If you can even find this book, I recommend reading it. Lachrymology literaly means "the science of crying" and Maynard James Keenan from the band TOOL mentions this book a lot in th ebeginning of TOOL. Maynard claims that this book had a lot of influence on his philosophies and life. It took me a long time to find this book and some people even told me it didn't exist.... well it exists! FIND IT! READ IT!
A lot of people have been asking me about this book.
When I was a child my great grandma Mary E. Ford used to talk about this book. She wrote a book called “The Hidden Way”, Through the Threshold. She said the book by R.P. Vincent had inspired her to write this collaboration of other, older ideas. She told me that The Joyful Guide to Lachrymology was a collaboration of ancient ideas that Vincent had gained somehow. I…. as funny as it might be, do not have a copy but I met a girl who worked for an old gypsy lady in 1992. I had house sat with her a few times and this old women had a copy. It was no published work by any means, but more of a typed version that was very old. Laced with spelling and grammar errors, I asked the gypsy women about the book. She was from Nebraska somewhere and I met her in Joshua Tree California. By the late nineties I started getting into a band Called Tool and Maynard Keenan (the front man) mentions it in a couple interview Cds. Actually Adam Jones talks about it more. I haven’t thought about that book in years and one evening it pops up as a recommended book by this sight so I clicked that I had read It. Now that I am searching around on the internet, I am learning that possession of that book would be very nice to have. That old gypsy lady is long gone and that old girlfriend is even more illusive. She lived down the road from us and she said that she could not say for sure where she got it, Just that it had a lot of information. I remember that it talked about how all ancient beliefs and religious views derive from the experience of pain, of suffering. I remember that the book repeatedly mentioned the importance of experiencing struggle, mourning and crying. That is the reason for evolution. He said that the ability to rise above pain, suffering and experience compassion and sadness is the sole purpose of existence. And that all religions are based around this idea. I guess it could have been something the old gypsy lady had wrote herself, perhaps, but I was definitely interested since my great grandmother had always mentioned it. This book did open my mind somehow to other things at the time, especially Maynard. No matter what the case may be, this book keeps popping up in my life.