masculine and feminine

Some of my favorite bits from Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo. Great book… I love books about the masculine and feminine energies. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

*

Psychological thinking has seeped through into ordinary life and it is so easy to explain a situation by some psychological slogan — yet the inner meaning may lie in a different place.

Perhaps man’s need is to be trusted even more than to be understood. He needs to be believed in, and his work, whether she understands it or not, to be given full value. But he needs her also to express herself. Herself. It is her own deepest self that he must know, not her opinions which she has picked up from parents, schools and the daily press, but her deepest self. How many women can give him that?

He throws light on the jumble of words hovering beneath the surface of her mind so that she can choose the ones she wants, separates light onto the colors of the rainbow for her selections, enables her to see the parts of which her whole is made, to discriminate between this and that. In a word, he enables her to focus.

Our need is to keep the balance between masculine focused consciousness and feminine diffuse awareness — or if you prefer, between the creative spirit which uses man as its vehicle and the life force which uses woman. Both of these forces are equally ruthless.

A woman’s tears accompany her deepest truth.

It is through his anima that a man receives his inspirations. She is the fountain from which he drinks. She holds the treasures in her lap and offers them when he is ready to receive her gifts. But, having received them, it is his masculine, discriminating mind which gives form to the elusive riches she offers. She is the femme inspiratrice. 

Woman needs to give. She cannot help herself. Life pours through her and she has no choice but to pass it on, or let it stagnate until it becomes an abscess in her breast. This flow of life is not intended only for her children, but also for her mate. But many a man is too proud to accept her giving, confusing it with the mother’s milk he has outgrown, unaware that it is the water of life she offers him.

It is man’s greatest task, not to learn to love, but to learn how to create the conditions in which love can alight upon us and can remain with us.