Grief

 

The word "grief" comes from the Latin gravis, meaning heavy. In the sense of its derived French origins, it means a burden. The modern meaning is one of deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone's death.

Even animals, it has been noted, are capable of feeling grief; so it has deep biological roots and an evolutionary function. It's a shared property fundamental to a certain level of life on the planet. 

But what is it actually for?

Grief arises above all out of a sense of loss; and most especially a loss of some thing one deeply cares about. In this way, it is a call to deeper care; to a more conscious recognition of where the value in life lies. In this sense it is a property of one's spiritual evolution, the education of the soul.

Although it may not be evident at first, grief is connected to will. In order to live, one must care about life; when one doesn't, we say they have "lost their will to live." They don't care anymore. This illustrates the bonds between caring and willing: will has nothing to impart movement to it, or maintain momentum, without care to accompany it. 

On the divine level, this caring is love, hence the classic pairing in Swedenborg's “Divine Love and Wisdom.” Quite simply put, they go together. And in seeing this, we begin to see that grief is connected to seeing the lack of caring which can impart movement to wisdom. It's an effort to recognize what is real, what truly has meaning, through the sense that one has lost it.

This is the reason that grief is necessary, otherwise we wouldn't have it. It serves a function in our being; but it's one of the higher functions, not one of the lower ones. When I grieve, I engage in an activity that reminds me of why life is worth living; and this activity centers around the value of others, if it's a healthy one. After all, if I grieve only for my own loss, it's a selfish action; but when I grieve in a comprehensive way, not just because of the loss of an individual but because of the presence of loss itself, it begins to have a new value. 

This has been recognized for generations in the great religions; in Buddhism, it is valued because once we develop a comprehensive and spiritual sense of loss, we begin to see the transitory nature of all things. In Christianity, our grief in the crucifixion of Christ is a remembrance of God's love in the face of loss, and how sometimes loss must be endured in order to show that love at its highest level. These are deep matters worthy of many months and years of contemplation.

It's important to remind ourselves that grief needs to be, as much as possible, impersonal as it deepens in us. While it's true that it usually begins — true grief, that is —through a personal loss, if we stay with it and develop perspective on it we see that it leads deeper into a question of a more universal nature, and that the vibration — the harmonic resonance—of grief takes place on a finer and deeper level of the universe than that of the ordinary energies we encounter. 

We begin to touch something much greater than ourselves.

That something is related to the same thing that Gurdjieff called "The Sorrow of His Endlessness." This is a particulate matter, a quantum force composed of energies that penetrates the entire universe. That may sound like a big statement, but for those who have spent enough time in efforts devoted to the harmonic development of Being, it is a force that is objective, universal, unavoidable, and fundamental in terms of any real religious experience. Christianity contains esoteric references to this force in the sense of Christ as the Man of Sorrows. 

This is a substance that helps create the fabric of reality, not a concept or an emotive inflection. Until it is encountered that way, all discussions about it are theoretical; and I can fairly say, based on many years of experience, that it isn't so helpful to try and discuss it with people that do not already understand this in the marrow of their bones.

All of the things under discussion here have to be felt in the marrow of one's bones, and this is where grief itself already resides if it arises. Being itself is a second being-body larger than ordinary or natural being; it has flesh, blood, bones, and marrow of a different kind and quality than our natural flesh, blood, bones, and marrow. Grief is in the marrow of that second body. We could equally say that seeing forms its flesh, that suffering is its blood, and that sorrow are the bones. 

This body has a comprehensive humility in its nature.

Seeing is what helps to form the exterior body of this second inner life; suffering is what causes circulation of the impressions that seeing brings, delivering them to the various parts of the body that need the "oxygen" or air that allows the body to breathe; and sorrow is what forms the skeleton, the structure that supports the body. 

In the bones of that skeleton, the marrow of grief contains the concentrated substances that can, if they are prepared, receive the emanations of The Sorrow of His Endlessness.

I don't speak of average matters here; and one never undertakes discussions of the astral body and its nature without reservations, because the understandings related to it do not translate well into the language of this world, which was designed for other purposes. The higher languages designed for that purpose are long forgotten and lost, and were originally musical in nature. Nonetheless, it's useful to try to clarify some of these matters, if only to leave a record for others to trace within the roots of their own Being. 

Grief can teach us to love less the things of this world and more the things of the soul; and therein lies a much greater love than we can have of things. In such loss, grief teaches us that human beings are much more than things, even though we so often see them as such, whether we want to or not. 

Suddenly we awaken and realize our lack towards others, especially those we loved.

Because this lack is universal, and because it is so fundamental to our failure to love, grief helps us to touch something much larger than ourselves and begin to understand our selfishness in a deeper context that can ultimately lead to the reconstruction of the soul, if we follow that path.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.