One facet of our movement that bothers some is the frequent comments that women are Maya. This is the source of much exasperation since it leads to all kinds of negative interactions.

It’s easy to understand that this is prevalent amongst neophytes and that as devotees advance they gradually learn to have a more balanced approach to human relationships. However, why do we have to wait? Is there not a way to fix things from the start, so devotees from all devotional levels can just relate between themselves as normal human beings, without having to go through these different phases?

While this is possible, it can be difficult. The problem is that as long as a person is affected by passion and ignorance, his vision will always be clouded by duality, which will manifest as attachment and aversion. Nowadays, 99% of the world’s population is in this situation, and almost all new devotees come from it. As a result, practically all of us start from this platform of passion and ignorance, and we have to work hard from there to gradually progress into goodness.

In most countries nowadays, boys and girls associate freely. As a result, people just go from one relationship to the other, enter into married life only much later, and even then often go through a few failed marriages until finally settling in life. This is all considered normal.

However, when one decides to seriously practice spiritual life, this system of going from one partner to the other doesn’t work very well. One has thus to choose between going to the path of celibacy, or entering into married life and being content in staying with the same partner for life. In both cases, one has to learn to control oneself.

When one is in goodness, this becomes easier, because at this level lust becomes subsidized and people can interact more or less normally with the opposite sex without this kind of involvement, seeing others as souls and not just like bodies. Even if there is subtle attraction, devotees who chant good rounds can deal with it.

Prabhupada tried to implement this standard since the beginning of our movement, teaching devotees to call each other “Prabhu” respectively of being a man or a lady, and acting respectfully with everyone, but it seems the idea was a little ahead of the time.

Seeing everyone as a soul and respecting everyone regardless of gender or social position is a level that is hard to maintain when one is just starting. Because of the dynamic of attachment and aversion that comes from the influence of the lower modes, one has thus to choose between one or the other, courting the ladies or calling them maya. In such cases, one has just to go with the lesser of the two evils, and there is not much that can be done.

We can see that children who grow up in our movement are usually much better at that because they have time to mature in spiritual life as they grow up and usually are much more sattvic than people from the outside. However, when we speak about new devotees, that’s much harder to avoid. I can surely be minimized with proper examples from leaders and mentors, and by trying to reach higher class people, but it’s hard to destroy completely. Largely, that’s just something we have to tolerate, understanding that it is a phase someone has to go through to maybe later reach some higher level of spiritual understanding.