we can do it thus: emotion is directed outwardly and is about outer relationships, how I see and interact with the outer; and feeling is about my inner life and how I truly sense and view myself. I find feeling has a finer granularity to it than emotion does; it’s more tactile, more compellingly intimate. Emotion is extroverted; feeling is introspective. They have different values to us, and it’s thus appropriate to view them and define them as materially different from one another.