QA225 QUESTION: We’re all working on this International Woman’s Year at the Center as a group. And I was wondering, first, whether it would be all right to take pieces out of the lectures and use them as background material for the work we are doing?

ANSWER: Oh, yes.

QUESTION: Good. The other thing, we’re getting rather stuck on issues like being victims and blaming. Perhaps you can help us broaden the issues so that we could present a very comprehensive paper at this conference in Mexico in 1975.

ANSWER: Basically, to begin with, the following aspects could be emphasized, and later on other issues can be added on. The most important one would be to help all women find the unity of their autonomous self-responsibility in conjunction with the feminine principle of receptivity. There has been such a tremendous duality in this respect.

The world, as in many other issues, seems to be divided into two camps: the ones who say that in order to be feminine the woman must deny her selfhood, her creativity, her inalienable right to be a full-fledged individual – and on the other hand, to be the best she can be, to be the most intelligent and the most strong she can be. This opinion tends to believe that if the woman is strong and self-sustaining and creative and independent, that this needs to impair her femininity.

On the other hand, we have the great factions of the new womanhood that is arising today that denies the feminine principle, the receptive principle, and confuses it with what these other people say: the woman, if she’s feminine, she has to be weak and dependent. Of course, then there is a rebellion against this.

Your work can be very helpful to bring these two principles together – to show that if the woman is without the receptivity and the capacity to surrender to her feelings, and to be wholly loving and melting and soft, that if she is not that, she can never be strong; just as the man can never be truly strong, without his gentleness.

Now, they both start from two different ends, but the principle is the same. The man must come through his softness to his strength, and the woman must come also through her softness to her strength. In history, it was the other way around. The man had to be, for a long time, only strong, apparently or primarily or predominantly. In order to survive in times past, he had to curb the tendency for his soft feelings.

And the woman, for a long time, had to curb her strength and her individuality. So they did approach one another from two different ends. But both need to combine both principles in order to be fully men and women. You can help very, very much in discussing these principles from many different angles and vantage points, to find this unity and to create a unity out of this dualistic split on this topic.

QUESTION: We’ve been recently making contact with a women’s group in places like Findhorn. I was wondering if you could give some guidance about the possibility of moving from various spiritual centers around the world during the International Women’s Year and perhaps infusing the new spiritual consciousness, particularly during that International Women’s Year conference.

ANSWER: I would be glad to. Instead of having another question and answer session whenever that is scheduled for, I will give a specific lecture [Lecture #229 Woman and Man in the New Age], if you wish, for that purpose, which can be used and which can become a link for all these women.

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