The first year · Lesson 7
The I and the Me
The seventh principle, Gender, in the world and in the mind
Welcome back. Today’s saying is “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.” It asks you to look for two kinds of work side by side: one that makes things and one that starts them off. Our last principle, then. Two chapters, nearly thirty pages. Let’s open the door.
The reading
- Chapter XIII: Gender The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 183–192 · about 1,612 words, 8 min
- Chapter XIV: Mental Gender The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 193–210 · about 3,148 words, 16 min
About 24 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- Chapter XIII looks for Gender in matter and energy. Chapter XIV looks for it inside your own mind. The second chapter is longer, and it is the one the book cares about most.
- The book says early on that Gender is not the same as sex. Its “Masculine” and “Feminine” are its own names for two kinds of work. Read them as labels, the way you would read “north” and “south” on a magnet.
- Chapter XIII leans on the science of 1908: tiny “corpuscles” (what we call electrons), the poles of a battery, and the new rays everyone was talking about. Physics has moved on since. Read these pages as a window on what was new and exciting then.
- Chapter XIV names a real book of its day and its author, Thomson J. Hudson. Watch for the “I” and the “Me,” and for the everyday examples the book uses to explain them. The quiz asks about them.
In a nutshell
Chapter XIII: Gender
The book starts by saying what Gender is not. It is not sex. The word comes from a Latin root that means to create or produce. Sex, the book says, is only one form of Gender, on the plane of living things. It warns against writers who tie this principle to wild ideas about sex. Then it turns to the science of its day. It says atoms are built when tiny particles cluster around each other. It refuses to call one pole of electricity “negative” and calls it “Feminine” instead. It goes on to find Gender in chemistry, in crystals, and even in gravity. The book admits it cannot prove all of this yet. It says science will catch up. The last lines turn from matter to the mind.
Chapter XIV: Mental Gender
The chapter opens with the “two minds” ideas that were popular at the time. One was Hudson’s “objective” and “subjective” minds. The book says the old Hermetic teachers knew about two sides of the mind long ago. They called it Mental Gender. Then it asks the student to look inward. At first you find only yourself. Look closer, the book says, and you find an “I” and a “Me.” The Me is where thoughts, feelings and pictures are made. The I is the will. It tells the Me to get to work, and it can stand back and watch. The book calls the I Masculine and the Me Feminine. It says this is the same pattern as the making of the universe. Then it uses the idea to explain telepathy, suggestion, hypnotism and the pull some people have over others. Most people, it says, let their own will rest and take their ideas from others. It ends by calling itself a key that unlocks the other books.
Highlights
Gender, in its Hermetic sense, and Sex in the ordinarily accepted use of the term, are not the same.
The book’s own warning, and the key to both chapters. Keep it in mind every time you meet the words Masculine and Feminine.
The office of Gender is solely that of creating, producing, generating, etc., and its manifestations are visible on every plane of phenomena.
Here is the plain meaning. “Office” means job. Gender, for this book, is simply how anything new gets made, on every plane.
The "I" represents the Aspect of Being; the "Me" the Aspect of Becoming.
The heart of Chapter XIV in one line. The I is the part that is. The Me is the part that changes and makes. The same paragraph ends with “As above, so below,” so you can see the book tying this to Correspondence.
We do not come expounding a new philosophy, but rather furnishing the outlines of a great world-old teaching which will make clear the teachings of others
The book’s claim about itself, near its end. It says it is old and that it explains all the newer teachings. Read “The real story” below for what historians say.
Words to know
- Gender (the book's sense)
- The work of making anything new. The book names its two sides Masculine and Feminine.
- Corpuscle
- An old word for a tiny particle of electricity. We now call it an electron.
- Cathode
- The pole of a battery or tube that the book says used to be called “negative.”
- Objective and subjective mind
- Hudson’s names for two parts of the mind. The objective mind reasons and plans. The subjective mind takes things in.
- Suggestion
- Putting an idea into someone else’s mind so that they act on it.
- Hypnotism
- Putting a person into a sleep-like state in which they easily accept suggestions.
- Telepathy
- Sending thoughts from one mind to another without words. The book takes it as real.
- Personal magnetism
- An old phrase for the pull some people have, which makes others like and follow them.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
Chapter XIV names a real book. Thomson Jay Hudson’s The Law of Psychic Phenomena came out in 1893 and sold very well. Hudson said each person has an “objective” mind that reasons and a “subjective” mind that cannot say no to suggestion. He used that idea to explain hypnotism and psychic events. In those years doctors in France and elsewhere were studying hypnotism closely, and many readers were eager for any theory of it. The Kybalion takes Hudson’s two minds and gives them its own old names. So the “Masculine” and “Feminine” here are labels for two kinds of mental work, will and making, written in the words of 1908. They are not a claim about men and women, and the book even speaks of “strong men and women” alike. Psychologists today do not split the mind into two like this, and the book’s “streams of vibration” are its own idea, not science. Still, these pages are a rare snapshot of how people a century ago joined old sayings to the new study of the mind.
Quiz
Answer from the notes or the reading, in any order; you can change an answer at any time. Each answer says why, with a link to the page.