Kierkegaard - some quotes

I know very well that what I write here will in the course of time be declared to be the loftiest wisdom. I also know that when that happens the shape of the world will not have changed one whit, because those who will be busy showing how profound and true this is will be, of course, assistant professors - those animal-creatures. If any class of men deserves to be called animals in comparison with the rest of us, it is preachers and professors.

Youths have lofty thoughts - but then he gets sensible and these thoughts are forgotten. The exceptions do not have a period of youthfulness. Their youth runs on in dark melancholy - and only when they are also fully educated and matured - only then do these thoughts awaken, and with the enthusiasm of youth.

A man says: I cannot practice self-denial. Charming! And not only that but he wants to be praised for his humility because he is humble enough to be satisfied with ethical shabbiness.
. . . We hypocritically abolish Christianity by saying we are much too humble to aspire to anything so lofty. We say: "I am too humble to want to be significant".

In our society idea-strength is regarded as weakness, and palpable strength is regarded as strength. A person who has the strength to live devoid of ideas is called strong.

"Deathbed renunciation" is like the kind of generosity with which someone threateningly required at pistol point to hand over his money chooses to give the affair a turn and say that he generously offers it as a gift.

Cuckolds - this is what people are in all matters. They know they are being cheated; by their wives who are 100% selfish, by their religion which they know is a fable. But they are such spineless wretches that they don't have the courage to break dependence to them.

Most men think that the more you think about life and the more knowledge you have the happier you become. But the ironical thing, is that it only increases sorrow.

The quality of an individual can be measured by the distance between his understanding and his willing.

When children play together, this relativity becomes actuality to them, an actuality in which they are, each one respectively, a significant magnitude. But then there comes a message, that little Peter, Hans, or Soren, or whatever the person is called, must go home. In this way the absolute disruptively intervenes.
An adult goes and talks with other earnest men about what he wants to be in the world, that he wants to be this and that, and it seems to the other earnest men that he is an earnest man, almost as earnest as the others. But what happens - suddenly there comes a message that he must go home - that is , the God-relationship asserts itself.
The child cannot be allowed to get stuck to the illusion that the relationship with the other children is the whole thing - for then comes the message that he must go home.

Just as a worldly man desires that which tends to nourish his love of life, likewise, he who wishes to live with eternity in mind constantly needs a dose of disgust with life lest he become foolishly enamoured of this world and, still more, in order that he may learn thoroughly to be disgusted and bored and sickened with the folly and lies of this wretched world.

Apart the last one all quotes are from Journals and Papers

On Sluts, Shame, & “Slut Shaming

One of the great constants of the human condition is that women complain. If there is a heaven, we can count on women to complain about the accommodations, for it would not be heaven to them if they could not do so. Men must learn, therefore, not to take female complaints too seriously, nor treat them as evidence that women really have it all that hard. Far more important is the content of their complaints. For example, many wives complain that their husbands do not pay enough attention to them. Properly understood, this is evidence that things are in order: we want women to be wishing for more time with their husbands. If they start complaining that they would prefer the company of some other man instead—then we should start to worry.

Women’s complaints constantly change as society evolves, but they will cease only when human life on earth itself ceases. Some scribe ought to keep track of women’s ever-evolving complaints as possible raw material for the historians and philosophers of the future; a kind of cultural time-capsule, as it were.

In recent years I have been made aware of a female complaint unknown to the world of my youth and (I am inclined to think) to any previous period of recorded history. It is directed against men who engage in “slut-shaming.” The idea is that women have every right to be sluts if they please and must not be subjected to criticism or made to feel embarrassed on that account. It is a remarkable testimony to the age in which we live that women have now taken up this particular complaint, and the present essay is my attempt to analyze the phenomenon and learn what it has to teach us.

I will begin by going back four centuries to the Spain of the siglo de oro and its greatest literary monument, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Readers of this famous tale will remember the character Maritornes, an ugly slut who works in the kitchen of an inn where the hero and his faithful companion Sancho Panza stop. At first glance, she would seem an object of pity to the reader. Extremely ill-favored by nature, she is the sort of girl people shake their heads over thinking “what a shame—what man will ever marry the poor thing?”

But closer inspection reveals that such pity would be unwarranted. Maritornes in fact has an extremely active love life, far more than most of us ever will. She has achieved this remarkable feat by the simple expedient of throwing herself at every vigorous young stable hand or peasant lad who walks through the door of the inn. Her bed has become the chief center of sport and recreation for the entire province. Every art of Venus is regularly practiced there. Through sheer pluck and determination, the girl has managed to procure for herself a copiousness and variety of sexual experience that the handsomest Don Juan in the Kingdom of Spain could only regard with stupefaction and envy.

As the reader may already have grasped, this enterprising young woman’s achievement in acquiring such a vast horde of lovers is funny. The author is inviting us to laugh at the circumstance that an unsightly scullery wench at a nondescript inn in rural Spain enjoys a more active and rewarding sex life than an oriental despot with an enormous and elaborately guarded haram. And this remarkable accomplishment obviously bears some relation to her being a woman.

Of course, another interpretation of the character would be possible. My regular readers know the frequency with which I recur to the inadequacies, as I see it, of the American conservative press in its attempts to understand and critique the sexual revolution. It is not difficult for me to imagine an American conservative pundit reading Cervantes’ novel, coming upon the story of Maritornes, and (instead of laughing) becoming indignant—not at her, of course, but at the vicious, lust-crazed stable hands who prey upon her innocence. Is it not obvious to these deeply immoral young men that they are simply ruining the poor girl, rendering her unmarriageable, and thus condemning her to a life of shame and regret? Obviously, what is needed in this situation is a robust law providing draconian punishments suitable to the magnitude of the crimes being committed by all these horny young peasant boys at the expense of poor Maritornes!

This interpretation, too, relies heavily on Maritornes being a woman, and thus presumably desirous of the security that only marriage to a man of good character can provide, a man such as everyone writing for the conservative press feels certain he himself is. It is only the failure of all these stable-hands to be such sterling moral characters that has led to the tragic downfall of Maritornes. For according to this interpretation, her story is a tragedy—rather than a comedy.

I should make clear that I am not objecting in any way to the high ideals and deep moral sense of responsibility that inspires such commentators. I merely wish to suggest that they might be a bit deficient in the sense of humor Cervantes presumes in his readers. No doubt it is wrong of all those stable hands to avail themselves of the girl’s excessively welcoming nature. But Maritornes is a volunteer, not a victim. As a practical matter, it might be more useful to urge her to place some slight check upon her own amorous and generous disposition than to try to talk every sexually desperate young stable hand in Spain into practicing monkish celibacy.

Most conservative commentators on the sexual revolution belong to an eternal human type popularly known as the “White Knight.” The White Knight is sure that all women are inherently virtuous, whereas men are disgusting, lust-addled pigs—with the curious exception of the White Knight himself. He sees it as his mission, therefore, to protect the good, innocent women from all those bad men. How fortunate the world’s women are that God in his providence has provided them with a tiny number of male advocates and protectors such as the White Knight!

And the White Knight simply hates to hear any woman called a “slut.” He disapproves of the very word. Instead, his pet term is “predator,” a word he uses constantly to refer to that overwhelming majority of his own sex who fail to be as good and virtuous as himself. Every other man, you see, seeks to use women for mere pleasure—only to abandon them along with their bastard children. The world simply needs more White Knights with plenary powers and shotguns for use against male predators and the protection of innocent, honorable women such as Maritornes.

But, of course, Maritornes is in reality neither innocent nor honorable. She is a slut, a term which—far from being a meaningless insult—has a definite denotation, viz., a woman who engages in multiple short-term amorous adventures with a variety of men, normally without any money changing hands (for there is a separate term applied to women who engage in sluttish behavior for payment). Sluttery has traditionally been regarded as socially harmful because of its incompatibility with marriage and family life. Spain was, of course, a Christian nation. Its sexual ideal was universal lifelong monogamy with an exception only for that minority of men and women who have a special calling to celibacy. Sluttish behavior in women moves society farther from this ideal, and that explains why and how the term “slut” (or its Spanish equivalent) became an insult.

Today, however, women are telling us that they no longer wish to be “slut-shamed.” In other words, they are indignant over being called sluts regardless of how accurately their behavior meets the word’s definition. How seriously should men take this complaint? Must we really recognize a “right” of every woman to behave like Cervantes’ Maritornes? Would this lead to happier marriages, stronger and more loving family bonds, or better cared-for children? Would it, in the long run, even increase the happiness or well-being of the sluts themselves?

It should also be observed that shaming sluts is no easy thing to do, their comparative imperviousness to shame being precisely one of their defining characteristics. Maritornes could never have achieved the success she did with such a broad variety of peasant lads unless she was fairly insensitive to appeals to behave with appropriate feminine modesty.

By the way, many languages—German, for example—do not distinguish between shame and modesty, employing a single word for both. In English usage, shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered guilty of some socially disapproved behavior, whereas modesty is the disposition to avoid such behavior. “Slut shaming” is society’s effort to persuade sluts to behave more modestly and avoid disreputable behavior. Such shaming has always been less effective than might be desired even before women took to complaining about it. The best answer to contemporary women’s objections to slut-shaming would be that if they comported themselves with greater decency, they would not have called forth such social shaming in the first place. But that would require them to put some kind of bridle upon their lusts, something much of contemporary Western womanhood is simply unwilling to do. They will accept nothing less than the right to do exactly as they please with no interference from anyone trying to persuade them to greater self-control. It is men and men alone who are responsible for the harmful consequences of female sluttery through their own failure to practice perfect chastity—just as White Knights have always said. Women’s adroitness at shifting responsibility for their own behavior onto men is matched only by the White Knight’s eagerness to allow them to do so.

As noted above, there are also women who engage in sluttish behavior not out of lust but for financial compensation. Today, such women also have plenty of complaints about the hardness of their lot in life. They admonish us that “sex work is work”—i.e., real work, rather than all fun and games. And no doubt there is some truth to this. Posing under a bunch of Klieg lights while getting your ass drilled by some fellow you hardly know is probably not the pleasantest way of earning one’s living. I personally would not want to do it. But how seriously should we take the complaints of porn whores that their honest and diligent labors in front of the camera are not being repaid with sufficient public respect and esteem? Do they really expect to be honored by society on a par with faithful wives who have raised ten children? Apparently, many of them now do.

These women have White Knights defending them as well, for whom they are merely innocent, naïve girls lured into a life of shame by male pornographers in order to satisfy criminal male lusts. I recently read a comment on the internet about women “getting sucked” into the world of porn like inert pieces of flotsam. No, sir. In pornography it is the men who get sucked—often into a serious addiction—and the women who do the sucking. The motive for their career choice, obviously, is the easy money it offers.

Now the gallant male defenders of whores have devised the new crime of “sex trafficking.” All the contemporary whore has to do to avoid being held responsible for her own actions is to claim she has been “trafficked.” So, of course, this is what all of them have learned to say: they did not decide to become whores, it was men who made whores of them by “trafficking” them.

One difficulty with this interpretation is the emergence of websites such as OnlyFans where women can act as their own freelance pornographers, requiring no male assistance to upload smutty videos of themselves for the titillation of lonely men who pay them for the sterile pleasure of being teased. Some of these young, female entrepreneurs apparently make quite a good living at it. But we must not criticize them for this, because “sex work is work.”

How did sluts and whores become so common in American society? It all began back in the late 1960s with a female complaint. This complaint, which can be heard from time to time even today, concerned what the ladies called a “double standard”, namely, that women who engage in many sexual encounters are unfairly maligned as “sluts” whereas men who do the very same thing are admired as “studs.”

But a woman fornicating with many men and a man fornicating with many women are not, in fact, doing the same thing. The two behaviors would be equivalent only if women and men were interchangeable, which they are not. Biology puts the female in the stronger sexual position, since eggs are a scarcer commodity than sperm. It is, therefore, easy for a woman to find mates, as Maritornes’ success—despite her meagre natural endowments—so vividly demonstrates. Finding mates is much harder for men, so a man who succeeds in mating with many women has overcome a natural difficulty. From a purely biological rather than a moral point of view, seducing many women is something of an achievement, and can be managed only by exceptionally attractive men, whether their attractiveness be due to looks or social status. Of course, this achievement also results in abandoned women and fatherless children, so it is not morally admirable at all, and no sane society approves or even tolerates such behavior from its men. Only women themselves could be foolish enough to admire “studs.”

Nevertheless, ever since the sexual revolution, women have been trying desperately to become the female equivalent of studs. They have only succeeded in becoming sluts whom even Maritornes would blush to associate with. Perhaps shaming is the appropriate response to shameful behavior.

The latest female complaint is that men are not “stepping up” to ply them with wedding rings, a circumstance which just might have something to do with their own sluttish behavior (along with a well-justified fear of divorce). It is almost as if women are returning to the complaint that they do not get to spend enough time with their husbands—except that now the husbands have never come into existence in the first place.

The sexual revolution began in female promiscuity and it will end in male chastity. Eventually, every woman in America will be a whore, but none will be able to land a customer. Remember: you heard it here first.

F. Roger Devlin

After he had given his two brief replies to Sri Ramana he did not speak again for another 13 years

 

Sri Ramana’s face was smiling ‘with more radiance than that of innumerable lightning flashes fused into one.

In that ineffable bliss tears of joy welled down in unending succession, and they could not be resisted.’’* Finally, the ‘I’-thought went back to its source, the picture of Ramana Maharshi disappeared and the Self absorbed his whole being. From that moment on the Self shone alone and the ‘I’-thought, the individual self, never appeared or functioned in him again. Lakshmana had realised the Self in the presence of his Guru and his ‘I’-thought was permanently destroyed. Commenting on his realisation many years later Sri Lakshmana said, ‘“The ‘I’ went back to its source, the Self, and disappeared without trace. The Self remained alone. It is eternal peace and bliss.”’  (...)

The two men looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Ramana Maharshi asked him where he had come from. Sri Lakshmana answered that he had come from Gudur.
‘“That’s in Nellore District, isn’t it?’’ asked Ramana. Sri Lakshmana replied that it was and no more words passed between them. Sri Lakshmana had not spoken since the moment of his realisation.
After he had given his two brief replies to Sri Ramana he did not speak again for another 13 years.
*

Swamy ignored all these events and continued to sit quietly in his room. When he was inside the room he only ever wore a kaupina (two small strips of cloth, one tied around the waist and the other covering the genitals) but none of the thousands of mosquitoes who shared the room with him ever bothered to bite him. The only other occupant of the room was a squirrel which used to sit on his lap while he was in samadhi. Swamy used to keep some peanuts near him and whenever he emerged from his samadhi state the squirrel would eat a few out of his hand.

*
Swamy moved into the hut at the end of October 1950 and was soon spending nearly all his time in a state ‘of Self-absorption that was so intense that he rarely became aware of either his body or the world. He sat motionless in the padmasana position for 20 hours each day and lay down on the mat for the other four hours to give his back and leg muscles a chance to rest.
The hut was infested with poisonous snakes and scorpions but Swamy ignored them, and for the most part they ignored him. His only serious accident occurred when a scorpion bit him in the eye while he was resting on the mat. The eye swelled up immediately and for several days Swamy thought that he would lose the sight in that eye; he was in great pain, and obviously seriously injured, but it never occurred to him to seek medical treatment. After four days the swelling subsided and he discovered that his sight was unim- paired. To avoid a repetition of this accident a bench was provided for him so that he could have his rest away from the snakes and scorpions that crawled on the floor. In one of his rare moments of normal waking consciousness he made a half-hearted attempt to drive away the snakes by flicking water at them. The snakes drank the water and then danced in front of him, as if asking for more.
After that he left them alone.
*
A large party of 500 women, accompanied by a few men, walked to his hut and insisted that they too should be given darshan. This time Swamy refused to come out. The crowd, refusing to be deterred from its intention of having darshan, hit upon a novel way of getting to see him. The mud walls of the hut were quite low and the beams and supports for the leaf roof rested on top of them. The 500 women positioned themselves at strategic points around the hut and tried to lift the roof completely off the building so that they could peer over the walls and have a look at Swamy. When Swamy discovered what they were trying to do he admitted defeat and opened his door. His intention was to come out and see the women, but when the door opened, the weight of the pressing crowd, all eagerly converging on him, pushed him back into the hut. Within a few seconds he found himself trapped in a corner by about 60 agitated women. The women outside the hut were even more agi- tated because they had not been able to get in, and it was some time before some semblance of order was restored. Swamy sat in his corner and looked helplessly at the confused scene in front of him:

‘‘There were no volunteers to help me, and since I was keeping mouna [silence] I couldn’t say anything. I just sat down and waited to see what would happen.” Eventually, the women formed them- selves into a line. One by one they all appeared before him, had his darshan, prostrated and then left. Swamy was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the soles of his feet sticking out on each side. One woman touched both soles simultaneously with her index fingers and then rubbed the fingers on her face, just under each eye. All the women behind her thought that this was a good idea and they all adopted the same practice when their turn came. Swamy didn’t like being touched and he tried to deter the women by closing his eyes, looking as severe as possible, and pretending that he was in samadhi. The rest of the women suddenly became afraid. Thinking that he was angry with them, and that he might put a curse on them if they offended him any more, the rest of the women restricted themselves to a darshan and a prostration. When the last of the women had prostrated and left he thankfully closed his door and went back to his life of solitude.
*
Swamy was not keeping away from devotees as a matter of principle; he told me that if any good devotees had come to his hut seeking Self-realisation he would have been happy to teach them.
Apparently none came during this period and so no teachings were given. Swamy says that the people who came to his hut were either curiosity seekers or people wanting their desires fulfilled. He had no interest in either category of visitor. Swamy has a particularly low opinion of the people who came to see him on darshan days. When he reminisces about this period he usually refers, disparagingly, to the people who came to see him as ‘the mob’.
*
In between the darshan days Swamy ignored all the casual visitors and sat quietly in his room; he never made any attempt to attract devotees. While he was sitting there he had become aware that eventually a young girl would come to him from East Gudur.
Swamy knew that this girl would be spiritually advanced and that she would be ready for Self-realisation when she came. He was content to sit quietly, awaiting her arrival. He had a rough idea of what she would look like because he had seen an image of her as a 10-12 year old girl while he was sitting in his hut. Swamy had no idea how long it would be before she came, he only knew that one day she would come to see him. Twice a year, on darshan day, he would scrutinise the line of people as it filed past his hut, but he never saw anyone whom he considered to be an advanced devotee, and none of the visitors corresponded to the image of the girl he had seen. The girl from East Gudur was Sarada, but Swamy was not destined to see her for more than 20 years.
*
Sri Lakshmana’s privacy was still occasionally disturbed by visitors who wanted to talk to him or have his darshan. One man came and called out to Swamy, “You are a jnani [one who has real- ised the Self] and I am also a jnani. You must come out of the hut and give me darshan.’’ Swamy would normally ignore such people when they came, but on this occasion he passed a note out through his window which read, “If we are both jnanis, who is there to give darshan, and to whom?’’. The man stayed about an hour and then went away. Other people were far more persistent. One such man turned up at 8 p.m. one evening in a slightly drunk condition.
“Swamy!” he cried, “I am your boyhood friend. You are now a great swami but I am a bad man. Why have things turned out like this? Make me like you.

Please give me your teachings.’ The man was in fact a childhood acquaintance of Swamy, but he had not known him very well. When he first started to shout outside the hut Swamy ignored him, but when it became clear that he was not going to leave without some sort of answer, Swamy wrote a s/oka from the Bhagavad Gita (chapter 6, verse 5) on a slip of paper and passed it out through the window. There was no light in or near Swamy’s hut so the man had to take the note to the toddy shop nearby to read It.

The verse read: ‘“‘Let a man lift himself by himself; let him not degrade himself; for the Self alone is the friend of the self and the Self alone is the enemy of the self.”’ The message, although appro- priate, was much too abstruse for a man who was partly drunk and who had no knowledge of spiritual philosophy. He returned to Swamy’s hut, shouted that he didn’t understand the message and asked Swamy to show him what he should do. This time Swamy made no reply. The man then became angry and started to abuse him. Finally, he threatened to burn the hut down if Swamy didn’t answer his questions. When Swamy still declined to give an answer he took out a matchbox and was about to strike a match when he saw a huge cobra on the roof of the hut. It was no ordinary snake; it appeared to him to have five heads. As the snake started sliding towards him he panicked, dropped his matchbox, and started running towards Gudur. The cobra followed him and apparently moved just fast enough to keep him in sight. The man looked over his shoulder several times, and each time he saw that the five-headed cobra was still pursuing him. On the last occasion he saw it he was half a mile from Swamy’s hut.
This man still lives in Gudur and he is still insisting that a five-headed cobra chased him all the way back to town. Whatever the truth of the matter it was certainly a traumatic experience for him.
He gave up drinking, reformed his character a little, and years later, when Swamy was more accessible, he visited the ashram a few times to have his darshan.
*
In 1959 a local advocate, who visited Swamy occasionally, lost his only son. The boy, aged four, died after a sudden illness. Full of grief he wrote to Swamy asking him to explain why his son had to die at such an early age. He also wanted to know if the boy’s death was inevitable and predetermined, and if so, what possible reason could there be for putting a child on this earth for less than five years. Swamy wrote him a fairly long reply which fortunately has been preserved.

Death is inevitable to every born individual. Similarly, birth is inevitable to every dead person. Why do you grieve over inevitable happenings? You are saying that he is your child. Supposing that the child lived for 65 years in his previous life and lived for 5 years in his present life, his span of life would be 70 years in the aggregate. What do you call him? Your father or your child! In the previous life he was the child of one person, in his present life he is your child and in the future life he... [will] be the child of another. So it is not desirable to weep for his death under the illusion that he is your child. God has given him and has taken him back. Don’t grieve. Think that the whole universe is one family. Every second, millions of people take birth and millions die. If one were to weep for all the dead persons... [one] will have to wail ceaselessly for days and nights throughout life. Is it possible? See! How many difficulties are to be faced with this body. It has to be washed thrice. It has to be fed. It has to be clothed. Its endless desires have to be satisfied. The dead are more happy. | They do not grieve. Will anyone weep... [when] he goes to sleep. We are in the three states [waking, dreaming and deep sleep]. We are having the gross inert body in the waking [state], the subtle body in the dream [state], and the cosmic body in sushupti [deep sleep]. Is not the one who transcends all these three states and dissolves himself in the Supreme Self really liberated? Is it wisdom to seek permanence of this inert body either to oneself or to others? Think [it] over. At the time of death, the mind forgets the existing body and enters into another body. Whether [you] will it or not what is destined to happen will certainly happen as ordained by God. Hence it is advisable to leave all sorrows to God and live in peace.’
*
Sarada had no religious inclinations at all during her childhood but she did have a curiously ascetic nature. She had an aversion to wearing good clothes and she had little or no interest in the food that was given to her. When she was taken shopping to buy clothes she would always prefer to buy cheap, coarse material; if her clothes became torn she would prefer to pin them together rather than have them properly mended. These habits were a source of embarrass- ment to her family. Her dark skin (the rest of her family were light-skinned) and her cheap clothes led many people to believe that she was a servant rather than a member of the family. Sarada didn’t care what impression she made on people; she was unperturbed by her parents’ embarrassment, and equally unaffected by the people who looked down on her because of her appearance. Her indiffer- ence even extended to her diet since she cannot ever remember having any interest in food (...)
Although she was indifferent to food and clothes her temperament was far from placid. She was always getting into heated arguments with her brothers and sisters. In the inevitable fights that ensued, she would compensate for her smallness and weakness by fighting ferociously. On many occasions she drew blood by scratching her opponents with her fingernails.
*
After she and her sister had been at- tending the darshans for four weeks they had a heated argument in their house which reduced Sarada to tears. The subject was a trivial domestic matter but Sarada says that the argument was an im- portant milestone in her life: from that day on her feeling of disgust towards the mundane events of everyday life increased, and a strong desire to be detached from all human affairs started to grow in her.
At the conclusion of the argument Sarada wrote a letter to Swamy.
Om Namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya. Om Namo Bhagavate Sri Lakshmanaye. Sri Lakshmana Swamy. There is no happiness in this world. In nothing is there any happiness. I should not be attached to anything. Bhagavan, you are my only refuge. I have no support except you. I am surrendering to you. You are my father, mother and Guru, and if you do not exist, then I do not exist either. I am writing this letter in much agony; please show me your grace. I am not compelling you, excuse me, but you are my only refuge. I am giving my life to you, for you are everything to me. No one is loving me except you, and except for you no one is pitying me. I am surrendering to you. Lakshmana Bhagavan. Surrender, surrender, surrender.

SARADA Sri Lakshmana was impressed with the letter and he told his mother that Sarada’s dispassion was very good. However, since it was not his practice to reply to devotees’ letters, the letter went unanswered.
*
Sarada was now free to resume her meditation again since she had no more intruding worries to disturb her. Her mind was constantly turned towards Swamy, and everything else, including her schoolwork, was ignored. On the 23rd of July Sarada came to Swamy and told him: “I cannot read my school books any more because I am always thinking of you. The teachers are now getting angry with me. I want to stop going to school.” Swamy sympathised with her problem and promised to ask her father if she could leave school.
The following day he found an opportunity to speak to Ramana- dham and explained the situation to him. Her father had been hoping that Sarada would complete her 10th standard year, but after listening to Swamy’s request, he allowed her to leave immediately. Sarada’s school career came to an end the same day.

*
After Swamy had given her the lecture on detachment he asked her again about her decision not to marry. When Sarada confirmed her decision Swamy told her, “Then you can get enlightened”.
Sarada thought that Swamy would not be continually asking this question unless he doubted her sincerity. In order to finally convince him she told him, “When I look at Swamy it is as if I am looking at God. I am always in bliss in your presence, but when you ask me about marriage I get angry. I shall remain in brahmacharya [the state of celibacy] or I shall die. I shall not go back on my word for I don’t want that life of a dog.”
*
Unable to bear the separation any longer, Sarada sat down and wrote a letter to Swamy asking him to allow her to come and see him again.

Sri Lakshmana Bhagavan. You are God who gives bliss. I cannot leave you even for a minute. You are my mother, father, Guru, God. Whatever you say I will do. I wish to stay always with you, and I am only happy when I am with you. I have no other direction to go. I cannot forget your name, and I shall always be thinking about your name and form. You are the foundation for me, and my burden is yours forever. If I realise the Self I shall have no business with you.Till then I have to stay with you. You attracted my mind, and now you have stolen it.

At the conclusion of the letter she composed a poem:

In my difficulties you will hear my words and you will help me. In leaving me you cannot go anywhere for you are the Self. Please don’t cast me aside. I am surrendering my life to you. What use is this life without looking at your form?

Bala took the letter to Swamy, but Swamy’s only comment was that the poem was very good.
Sarada’s exile lasted nearly a week. On the 8th of July, when she was paying her first permitted weekly visit to the ashram, Swamy told her that he had only been testing her devotion again. He said that he had wanted to see what her reaction would be if he appeared to take the Old Woman’s side in her long-running dispute with her. Swamy said that she had passed the test well. From then on he always sided with Sarada when she got into fights with the Old Woman.
*
Ramanadham came to the ashram early the following morning. When Swamy told him that he wanted to adopt Sarada as his daughter he raised no objection. The adoption ceremony, which took place immediately, was brief and informal. Swamy assembled everyone who was in the ashram and then addressed the following question to Sarada: “‘Are you going to stay with me always, from today onwards?’’. Sarada replied “Yes’’. Swamy continued, “From today I am taking you from Ramanadham as my adopted daughter. From today onwards you are my daughter.” Then Swamy addressed the Old Woman: ‘From today onwards Sarada is your grand-daughter. Look after her. Give her hot water and attend to her other needs.” The Old Woman deliberately looked away from Swamy’s face while he was speaking to her and his words had no effect. She made no attempt to supply Sarada with any of her needs, nor did she lessen her attempts to drive her from the ashram.
*
At the beginning of October 1978 Sarada’s sister, who lived in Bangalore, became ill] and Sarada was asked to go and look after her for a few days. She left on the 18th, planning to spend only a few days there, but her sister’s condition did not improve and she was unable to return to Swamy until December. (...)

It was during her stay in Bangalore that Sarada first started to go into Kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. She says that at first she had no idea what these states were; the first few times that it happened she thought that she was only falling into a very pleasant sleep. In between these states her mind, which had been quiet and relatively thought-free for several months, suddenly started getting some very strange desires.

During all her years with Swamy she had only ever had one or two cheap outfits to wear, and she had never paid much attention to her personal appearance. Now, in Bangalore, she suddenly started to look at her sister’s expensive clothes with a strong desire to be dressed in a similar way. At one point her mind even developed a strong craving for siddhis. Sarada watched these desires with great interest, but she never made any attempt to fulfil them. She says that for the last few months of that year she was in a completely detached state. This enabled her to witness all her thoughts, desires and emotions dispassionately, without ever becoming involved in them.
In the last few weeks that she was in Bangalore she spent nearly all her time either in a thought-free state, or in a state of samadhi.

She stopped meditating on Swamy, stopped performing puja to his picture, and spent many hours of each day lying on her bed. Her sister thought that she was just being lazy; on one occasion she told Sarada, “‘You live in an ashram, and you are supposed to be a devotee, but you don’t meditate any more and you have stopped doing puja. What kind of devotee are you? You just lie on your bed all day and do nothing.’’ When the remark was made, Sarada was so deeply immersed in one of her thought-free states that she was incapable of either explaining what was happening to her, or of giving any kind of answer at all.

When Deepam day arrived that year (12.12.78) Sarada roused herself from her thought-free state and celebrated the festival by drawing a picture of Arunachala; she put Swamy’s picture and a symbolic light on top of it. As she concentrated on Swamy and Arunachala she entered a thought-free state again; her mind subsided into the Heart and she had a temporary experience of the Self.

The following day she decided that she could not stay in Bangalore any longer and she told her sister that she had to see Swamy urgently.

She says that during all the time that she was in Bangalore the world had appeared to her as if it was a dream. With a desire to see Swamy uppermost in her mind she decided that the dream had to end.

However, her sister had not fully recovered from her illness and this prevented her from leaving for another three days; she was not able to leave for Gudur until the evening of the 16th.

She returned to Gudur by bus and spent most of the journey ina state of samadhi, or near samadhi. This was rather inconvenient because she had to change buses in Tirupati. She was conscious enough to get off the bus there with her bag, but then she relapsed into a thought-free state again. A friendly fellow-traveller found her some time later, standing by the side of the road, staring vacantly into space. When he discovered that Sarada was heading for Gudur he put her on the correct bus. Sarada stayed conscious long enough to pay her fare and then relapsed into a full samadhi state for the remainder of the three-hour trip.

She was met by her family in Gudur and escorted to their house. They tried to entertain her by telling her all the latest news and gossip, but she was unable to keep her attention on what they were saying, and she was unable to make any kind of reply herself. Eventually her family just assumed that she was very tired and let her go to bed.

The next morning, at 10 a.m., she went to the ashram, sat down in front of Swamy and tried to tell him about the thought-free states that she had been experiencing. She was still deeply immersed in such a state and she found it hard to speak. Swamy tried to engage her attention by telling her about a few of the events that had been going on in the ashram in her absence, but Sarada couldn’t concentrate on anything he said. When she told Swamy that she wasn’t capable of paying attention he stopped trying to engage her in conversation. He had been watching her intently ever since she arrived and he could see that the Self was trying to pull the ‘I’-thought towards it. A few minutes later a party of visitors came to look at the ashram. Swamy went into his house because he didn’t want to see them, but Sarada remained sitting on his veranda. She remained there for the next two hours, immersed in a state of kevalu nirvikalpa samadhi. Sometimes her eyes were half open, but she wasn’t aware of seeing anything because her mind had completely subsided into the Heart. When she kept her eyes open for any length of time the ‘I’-thought would rise from the Heart to the brain, but Sarada soon discovered that she could easily make it subside again by closing her eyes.

At about midday Bala brought Swamy and Sarada some food. Swamy called Sarada into the house because he thought that she should have something to eat, but Sarada found that she was incapable of moving by herself. Eventually, Bala and Swamy had to help her into the house. Sarada found it very difficult to eat; the first time she tried she only managed to lift her hand half-way to her mouth. After a few false starts, and with Swamy’s help, she finally managed to swallow a little food and drink a little water. She spent the rest of the day, and all of the following night, in samadhi. During the course of the day Swamy helped her to walk up and down his veranda a few times, but for the rest of the time he allowed her to remain undisturbed.

The next morning she came out of samadhi with a strong awareness that her I’-thought was still existing. She remembered the peace of the previous day and night when she had been in samadhi, with the ‘I’-thought temporarily gone, and she decided to see if she could enter the same state again. She closed her eyes and within a few minutes her I’-thought subsided into the Heart and she went back into samadhi again. The ‘l’-thought emerged from the Heart several times during the day, but each time it subsided Sarada was convinced that she had realised the Self. She was still able to talk and Swamy, thinking that her realisation was near, placed a small tape-recorder near her to record her words. Sarada spoke in short, quiet sentences, with frequent pauses as she was overwhelmed by the bliss of the Self.

I have no body. I have no ‘I’. I am not the body. How I am talking I do not know. Some power is talking through me.

Swamy asked her if she was looking and she replied:

Even though I am looking, I am not looking. Where is the ‘T° to look. When the mind enters the Heart there 1s no I’ to tell that there ts no ‘I’. My I is dead.

Swamy then asked her how she was feeling.

My whole body 1s filled with peace and bliss. I cannot describe it. Everything is filled with peace. The Self is pulling me towards it and I am not able to open my eyes. The whole body is weak.
Swamy remarked, ‘‘It is like an elephant entering a weak hut. The hut cannot stand the strain. Is it beyond time and death?” It is beyond time and death as there is no mind. As the "I" is dead I don’t wish to eat anymore. I am not able to eat. However tasty the food I cannot eat. I have no desire to eat. Everything is filled with peace and bliss. I am content with my realisation. I have recognised my own Self, so I am content.

Swamy then told her that her ‘I’ was not yet dead and that she had not yet reached the final state. Sarada replied:

As the ‘I’ is dead there is no you.

‘‘Have you no mother or father?” asked Swamy.

No father, no mother, no world. Everything is peace and bliss.

Why do I have to eat when there is no ‘I’? The body is inert, it cannot eat. A corpse will not eat. It is like that because the ‘I' is dead. As I cannot eat I cannot talk. Who is talking I do not know.

‘‘Then who is talking?” asked Swamy. Sarada remained silent and so Swamy answered his own question. “‘The Self is talking.” Sarada continued:

Even though I am seeing, I am not seeing. Even though I am talking I am not talking. Whatever I do I am not doing it because the 'I’ is dead. I have no body. All the nerves are filled with peace and bliss. All is Brahman. All is bliss. In the veins instead of blood, love and bliss are flowing. A great power has entered into me.

Three months before Swamy had told Sarada, “Even though I sleep I am not sleeping’’. Sarada remembered this, repeated Swamy’s words and said that she was finally able to understand what he had meant. Sarada continued to talk:

I have no thought of doing anything. I have no fear of death. Before, I feared death, but not anymore. I don’t care about death. I have nothing more to do. I shall give up the body.

Swamy asked her to stay but Sarada answered:

What is death to die now? The body is inert, how can it die? My ‘I is dead, what is there left to die’? Why then fear death?

Swamy then reminded her that her ‘I was not dead and that she was not yet in the final sahaja state. Swamy then stopped the tape we were listening to and talked a little about the state that Sarada was experiencing when she spoke these words.

‘‘Anyone whose mind completely subsides into the Heart for a short time can talk like an enlightened person. Their experience of the Self is the same as that of a realised person. However, their ‘I' thought is not dead and it is likely to re-emerge at any time. Such an experience is not the final state because it is not permanent.” He then played the final portion of Sarada’s comments on her experience.

I am everywhere. J am not the body. I have no body so J have no fear. I am immobile. Whatever I may do I am immobile. I am shining as the Self. Everything is a great void [maha-sunya]. How can I describe the Self in words? It is neither light nor dark. No one can describe what it is. In the past, present and future no one can describe what it is. It is difficult to describe. Self is Self, that is all.

Throughout that day Sarada’s mind kept sinking into the Self, but on each occasion it came out again. At 4 p.m. the ‘I’-thought went from the Heart to the brain and started to bang against the inside of her skull. Sarada said later that it was like an axe trying to split her head open from the inside. Since she was not able to bear the pain she came forward, took Swamy’s hand and placed it on her head. The ‘I’-thought went back to the Heart, but again it was only a temporary subsidence. Three minutes later it rose again and once again started to bang against the inside of her skull. Sarada came forward, placed her head on Swamy’s feet and a few seconds later the ‘I’-thought returned to its source and died forever.

With her ‘I’-thought permanently gone Sarada had realised the Self. Swamy says that in the final few minutes her ‘I’-thought was trying to escape and take birth again, and that had he not been present, the ‘I’-thought would have killed her and escaped.

In the first few minutes after realisation Swamy thought that Sarada was going to give up her body. Her arms and legs went stiff and cold and her blood circulation stopped. Swamy shook her to try and revive her, but she was unable to open her eyes. It occurred to Swamy that if she did give up the body, not only would her family be very angry with him, but he might even be arrested for murder. Eventually he took her to her parents’ house in Gudur, but it took five days before Sarada was able to sustain consciousness of her body for any length of time. Throughout this period she was continually saying that she wanted to give up the body, and Swamy had to use all his powers of persuasion to keep her alive.

Swamy gave her the new name of Mathru Sri Sarada; Mathru means mother and Sni is an honorific prefix. He was most anxious that she stay in the body because he felt that she could offer invaluable help to devotees who were seeking the Self. However, he had great difficulty in keeping her alive; Sarada continued to show no interest in retaining her body and for the next twelve months Swamy was engaged in a daily battle to keep her in contact with the world.
Almost every day Sarada would lose body consciousness and withdraw into the Self. Each time she did it she would say that she no longer wanted her body and that she was going to give it up.
*

Saradamma asserts that the world is nothing but the mind. The logical inference from this is that nani’s do not perceive the world at all since they no longer have a mind. Saradamma confirms that this is so in the following exchange. 

Question: You make two statements: one, the world ts nothing but the mind, and two, the realised person has no mind. If both these statements are true how do you see the world since you no longer have a mind? 

Saradamma: I don’t see the world, I only see the Self. Seeing the Self everywhere I look is such a fundamental property of my being that I sometimes forget that devotees are not also seeing what I am seeing. When this happens it is only when they speak that I am reminded that they all have minds, and that when they look at the world they are only looking at their minds. 

Not having a mind, Saradamma travels through life unencumbered by any mental baggage. The implications of this are sometimes quite surprising. 

Saradamma: Sometimes I go to Bangalore and visit my sister who lives there. While I am away from the ashram I completely forget about it because there is no mind to keep reminding me of its existence. When I come back to the ashram it is very strange. Even though everything is familiar, it is almost as if I am visiting the place for the first time. Since I do not have a mind, there is nothing in me to provide continuity with the past. The Self only exists in the present moment, and since it has no residue of the past attached to it, each experience is new and fresh. When I am in my sister’s house in Bangalore, that household is all that exists for me. When I am here, only the ashram exists. Wherever I am there is no attachment to the past and no anticipation of the future.

*

Saradamma frequently stresses that the Self cannot be described in words, but on many occasions she tries to describe the indescribable. 

The first account in this chapter was written by Saradamma herself in Telugu only ten days after her realisation. It is a glowing account of the jnani’s experience of the Self. 

Saradamma: When I opened my eyes after realisation there was only peace inside and out. I knew that I was the Self and that when I uttered the word ‘I’, this ‘I’ meant only the Self. Even though I may see, I am not seeing; even though I may hear, I am not hearing; even though I may talk I am not talking. When I wake up I am not really waking and when I sleep I am not really sleeping. Sleep, waking and dream are passing before the Self but they cannot touch it. Whatever I may do I am not doing it. I have no sin and no virtue, no sleep and no waking, for I am always in the state of sahaja samadhi. Whatever I may do I am always in that State. 

If there is a mind then there is a world. If there is no mind then there is no world and no body. There is nothing except the Self and the Self has no name and no form. It 1s eternal peace. I am ever content. I have been able to gain the most valuable thing in the world, for all the riches in the world cannot buy or balance the Self. Even though I did not know that it was possible to get it I attained it, for without my knowing it, the Self killed the ‘I’. Everything is the Self and nothing is apart from it; this is my experience and I do not slip from that state. I am shining as the Self and there is no doubt about my experience.

*

Since her Self-realisation Saradamma’s link with her body and the world has been very tenuous and unstable; on many occasions she has withdrawn into the Self and completely lost bodily and worldly consciousness. She calls these withdrawals ‘going into samadhi’. Because of the misleading connotations of the word samadhi, I have substituted the expression ‘Self-absorption’ in the following description of these periodic withdrawals. 

Saradamma: Although my experience of the Self never varies, sometimes awareness of the body and the world fluctuates. I have no interest in keeping this body and sometimes I go into a state of complete Self-absorption where the body and the world cease to exist. This body is a useless appendage for me. The Self does not need a body and sometimes the feeling arises, “Why should I keep it anymore? Every day it needs feeding, washing and clothing. It is a sick weak body, full of pain. Why should I prolong its existence?” When these feelings about the body arise, or when there is a great pain, then I withdraw into the Self. Sometimes I also do it if I am by myself and I feel an urge to dive deep into the peace and bliss of the Self. On these occasions I close my eyes. Then I direct attention within and there is a feeling that I can only describe as ‘closing up’. I cannot describe either the process or the experience even in Telugu because one who has not realised the Self cannot possibly understand it. 

There are several stages or levels of absorption which I can withdraw to. In the first few stages there is a partial loss of body consciousness and the body feels like an inert lump of stone. All pain and touch sensations disappear but I can still hear what people are saying, and with a little effort I can still manage to speak to them. 

In these first few levels it is relatively easy to open the eyes and resume normal body consciousness again, but as I withdraw more and more, it gets progressively more and more difficult to reverse the process. After a long or deep period of Self-absorption it is sometimes very difficult to open the eyes and direct attention outwards rather than inwards; it often takes many attempts before I finally succeed. These periods of Self-absorption are so attractive that Swamy often has to plead with me to get me to come out of them. He knows that if I stay in this state for a long time there is a possibility that I might give up the body. 

The experience of peace, bliss and self-sufficiency is the same whether I am absorbed in the Self or not, but when I am freed from the shackles of the body, and when I know that in that state I need nothing, I am often most unwilling to resume body consciousness again.

*

Saradamma usually describes her experiences of the Self by using such words as ‘peace’, ‘bliss’ and ‘love’. In the following brief exchange she reaffirms that her experience of the Self is continuous and asserts that its real nature is peace and bliss. 

Saradamma: I am always shining as the Self. I am always peace and bliss and nothing can shake me from that state. If I appear to be angry or sad it is only so in the eyes of other people. To me these images are merely emotions which appear and disappear on the screen of the ever-peaceful Self. 

Question: Do you always experience the bliss of the Self, the ananda?

Saradamma: Always! Always! In fact I don’t experience it, I am it.  I am that ananda, it is I.

*

When she is talking about the Self Saradamma often calls it ‘the Heart’. Usually she uses this term as a synonym for the Self but sometimes She also uses it to indicate the Heart-centre on the right side of the chest. This centre is the one which Swamy spoke about as being the source of the ‘I’-thought. In the following conversations she talks about this centre and her experience of it both before and after her Self-realisation. 

Question: I heard Swamy talking about your experience of the Heart-centre. Was this permanent and how did it affect you afterwards? 

Saradamma: When the mind dies in the Heart it is dead forever.  It never rises again. I cannot say what my experience of this state is because it cannot be described in words. But I can say a little about how this affected me. There are now no worries, no fears and no desires; the experience itself I cannot describe. 

Before Self-realisation [ sometimes went into samadhi. As I went into and came out of these states there was an awareness of the Heart-centre on the right side of the chest. However, since realisation, I know that the Heart cannot be located in the body. The Heart is the Self and it is immanent in all things.

It is the source of everything and it is neither inside the body nor outside. It is everywhere.
*
Swamy: In sound sleep the mind (the ‘I’) enters into the Heart but it remains in an ignorance of the Self which cannot be described in words. Just before waking, the mind, which is the ‘I’-thought, rises from the Heart to the brain in a split second through a passage called the amrita nadi. Then the mind experiences the world through the five senses and thinks that it is real. In Self-realisation, the pure mind, without thoughts and problems, returns back to the Heart-cave through this same passage.

As the mind tries to pass through the narrow way, the Self pulls the mind towards it and kills it After the death of the ‘I’ the Self will remain, one without a second; it is eternal peace and bliss. As there is no mind, there is no world, no birth and no death. Just as ornaments are not apart from the gold they are made of, even so, the world is not apart from the Self. As the Self is all-pervading, it is beyond time, directions and the three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping.
*
Saradamma: If you are always thinking about worldly things your mind becomes dirty. From a spiritual point of view the mind is like a mirror; it is only useful when it is clean. If you keep a mirror outside it will get so covered with dust and mud that you cannot see your face in it. If you keep the mirror inside a cupboard it stays clean and you can use it whenever you need it. When the mind wanders among worldly things a layer of vasanas (mental activities) forms on it which prevents it from reflecting or being aware of the light of the Self within. If you stop the mind from wandering and keep it turned towards God, then no outside influences can deposit any vasanas on it. This is the mental equivalent of keeping the mirror in the cupboard. Sometimes you have to use your mind. On such occasions, take it out of the cupboard, let it do its job, and then put it back again. When you don’t need to use your mind, put it back in the cupboard by thinking of God, otherwise it will get dirty.
*

Sitting for many hours in meditation is not necessarily good. Sometimes excessive meditation just dulls the mind and leaves it in a permanent state of tamas. A thought-free state is not necessarily good either because there is a tamasic thought-free state in which there is no peace or bliss, only a semi-conscious stupor. No progress is being made when one is in this state.
*
Saradamma: If you love one person more than another this is not true love; it is an attachment created by desire. To love all things equally, seeing the Self in all of them, is true love. When the Self ts realised, and sometimes even before, one can feel this love animating and flowing through the body in the same way that blood flows through the veins and arteries. It is love which binds the universe together and sustains it. Without love it would be nothing more than a collection of inert matter.

It is the same with the human body; without love, or the Self, the body would just be an inert lump.
All love is the same love, but love other than the love of God is a waste. When two people love each other and get married, what are they loving? They are loving each other’s minds and bodies. If a man loved the Self in his wife he would not grieve when her body dies because he would know that nothing has really happened to the Self. When two people marry and give all their love to each other they are building a wall around themselves. They have no love left for God or the Self, and because of this they can never see and love the Self, which is immanent in all things. Couples who only love each other can never realise the Self because they are preoccupied with their minds and bodies and have no love left for God.

From a spiritual point of view the ideal man-woman relationship is one in which the couple live as brother and sister, and instead of wasting their love on each other, they give it all to God.

from the book No Mind — I Am the Self The lives and teachings of Sri Lakshmana Swamy and Mathru Sri Sarada by David Godman

The Nature of Women - the article plus selected quotes

“But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe…”  – Knut Hamsun

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Dissociative Rationalisation aka Hamstering
3.) Mental Gymnastics
4.) Dissociation, Her Substitute for Psychopathy
5.) Women, Words, Beliefs & Lies
6.) Her Fluidity of Truth
7.) In Closing
8.) Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

To understand women with at least some degree of competence, one must firstly understand Machiavellianism. Once they understand Machiavellianism, they must come to understand dissociation. After understanding dissociation, the next logical step is to understand dissociation’s relationship with rationalisation, for rationalisation is reason built upon fantasy. A hoax, but one that can only be identified as such once you have investigated its origin.

Most within the red pill community come to know of rationalisation before dissociation; I suspect many know not what dissociation is in spite of its relation to rationalisation. Without dissociation, the reality removing mechanism on which feminine solipsism is predicated, rationalisation lacks the conviction needed to be convincing. The most compelling of a woman’s performances thus requires dissociation to masquerade as truth. If she did not believe her lies, neither would you.

2.) Dissociative Rationalisation aka Hamstering:

If womankind did not possess an infinite capacity for dissociation, the effectiveness of her manipulations would be greatly vitiated. Such a woman would be unable to leverage her sexuality into attaining commitment once she’d had more than a few partners. Her sexuality would be utilised and disposed of like something to be consumed, as once perceived a whore, she would become her sexuality and deemed to lack essence in absence of it. All too aware of this, dissociation is women’s primary coping mechanism.

If a woman cannot sell herself a false narrative, she cannot manipulate men into holding her in higher regard. Her worthiness of this bothers her not, her only concern is to obtain her ends. Although man is romantic, he does not easily trust or forgive women of dubious history. Such women are objectified in great ubiquity, for no value is seen in a whore outside the physical pleasure her flesh can offer. Some women set out to commodify themselves in this manner, we call them prostitutes.

And yet a prostitute would not be able to engage in the mental gymnastics necessary to forgive herself her promiscuity if she were chained to decision-making in a way that reason absent dissociation necessitates. In order for a woman to opportunistically capitalise on her sexuality, she must be capable of great dissociation. With dissociation, she can avoid consequences for her life choices, enabling her to convince a man she possesses an innocence and chastity she has long lacked.

A woman would get what she deserves, rather than what she wanted or needed if she could not dissociate. Luckily, nature has equipped women with an instinctual proclivity to dissociate. Women have evolved to become humanity’s most competent liars, in spite of themselves, for their own sake. Rather than striving to be better than she is, womankind has become competent in pretending she need not be better because she already is what she isn’t – better.

3.) Mental Gymnastics:

Machiavellianism, dissociation and rationalisation lie at the root and core of female behaviour. Female manipulation is about as natural as much as it is instinctual. It comes easily. Some women are comfortable with this aspect of themselves, others are not. Some may freely admit this to themselves, others may need to see themselves as good; such women seek to maintain a pretence of virtue in order to prop up whatever semblance of sanity they possess. When a woman cannot accept what she is, she lies to herself about who she is until she believes in her lies. A lie told long enough feels like the truth, women know this truth quite intimately.

Of course, there are women who are at peace with their nature and do not care, their rationalisation merely a method of safeguarding reputation – a neurotic means to a rational end. These women are far more dangerous than their in-denial counterparts, for they are cognisant but seek not to mitigate their nature. This is to say that all women are Machiavellian, but some are so with more zeal and aggression. Effectively, some women value altruism in spite of themselves, so upon introspection deceive themselves about themselves with great conviction. Others do not care, so they do not.

All women are similar, but likewise within that similarity, there is difference as there is with men. The difference may not be as emphatically noticeable as it is within the diversity of man, but it is there. If the rather drawn out discussion on morality we’ve been having has taught you anything recently, it’s that although we all value the ideas discussed by the red pill, each of us will act upon this knowledge differently. Women are much the same with their capacity to manipulate and dissociate. Sometimes they indulge in it and weaponise it, other times they deny reality and live a lie as a means to cope. In spite of how they use it, they all use it.

What one must realise is that woman’s capacity to rationalise away anything she doesn’t like is one of the greatest tools she has in amplifying her manipulative prowess. If women couldn’t dissociate and rationalise to the point she can pass a lie detector test, she’d be far less proficient in manipulating man. And a woman who cannot manipulate a man is a vulnerable woman, for she is completely reliant on the volition and altruism of man rather than possessing any for herself. As such, women are not built to live and hunt alone, but to attach themselves to man. Conversely, man does not need women, but rather he covets her for all her ostentatious adornment and lustful appeal. Woman’s need is greater, but owing to the libido of testosterone, man’s is more pressing.

4.) Dissociation, Her Substitute for Psychopathy:

I find female dissociation to be something tantamount to psychopathy in the absence of psychopathy. Women can do great evil by act of self-compulsion, effectively inculcating themselves to believe the abhorred acts they have engaged in are without dishonour. In this aspect, honour is a uniquely male abstraction that women do not hold themselves to. Even if a woman does believe in honour, she may as well not; for she will find a way to pervert the truth and clutch at any justification necessary to make an act of dishonour seem honourable. They hold onto such clutched straws with a delusional sincerity that belies falsehood. And all this occurs to ensure her interests – at any cost.

I see a utilitarian parallel between female nature and psychopathic moral reasoning, in fact, I see many similarities between the two, but one must be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. It is not that women as a group are psychopathic, not at all, but rather, that dissociation allows them to behave as if they were by completely twisting reality.

The histrionic self-delusion inherent of women is an effective substitution for psychopathy if you need to get something done at any cost, but aren’t actually a psychopath. Man has always been baffled by how someone who feels great sympathy for others can seemingly, as if by choice, turn off such sympathy without a shred of guilt. This is a behavioural observation unique to women noted by many men in many places. What they are observing is a woman dissociating in order to withdraw sympathy where she once felt it. Even after reading red pill material man does not completely understand this aspect of women, the moral and logical gymnastics native to womankind continues to baffle man because man is a creature of reason and morals more than he is pragmatism. For women, this is not so.

The greatest irony is that man ponders women with a consciousness bound to reason, endeavouring to find the reason for the unreasonableness of the opposite sex, repeatedly failing. In this pursuit he encounters great futility and frustration, for even if the opposite sex did possess the required self-awareness to explain herself, which she does not, she would not be inclined to explain such a thing, for it would not serve her.

5.) Women, Words, Beliefs & Lies:

I don’t assign any real value to what a woman says when she speaks of morals or loyalty or other such topics. This may sound harsh or undue, but I believe it necessary. Knowing someone can dissociate in order to hold incredibly strong convictions and then likewise do the same to dispose of said convictions when they are no longer useful means that person will never have any credibility or sway with me. Someone who is too fluid in their views and convictions is someone who does not have strong views or convictions. Because even though these things may seem plausible and compelling in the moment, they are too temporary to carry any real depth. In essence, women have mastered the aesthetics of depth – to seem deep without being deep.

I regard such things to be nothing more than pretty aesthetics, an extension of what she does with her physical appearance manifesting in the mental. The female word is much like the female form, covered by makeup, nothing more than mere pretension, a distorted augmentation of who she really is. Much like man wishes to believe the woman he lusts for would be just as pretty without the makeup, he falls victim to this same line of thinking when assessing her mentality. And so as a man it takes me far too much work to ascertain whether her asserted beliefs are things said to please me, to deceive me or to otherwise please or deceive herself. And I know it is always one of these things, and never not one of these things, because if it were not one of these things, she would be not a woman.

As such one should judge a woman how one would judge any character so flexible as to be scrupulous. Ascertain whether what she says benefits her to be seen and heard saying, or whether her beliefs assist her goals in spite of reputational considerations. If it does not aid her goal, and yet she claims it, it is likely a lie.

For example, if she claimed to be unconditionally loyal, ask yourself if she needs to be loyal to get what she wants? No, you say? You say she ensnared a man who cannot maintain her respect to marry her? You find it likely she would get everything in the divorce? Then she claims what she does to safeguard her reputation or because she is otherwise invested in ignorant self-delusion. The delusion that she is incapable of the betrayal that any man of sound mind knows her to be capable of. Such a woman is not self-aware enough as to be in touch with her nature, but rather she is enamoured with the false image she has created for herself to look at. She believes she is the thing she tells herself she is, rather than the thing her behaviour tells us she is.

How does she so convincingly dissociate you ask? Women are good at transference, a term I use to refer to “reverse-projection.” Essentially, she believes a man’s loyalty to her is important, and so through cognitive transference can borrow the devoutness of that belief and appear, at least superficially, to hold herself to the same standard. She will temporarily believe she is loyal due to the conviction of her dissociation, much like you would temporarily believe an ugly woman is pretty whilst possessed by bourbon. Dissociation is intoxicating, and whilst under its influence, her shallow nonsense will sound devout.

Women have an innately powerful capacity to be entirely delusional in a self-serving manner, unhindered by logic and aided by dissociation, women are masterful liars. They are so good at lying to themselves, that lying to you is simply a by-product of their own delusion.

6.) Her Fluidity of Truth:

Women blend truth with convenient lies as to be deliberately confusing in a way that is nothing if not self-serving. The less intelligent amongst them forget what the truth really is, because it’s only ever what they need it to be.

Women are poor at rational abstraction, which means “their truth,” like them, is fickle. The more intelligent women can keep up with their own lies, and on some level know they do not entirely believe what they compel themselves to portray. But in spite of such cognisance, such women still possess a prowess in compartmentalising just enough to maintain the deception necessary to ascertain their goals. Women are greatly goal orientated and will jump through huge cognitive hoops to get what they want. Logic, valued by man as sacrosanct, is a sordid obstruction to the mechanics of the utilitarian female mind. When logic is inconvenient to a woman, dissociation takes its place.

And this way of being that possesses women is so innate it is not even calculated. It is a truly remarkable thing to behold, as to be a man, no such method of mind is inherent. Your beliefs, your sense of identity, it is neither so fluid nor so flexible as to constantly complement and adapt to your moment’s desires. You are not so free in your beliefs because your beliefs are not so fickle, they have merit, structure and a root reasoning for existing outside the immediate utilitarian aim that you seek. Again, I see great similarity between female and psychopathic morality. This is not to say all women are psychopaths because that is an incorrect diagnosis, but rather, although through different mechanisms, they equally possess a ruthless pragmatic morality.

7.) In Closing:

It doesn’t matter how much conviction a woman speaks with, for she can delude herself to believe whatever is necessary with uncanny prowess. She can pervert the truth so much so, that any old nonsense she says can speak with the conviction of truth even if it is an absolute perversion of it. This is woman’s greatest power, other than of course, her sexuality. And it is that element unique to women that makes her as effortlessly Machiavellian as she is. As I have said before, women are nature’s Machiavellians.

https://illimitableman.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-nature-of-women/

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Intellectually, a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied. . . . Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with particular instances than with general principles; they judge rather by intuitive perceptions than by deliberate reasoning.

Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but only because it is ugly . . . Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation! . . . They do something only because it pleases them . . . I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.
Immanuel Kant
*
In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgement, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Emma Jung
*
To men belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all that is universal and rational. Women, on the other hand, introduce into everything favour, exception, and personal prejudice.

Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy and certain types of artistic creativity; these require a universal ingredient. Women may hit on good ideas and they may, of course, have taste and elegance, but they lack the talent for the ideal.
Hegel

It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.
Charles Darwin

A woman's appearance depends upon two things: the clothes she wears and the time she gives to her toilet . . . Against the first we bring the charge of ostentation, against the second of harlotry.
Tertulian

The best couturiers, hairdressers, home designers and cooks are men. I suspect that were it biologically possible men would make better mothers.
Ida Alexa Ross Wylie

The opinion I have of the generality of women - who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
John Keats

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.

Such is the stupidity of woman's character that it is incumbent upon her, in every particular, to distrust herself and to obey her husband.
Confucius

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them very little.
Samuel Johnsen

Women have no sympathy . . . And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. Women crave _for being loved_, not for loving. They scream at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving _any_ in return for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so.
Florence Nightingdale

The great question... Which I have not been able to answer...is, "What does a woman want?" - Freud

I have found one good man in a thousand, But not one good woman among them.
Ecclesiastes 7:28

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.
Charles Darwin

In addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – where the whole human being was involved – it is certain that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant. But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it and by the common agreement of the Ancient schools of philosophy she is excluded from it.
Montaigne ↓

The only, essential, proper form of nobility in France is the profession of arms. It is probable that the first of the virtues to appear among men, giving some of them superiority over others, was the one by which the stronger and the more courageous made themselves masters of the weaker and so acquired individual rank and reputation, from which derive our terms of honour and dignity; or else those nations, being most warlike, gave the prize and the title highest in dignity to the virtue which they were most familiar with. So too our passion, our feverish concern, for the chastity of women results in une bonne femme (‘a good woman’), and une femme d’honneur, ou de vertu (‘a woman of honour’ or ‘of virtue’) in reality meaning for us a chaste woman – as though, in order to bind them to that duty, we neglected all the rest and gave them free rein for any other fault, striking a bargain to get them to give up that one.

It is dangerous to leave the superintendence of our succession to the judgement of our wives and to their choice between our sons, which over and over again is iniquitous and fantastic. For those unruly tastes and physical cravings which they experience during pregnancy are ever-present in their souls. They regularly devote themselves to the weakest and to the feeblest, or to those (if they have any) who are still hanging about their necks. Since women do not have sufficient reasoning-power to select and embrace things according to their merits they allow themselves to be led to where natural impressions act most alone – like animals, which only know their young while they are still on the teat.

Queen Margaret of Navarre relates the tale of a young ‘prince’ – and, even though she does not name him his exalted rank is quite enough to make him recognizable; whenever he was out on an assignation (lying with the wife of a Parisian barrister) he would take a short-cut through a church and never failed to make his prayers and supplications in that holy place, both on the way there and on the way back. I will leave you to judge what he was asking God’s favour for when his soul was full of such fair cogitations! Yet she cites that as evidence of outstanding devotion. But that is not the only proof we have of the truth that it hardly befits women to treat Theological matters.
Montaigne

Do people blush with shame in the dark? That people become pale with fright in the dark, I believe, but not that they blush with shame. For they become pale on their own account, but they blush on account of themselves as well as others.—The question whether women blush in the dark is a very difficult one, at least one that cannot be answered with the lights on.
Lichtenberg

One must make choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course.
Chamfort ↓

Apparently nature, in giving man an absolutely irradicable taste for women, must have foreseen that, without this precaution, the contempt inspired by the vices of their sex, vanity in particular, would be a great obstacle to the maintenance and propagation of the human species. 

A man who professed to esteem women highly was asked if he had enjoyed the favours of many. “Not so many as if I had despised them,” he said. 

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

A witty woman told me one day what may well be the secret of her sex: it is that every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

“He who has not seen much of demi-mondaines does not understand women at all,” gravely remarked to me a fond admirer of his own wife, who was unfaithful to him.

I remember to have seen a man forsaking the society of ballet girls because, so he said, he had found them as deceitful as honest women. 

Women only give to friendship what they borrow from love.

The woman who esteems herself more for her gifts of soul or intelligence than for her beauty is above her sex. She who esteems herself more for her beauty than for her intelligence or soul is of her sex. But she who esteems herself more for her birth or rank than for her beauty is outside her sex, beneath it.

A woman was at a performance of the tragedy of Mérope, and did not weep: surprise was expressed. “I could cry my eyes out,” she said, “but I have to go out to supper to-night.”
Chamfort

The punishment of those who have loved women too much, is to love them always.
Joubert ↓

Women think that whatever they dare do they may do.

In the uneducated classes, the women are superior to the men; in the upper classes, on the contrary, we find the men superior to the women. This is because men are more often rich in acquired virtues, and women in natural virtues.

Power is a beauty; it even makes women like old age.
Joubert

The male sex is not merely superior in relation to the female but acquires the status of the generally human, governing the phenom- ena of the individual male and the individual female in the same wa y. In various media, this fact is grounded in the power position of men. If we express the historical relationship between the sexes quite grossly as that between master and slave, then it is one of the privileges of the master that he does not always need to think about the fact thathe is master. The position of the slave, on the other hand", ensures that he will never forget his status. There is no doubt that the woman loses a conscious sense of her being as a female much more rarely than holds true for the man and his being as a male. There are innumerable occasions on which the man appears to think in a purely objective fashion without his masculinity concurrently occupying any place in his perceptions. On the other hand, it seems as if the woman never loses the feeling-which may be more or less clear or obscure-that she is a woman. This forms the subterranean ground of her life that never entirely disappears. All the contents of her life transpire on its basis.

Georg Simmel ↓

For the man, there is a sense inwhich sexuality is something he does. For the woman, it is a- mode of being. And yet-or, rather, precisely for this reason-the significance of the sexual difference is only a secondary fact for the woman. She reposes in her femininity as if in an absolute substantial essence and-somewhat paradoxically expressed-indifferent to whether men exist or not. For the man, this centripetal and autonomous sexuality simply does not exist. His masculinity (in the sexual sense) is much more pervasively bound up with his relationship to the woman than the femininity of the woman is determined by her relationship to the man. Th-enaive presupposition (which is precisely what is at stake here) is an obstacle to the acknowledgment of this consideration, and perhaps even to its comprehension: the assumption that femininity is a phenomenon determined only by its relation to the man, and that if this relation no longer obtained, nothing would remain. In fact, what remains is not a neutral "human being" but a woman. The autonomy of the sexual in the woman is exhibited most extensively in the course of pregnancy, which is independent of any further relationship to the man, and also in the consideration that, in the prehistory of humanity, obviously a very long time passed before there was any recognition of the causation of pregnancy by the sexual act.

Evidently the typical situation is this: The fulfillment of sexual desire tends to free the man from the relationship and bind the woman to it. The external reasons for this are obvious. For the man, the motive that impelled him to the woman has disappeared with the satisfaction of the impulse. For the woman, on the other hand, the need for a protective relationship arises from pregnancy. Here as well, however, the general pattern is that for the man, the sexual question is a relational question. Thus it disappears completely as soon as he no longer has any interest in the relationship. His absolute is not bound up with his sexual being. For the woman, this is a question of her nature, which her absolute also secondarily translates into the relationship that proceeds from it. The man may be brought to madness or suicide as a result of erotic experiences. However, he feels that they are of no significance to what concerns him most deeply, insofar as we may be permitted to speak of matters that cannot be proved.

The man is much easier to arouse sexually because arousal is not an excitation of his total being but only of a partial function. Thus for him, only a quite general stimulus is necessary. As a result, we can understand that the woman is more dependent on the individual man, and the man more dependent on women in general. On the basis of this fundamental structure, it becomes understandable, on the one hand, that a psychological instinct has always characterized the woman as the sexual being and, on the other hand, that women themselves frequently resist this characterization and feel that it is somehow mistaken. This is because we generally understand a sexual being-from the male standpoint-as primarily and fundamentally oriented to the other sex. Typically, however, this does not hold true for the woman. Her sexuality is so much an aspect of her immanent nature and it so unconditionally and directly constitutes her ultimate being that it is quite impossible for it to develop merely in the intentionality of her relationship to the man, or as this intentionality; nor could its nature be acquired in this. way.

As a type, the woman stands beyond this dual relationship to things. The idealism of pure theory, which signifies a relationship to that with which one has no relationship, is not her affair. If she does not feel that she is connected with something-either as regards its external or ethical-altruistic instrumental purposiveness, or as regards its significance for inner well-being-then it really does not concern her. It is as if she lacked what might be called the telegraphic connection which establishes the purely objectivistic interest. With respect to formation, on the other hand, male work-from that of the shoemaker and the carpenter to that of the painter and the poet-is the complete determination of objective form by means of subjective energy. But it is also the complete objectification of the subject. The woman may be completely and selflessly active, she may be quite fully productive and "creative" in her sphere, and she may have a thoroughly resolute ability to tune a home and even an entire area according to the timbre of her personality. Nevertheless productivity in the sense of the interpenetration and simultaneous autonomy of subject and object is not her concern. Knowledge and creation are dynamic relationships in which our existence is-as this might be put-drawn out of itself. They represent a displacement of the center, an annulment of that ultimate self-contained completeness of being which constitutes the meaning of life for the female type, even with all its external activity and its devotion to practical tasks.

Regardless of the extent to which man may live and. die for an idea, he always juxtaposes himself. toit. For him, the idea is an infinite task, and in the ideal sense, he always remains the solitary individual. Since this juxtaposition and opposition represent the only form in which the man can conceive and experience an idea, it seems to him as if women were "incapable of having any ideas" (Goethe). For the woman. however, her existence and the idea are one and the same. In spite ot a fateful isolation that may occasionally master her, typically she is never as solitary as the man. She is always at home with herself. However, the man has his "home" beyond himself.

In the domain of knowledge, logic represents-in relation to the immediacy of vital, psychic reality-the most complete differentiation and independence imaginable of the normative and the ideal. Whoever regards himself as bound by logic sees himself to a certain extent as confronted by the domain of truth, which demands conformity from his actual thought. Even if our thought completely diverges from the domain of truth, there is no sense in which it forfeits its inner validity or its claim on our mental processes. As a result of this quality of logical norms, the idea and the reality of our thought are placed in absolute opposition. The latter does not satisfy the demand imposed on it directly and automatically. The former exercises no unquestionable real power. However, such a dualism conflicts with the female principle.

Although genuine genius rarely oceurs among women, it has frequently been noted that genius has something of the feminine about it. This remarkable phenomenon clearly does not pertain merely to the production of the work, whose unconscious ripening, nourished by the total being of the personality, is analogous to the growth of the child in the mother. On the contrary, it is the a priori unity of life and the idea, on which the female nature rests. The genius repeats this unity on the highest level, where the object is produced. Thus consider the obscurity of that metaphysical relationship, the earlier form of the instinct which the conscious procedure of logic endeav- ors to replace, correct, and secure. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that the female instinct and unmediated female knowledge can be just as frequently in error as correct.

So there is no sense in which the so-called logical deficiency is a simple defect. On the contrary, it is only the negative expression of the quite positively determined female mode of being. This very mode of being is repeated in another phenomenon which translates that logical deficiency into another dimension. It is said that women are not fond of offering "proofs." Logic and proof rest on that tension between the real process of our thought and objective truth, the validity of which is independent of this process and the attainment of which is the aim of thought. As I indicated, the duality of this relationship is expressed in logic: the fact that in all of our actual thought we know we are bound by a norm which does not belong to this reality but rather to an autonomous realm of truth. In proof, the other feature comes to the fore: the indirection, which in countless cases is the only basis on which our actual thought process can arrive at self-sufficient truth. (...)

The woman perceives the primary and unprovable element in every thema probandum. There is a sense in which she does not need and cannot use the roundabout method of proof. The general submersion of the female type in existence allows her instinct to speak out, as if from an existential unity with objects that requires no mediation. It is as if her knowledge resided-and resided exclusively-in that ultimate datum on which all proofs are based and in which they rest, as if in nuce. As a result, the form of method that is characteristic of all our discursive knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant for her. Thus consider all the inadequacies of knowledge that are a consequence of this matter-for there are countless occasions on which the problems of inquiry can be solved only discursively and not in the coincidence of the beginning point and the end. The entire fact, so frequently criticized, that women do not like to undertake proofs and do not want to have something proven is not an isolated deficiency, but is rooted in the fundamental mode of her type of being, and its relationship to existence in general. It will become increasingly clear that the authentic definition of the female nature, in its metapsychological sense, is the following: The purely immanent significance of its subjective structure which does not extend beyond the limits of the psyche possesses, as such and immediately, a metaphysical connection or unity with existence in general, with something that we are obliged to call the ground of things.

This stands in the most profound contrast to the male nature. The true, the being of the cosmos, and the norm do not yet reside in the immediate and immanent psychic reality of the man's nature. On the contrary, from the standpoint of its own structure, the man's nature sees itself as juxtaposed to all this, as something to be accomplished or something that cannot be accomplished, as an imperative or an intellectual task. The spiritual expression of this nature is logic, which rests on the dualism between the real psychological world and the ideal world of truth that it does not touch, and proof, which presupposes the discursive character of knowledge and the necessity of method and of the roundabout method.

Insofar as the woman-with that inner unity that transcends the need for logic-is somehow. immediately situated in the things them- selves, in the truth and above reality, she is indifferent to proof, which is only supposed to lead us to this reality in the form of method. The one refusal exhibits the immanent formation, the other refusal the transcendent formation, of the female nature. This formation can be grasped in an extremely schematic and epigrammatic fashion, and in opposition to masculinity as such, in the thesis that its transcendence lies precisely in its immanence.

This distinctiveness of the woman, independent of any relationship to the masculine, is most complete and significant in the ethical domain. Here the dualism of reality and the idea clashes so forcefully, and the entire sphere of the ethical seems to be so exclusively erected upon this abyss as if on its own foundation, that it seems as if the form of the male nature alone would correspond to the depth and seriousness of the problems. This is why a thinker such as Weininger, who is thoroughly committed to an extreme male dual- ism and the unabashed conflation of the male and the human ideal, begins precisely at the point of the ethical in order to prove the absolute value nullity of the female nature on this basis. Moreover, he undertakes this in a thoroughly logical fashion, so that this nature seems to him to be not evil or immoral but rather simply amoral, detached from the ethical problem in general.

There is a sense in which this is logically expressed in the fact that the male nature is much more difficult to determine and define than the female. The generally human, of which sexual specificity should be a special case, is congruent with the masculine in the respect that no specific difference from the masculine can be identified in the generally human. The general as such cannot be defined. Yet suppose that certain features are cited as distinctively male. A closer examination establishes that these features are always intended only as differences from specifically female features. However, the nature of the latter features is not identified in an analogous fashion, purely on the basis of an opposition to the masculine. They are perceived, rather, more as an intrinsically exisiting and intrinsically defined entity, as a distinctive type of humanity which, however, is in no sense fixed exclusively by means of an opposition. Consider the old idea which extends from the level of brutal and ignorant self-aggrandizement to that of the most sublime philosophical speculation: that only the male is the genuine human. This idea finds its conceptual pendant in the greater facility with which the nature of the woman, compared with that of the man, is defined. For this reason, there are innumerable psychologies of women, but hardly one psychology of men.
Simmel

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.
La Bruyere

Most women have hardly any principles; they are led by their passions, and form their morals and manners after those whom they love.

Would I had the liberty of shouting, as loud as I could, to those holy men who formerly suffered by women: “Flee from women; do not become their spiritual directors, but let others take care of their salvation!”

A man who is vain, indiscreet, a great talker and a mischievous wag, who speaks arrogantly of himself and contemptuously of others, who is boisterous, haughty, forward, without morality, honesty, or commonsense, and who draws for facts on his imagination, wants nothing else, to be adored by many women, but handsome features and a good shape.
La Bruyere

In opposition to a very common prejudice, women — at least in their judgment of persons — are universally more objective than men. The typical man, when in love, invariably exalts the object of his love and debases the object of his hatred, and consequently in this sphere tends strongly towards the formation of “illusions.” A typical woman, on the other hand, may be passionately in love with a man, and yet have a keen eye for his faults; but she does not love him the less. And she may detest a rival, and yet fully recognize her mental and bodily superiority: but she detests her nonetheless. It may be objected: but surely man as judge is universally fairer than woman, and, if women had to administer the office of judges, would we not have to fear innumerable subjective judgments? This would indeed be the case; but the reasons lie elsewhere, and not where they usually were sought.
Klages↓

A young man runs a greater risk of over-esteeming the singing of the girl he loves than would a loving girl in a converse and similar case; but the girl, if, for example, she is a student, is more likely to prefer one lecturer among others, because she is interested in him and not in his lectures. But then we would have to assume that a female judge would be likely to have far more cause than a male to judge not “without respect of person” because she feels sympathy or antipathy for the accused; for the non-personal fact of the law might, though its content were valued adequately, become negligible in comparison with the personal fact of “accused.”

As we hinted above, it is true that women even more than men tend to demand the possession of love: and if this is true, then the faculty for jealousy must be looked for among women rather than among men. This is in fact the case, and is generally overlooked, chiefly because the jealousy of woman is more skilled in hiding itself than that of man, and manifests itself much less actively. Meanwhile, feminine inclination towards — and capacity for — intrigue in nine cases out of ten is rooted in jealousy.

A woman can love a man without discovering in him any extraordinary beauty, or interest, or goodness; for her his value consists of the fact that she loves him. Thus the potential injustice of man consists especially in a distortion of his estimates of value in favor of his personal feelings, while that of woman consists in an unconscious refusal to attribute significance and binding force to universal values, personal feeling being made the sole criterion. It is incorrect to say that feeling rules women, and reason men; the fact is that with typical women, personal feeling, and with typical men, general feeling, is decisive. But this does not prevent his estimations of value from being corrupted by his personal feelings.

I have been involved for many years with the characterological study of problems relating to the distinctions between the sexes, and I must say: even among the most outstanding women whom I have known, I found none who possesses a consequential power of imagination. Now someone might object that the psychology of women may well have altered since primitive times. I respond: yes, but men have undoubtedly changed to an even greater degree. If you ignore the so-called “emancipated” variety, you will certainly ?nd that, in important matters, contemporary woman more closely resembles her ancestors than contemporary man resembles his forbears. e lack of imagination in women is obvious throughout recorded history, and one must doubt that the situation has changed since prehistoric times. In the whole of recorded
history, there have been only two supremely gifted poetesses: Sappho and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff!
Klages

Why are women ordinarily malicious, sly, tricky, deceptive, sharp, imposters, both in love and in devotion, and in everything they undertake, and in whatever occupation they begin? Why do they acquire so early the inclination for and the art of deceiving, dissimulating, pretending, seizing the opportunity, etc. etc.? Why does the cleverness of a woman of mediocre talent and experience of the world very often defeat the skill and cunning of a man who by nature and practice is the most able? Do we believe that the mind of women is naturally and automatically disposed to want and easily acquire these qualities, unlike the spirit of men? Do we believe that these faculties (since they are really faculties) are produced in females more than in males, and are characteristic of a [2260] womanly nature? No, indeed. The natural, primitive spirit of women has no trace of those faculties, or disposition to acquire them, any more than men have. Rather, the ease and perfection with which they acquire them has no other cause than their natural weakness, and the inferiority of their strength to that of men, and their being able to rely only on art and cunning, since they are inferior in strength, and inferior, too, in the rights that law and custom distribute between men and women. That’s all there is that is natural and innate about the malicious character of women. That is to say, neither the character nor any particular disposition to acquire it exists in the female nature. Rather, there is only a quality, a circumstance that causes it, which is, in fact, extraneous to the nature, the spirit, the working of the intelligence and the mind. In fact, place women in other circumstances, [2261] that is to say, assume that they never entered any kind of society, especially with men; or that laws and customs did not make their condition inferior to that of males (which happened in primitive times, and which perhaps happens today, too, in some barbarous countries); or that the said laws and customs favored them somewhat more, or even placed them above men (I know of a country where they are considered sacred beings); or that, owing to certain circumstances (as was told of the country of the Amazons, etc.), they are generally or individually either equal or superior to the men they deal with, as a result of physical or intellectual force, natural or acquired, as a result of wealth, or rank, or birth, etc. etc.—and you will find their art and cunning either nonexistent or negligible, or not superior or inferior to that of men, at least those they deal with; or in any case proportionately less, depending on the quality of the said circumstances, than that of women [2262] placed in the opposite circumstances, even if they are less clever and less malicious, etc. Daily experience demonstrates this. Not only in women but also in men who are weak, or poor, or ugly, or flawed, or uncultured, or inferior in some way to those whom they deal with, such as courtiers, who are used to dealing with superiors, and so are always cunning, and deceitful, and dissemblers, etc. And not only in men but in entire nations (like those subject to despotism), cities or provinces, families, etc., as history, travel, etc. etc., demonstrate. And change the circumstances and the times, and that same nation or city or individual, male or female, loses, diminishes, gains, increases in cunning and duplicity, which are believed to be in their character when observed superficially. Savages are ordinarily duplicitous, dissembling, false toward strangers who are physically or morally stronger than they are. And observe that cunning is a characteristic of their intelligence. Now, it is very often greater precisely in those who, because of their intelligence or culture and the exercise of it, [2263] are at a disadvantage compared with others. (Thus, in women generally, since they are less cultured than men, in plebeian or badly educated individuals, male or female, in savages with respect to the civilized, etc.) What greater, clearer proof that the mind, understood as a whole, and its faculties are the work of circumstances, when we see that the very circumstance of having a limited mind gains for it a faculty (which belongs entirely to it) that larger minds do not have, or have in a lesser degree?
Leopardi ↓

Hence overall, in my view women really are generally and by nature more egoistic, and therefore less merciful (especially in terms of effective compassion) and less charitable than men. For intensity, strength, abundance of life and therefore of self-love have a much greater part in charity, in the disposition toward and the act of sacrificing oneself, and in excluding egoism, than do delicacy, and sophistication of mind separated from the strength, energy, activity, and vivid inner life of self-love. And this not just in men compared with women, but generally in whoever, compared to whomever. According to such arguments, an old woman, especially if she has lived in high society, must be the most egoistic human being imaginable (by nature, and speaking as a rule).

I have made about the natural compassionateness in the strong, and the natural mercilessness and harshness of the weak, etc., and vice versa those observations are to be applied to these. It is frequently claimed, and there are quite a few examples in histories, that women if they become powerful in any way, have generally been and are, inasmuch as they are cunning and wicked, to the same degree more cruel and less compassionate toward their enemies, or more so generally than men have been or are, or would have been or would be, all other things being equal.
Leopardi

Mme G. started to insist they be given nothing. Rien! Why is it that women who get involved in charity work so often become particularly nasty and heartless? This perfectly sweet, soft woman of Flemish plumpness all of a sudden revealed a harshness and lack of pity.
Bobkowski

What I say about women’s sexual instincts is meant to apply to all women, or at least to all normal women; but my criticism of contemporary female behavior refers only to women emblematic of the current Zeitgeist, those who have “liberated” themselves from the normal duties incumbent upon their sex in any healthy society. The objection that “not all women are like that” is always valid, of course, but a bit like defending the Black Death on the grounds that it did not, after all, kill everybody.
Devlin