As Ouspensky says, we have created two lives--one material, the other
spiritual. I believe this is owing to the fact that man is living and
working in the material and woman in the spiritual. In other words, she is
carrying her own responsibilities on one shoulder and man's baneful
burdens on the other. The figure of Atlas holding up the Globe should be
changed to that of a female.
One would think that in these days, when psychology is taught even to
children, that a man who has lived forty years in the world of action
would know better than to boast of his eternal activities. The word "busy"
has grown to be a veritable fetish with thousands who have little or
nothing to do. The truth is, most men are not half as busy as they seem
and not more than a fourth as wise as they look.
We have to find out by exact analysis just what incentive lies behind
people's actions. What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts.
Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to
quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are
adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people
are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a
plane with the quality of the incentive.
In the work done by women in the past fifty years in this country, the
incentive has been of a higher quality than that shown by men.
While men introduced a coarse realism into the novel, women saved the
situation by new ideals. I do not think there would be much left worth
reading today but for woman's taste and judgment.
In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of
intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our
control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a
corresponding cause behind it.
The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the
exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor
under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other
words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen.
And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are
swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will
have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters
of impulse and confusion.
There is a will to power that is blind. There is another will to power
that brings the higher emotions to bear on the lower impulses, controls
and directs the organs of sense.
The people who elect a President are the ones who will influence his
actions. And when we talk about a President being a good man for business
we are compelled to seek for the reason behind the statement.
If finance lands a President at the White House, women, children, teachers
and philosophers must shift for themselves, since the supreme test lies in
function, and not in manners, words and looks. And finance means finesse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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