One of the best thoughts I've read lately is an observation from A New Earth.  See the section "The Collective Female Pain-Body" section within Chapter Five which bears a close and careful reading.  It pertains to the period of the Inquisition, the church's treatment of women.  If a woman, say, took a walk alone in the woods, stopped to observe a bird or animal, or picked an herb for medicinal or decorative reason, well, she was a witch, to be dispatched, plain and simple, burnt at the stake.  The numbers of victims is staggering.  Tolle's point falls against a backdrop of the rise of the Ego. We move away from the feminine spirit, one in touch with nature and nurturing, toward the drive to conquer for the sake of selfish rational, male and ego driven.

And so, take that to the present.  We conduct our affairs based on competitive overly rational thought in a dog eat dog world, mine versus yours, who cares about the Earth, me first.  The nurturing type is subtly discouraged through the need to compete in an ego-driven society hyper on competition and outthinking the next guy.  The human being is conditioned to be leery about stopping by the woods to smell the flowers and watch the doings of the natural world.  The experience of nature is doled out in an economic bargain based on what you can pay for on weekends, our relationship no longer allowed to be a direct one.  Can you just 'go for a walk' anymore,  finding the interaction with nature just as it comes in its little individual moments that can happen just about anywhere?   Just as the feminine being had to be defined as a witch for her communing with the natural world, so have our own moments come to be defined by the light of a pervasive logic of Ego and economic purpose.  Nature becomes a place to show prowess physical, athletic, mental, reached through the cleverness of having a fine automobile or an expensive plane ticket.

But women survive to this day, as does their spirit.  And they are, if you let them be, nurturing and caring over the living beings alive in the world, sensitive toward life wherever you find it.  Interesting that that has survived all these years and all those egotistical things driven on by spirits less feminine.

Perhaps vestiges of ancient and archaic traditions respecting the feminine, the Celtic for example, as Tolle mentions, survive in semi-latent states to this day, just under the surface, about to be called into fullness at any moment.  And the 'idiots' of the world, defined as such by the collective egotism, who don't follow the defining logic of the selfish model of existence, will be received once again, accepted for just being human and good natured sorts.