Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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or spirit have a physical body to use on this stratum of life or not, is the only woman in the universe who can give, impress, or inspire him with the highest ideas he is capable of receiving. And such ideas from such source shall for him have a fitness and use, suitable for his peculiar intellect and his peculiar work, business enterprise, or undertaking, at the time they are received from her; nor can he receive from any other being in the universe that idea or order of thought which shall suit his peculiar needs. The true husband of such a wife, whether his spirit has a physical body or not, is the only man in the universe to carry the ideas received from his wife into execution.
This fitness and adjustment each to the other constitute their oneness. She, through the fineness and greater sensitiveness of her organization, receives thought from the higher domain of mind. She is, so to speak, the more sensitive photographic plate for receiving impression. His is the more suitable intellect for a relatively coarser stratum of life to put the ideas so received into execution. But the man’s is not the stronger intellect for originating ideas; or, in other words, for receiving the finer and more powerful thought. All leading ideas have been brought into the world by women. Man has unconsciously taken or absorbed them from her, and then ignorantly given himself full credit for them. Behind every great enterprise or movement in the world’s history, there has been the generally unknown woman who has inspired the man or men prominent in such movement. It was Mme. Roland who inspired the Gironde to demand a constitutional government for France. It was Josephine who fed Napoleon with the ideas which resulted in his triumphant career until their separation. It was Isabella of Spain, who prompted and persisted and importuned the hesitating Ferdinand to aid Columbus to re-discover that new world which her woman’s intuition, soaring beyond the narrow bounds of what the world calls “reason,” told her existed. Behind Washington stood his wife, who shared with him the hardships of Valley Forge, and who was also the still unrecognized communicator to him of those ideas and that power which his intellect used in securing American independence. Behind every successful man, in every grade and phase of life, in every successful business or undertaking, there has been somewhere, seen or unseen, a woman, his inspirer.
Woman has more power to-day, and uses more power, than even she realizes. Because the power and effect of woman’s thought are everywhere, and every man feels it according to his sensitiveness or capacity for feeling, or absorbing thought.
A woman’s mind may teem with invention; and every thought or idea of this order may be absorbed and used and unconsciously taken from her by some man more or less in association with her. A woman’s mind may be full of business ideas and business capacity, and this may be absorbed and appropriated in the same way by a man; while she may neither receive credit for these gifts, nor even credit herself for giving them. It is a truth, that valuable ideas may be given away to others when but few, if any, words pass between them. Worse yet, it sometimes happens, that if yours is the finest thought, and some one with whom you are much in association is the coarser mind, the finer is absorbed to an extent; while you absorb, and get back in return, the coarser. You may then act that coarser thought, think it, and be governed by it. You will not be then using your own, the superior power (that is, thought), but the other, the inferior; and for such reason, you will not prosper so well in business, or succeed so well in your art. This is the damage inferred by an ancient writer when he said, “Be ye not unequally yoked together.”
Woman is not the “weaker,” but the finer vessel. She is to man what the delicately adjusted magnetic needle of the compass is to the helm which steers the ship. Being the finer instrument, she does need to be shielded and protected from the cruder forces with which man deals, as the engineer shields and protects his theodolite, or the sailor his compass or sextant.
If, then, the finer instrument for receiving the finer idea is obliged to deal at the same time with the cruder forces of Nature, or, in other words, do man’s work, the instrument will be injured and blunted, and rendered less sensitive, and in turn man will not, through her, receive what he would were the instrument better protected; and in consequence man will be injured in health and fortune.
For this reason Christ commended Mary, as having chosen the better part, because she did not make of herself a household drudge, as did Martha. Mary, by not tiring her body, was keeping her mind-clear to receive ideas. If you tire and fag the body, you make it more difficult for the spirit to act on that body, and more difficult for it to aspire and reach literally out and up, permanently, above the crude stratum or current of thought all about us, and into the regions of higher, finer, and more powerful thought.
It is only the barbaric idea which declares that household work shall be exclusively woman’s work. In-door work, where cooking, bed-making, washing, baby-tending, and a dozen or twenty other duties fall on a woman in a single morning, is far more exhausting than following the plough, or any single line of masculine effort; for the more things you have on your mind, to do within a given time, the more force (that is, thought) are you sending out in different directions within a given time; and this exhausts quicker than if force is concentrated on one line of effort, as when a man is keeping books, or digging, or at work on the forge, the desk, or the carpenter’s bench. So if woman is made a drudge, her spiritual eyesight, or faculty of getting new ideas, is blunted; because the force necessary to get that idea is turned to muscular effort. If man also drudges, his power to receive her idea, and work it out, is also crippled.
If a man will not or can not recognize this relation and use of his real wife to him, he may have a compass which he refuses to use. If he continually scoffs at her impressions or intuitions or suggestions, as to his life and methods of business, he may at last so injure the compass as to make it quite useless. In other words, he will blunt her intellect, cripple her intuition, and choke up the fount of her inspiration. He will quite sever her connection, and ability to reach and draw from the higher current of constructive thought. He will injure her health and his own. He will injure her intellect and his own. He is dragging down on lower and coarser levels of life himself, and her with him.
They are parts and forces, making one whole, which God, or the Infinite Spirit of Good, has joined together.
The so-called mythologic fable, of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, springing, in full fruition of power, from the brain of Jove, implies the superior feminine capacity for absorbing the finer and more powerful thought, idea, or greater wisdom, and transmitting it to man in mass, the lump of gold which it is his capacity and strength to beat out and fashion into forms of beauty.
The question has often arisen, “Why has woman accomplished relatively, as compared with man, so little in the more-active fields of effort, in invention, in business?” The answer is, that in every department of life, without the feminine brain behind his own, so transmitting original and fresher thought and idea to him, man has accomplished little or nothing, whether as conqueror on the field of battle, or conqueror in the fields of art or invention. He absorbed from her idea without knowing it. She has sent her thought to him without knowing it. The man has been in all these cases the unconscious gainer. The woman has been the unconscious giver. Neither knew that the chief parts of their real beings were invisible, and that these parts— filaments, so to speak, of thought—reached out far, far from their bodies, meeting, mingling, attracting, giving, and receiving an unseen element, thought. In this way and without knowing it, woman has ever done her work; the feeder and inspirer of every man who has ever done any thing great—whether such greatness be the greatness of good or the greatness of bad, the greatness of Lucifer or the greatness of Christ.
The adoration paid the Virgin Mary by the Catholic Church implies that it is the office and function of the feminine mind or spiritual organization to bring greater wisdom, knowledge, and truth to earth, the lower and cruder stratum of existence. Spiritually Mary’s soul reached far into the higher realm of mind from whence came Christ’s spirit; and without this nearness and relationship of Mary’s to that realm, could she ever have given to the world a body fitted for the use of such an exalted spirit as the Christ’s? And not until men adore and reverence the feminine element, mind and spirit as the agency, conduit, or messenger for bringing more knowledge to earth, will they be able to possess and use powers equal and even superior to those of the Christ’s. Deity is not merely masculine. Deity, or in other words, The Power of Giving, must, to use such power, be both masculine and feminine. When we