Women's Perception of Their Place in the World

Women, what do you make of your place in the world? There's a particular purpose set aside for you, a niche many women never notice until the chance to claim it has slipped away. Men chase the things that are supposed to deliver happiness and usually don't. Look at who holds the offices and the seats of real influence: still mostly men in suits and ties, with women scarce. How did we end up here? And where are we headed? Part of the problem is that men have trained women to be suspicious of each other, to bring our worries and decisions to them instead. It costs a man little to pour himself into gaining power, piling up money, owning as much property and valuables as possible. In doing so he can get so caught up in the acquiring that he never notices love and the spiritual side of life passing him by.

Raising children turns life into something close to spectator sport. You become the devoted fan trailing after a team, cheering the wins, sitting through the losses, propping them up through both. The way small children figure things out and manage tasks in their own stubborn fashion is genuinely fascinating. You will probably never again hold that much sway over another person. Yet two skills we're rarely handed are how to run our own lives and how to deal with our own feelings. And because nobody taught us those, we tend to miss how deeply we mark our children's lives. Even if you aren't the main force shaping a child, you can soften what the main forces do. Plenty of people never stop to think about what teasing and ridicule do to a person. Why does it feel like a game to make someone cry so quickly?

We share one spirit, and an injury to one is felt by all. Inflicting pain, even the mental and emotional kind, can be a careless cruelty. The wound it leaves may never close. Worrying about what others will think of us has been pounded into us by the culture we grew up in. So why do we go after the ones with the least power and the least ability to defend themselves? Many of us were simply never shown how to respect the life around us.

Women tend to carry this awareness, probably because it was planted in us during childhood more reliably than it was in men. We are the ones who nurture everyone else. Men and children lean on us to tend to them, to notice what they need and supply it. Men often struggle more in their later years once they're on their own, and women are catching on, later in life, that the men who suddenly want to marry them then are mostly afraid of being alone and either can't or won't look after their own needs. When a woman does learn to stand on her own, she comes into her own.

A woman is more apt to grow faith and spiritual strength aimed at helping others, the world, the whole universe, rather than at ticking off concrete goals for herself. She's more likely to understand that how we see the world and the living things in it can shift in an instant, and that we've frequently been vain enough to imagine everything orbits around us. That mindset breeds a self-absorbed way of living. Oddly, women are often not self-centered enough; they take care of their own needs and then expect others to do the same in return. A woman will more readily live through others, becoming the power behind the throne. Think of the First Ladies in this country.

When men stumble onto metaphysical abilities, they tend to misuse them, bending them toward controlling the people and things around them. That hunger for control is what tore apart spiritual civilizations like Atlantis and Lemuria.