One of the problems of the material world, especially in current society, is that people can’t be completely honest with each other. Honest and good-natured people are frequently cheated by others, and thus even the best people need to learn to build their defenses to be able to live in this world.
When we come to Krsna Consciousness we frequently lower our guard, thinking that all devotees are saints. Many indeed are, but unfortunately not all of them. There are many materialistic people who pose as devotees, and these can be quite dangerous. There are also devotees who are quite sincere, but not yet at a level where they can break with their negative materialistic tendencies, and thus can still be propense to cheat others.
In the Sri Isopanisad, Srila Prabhupada explains that a conditioned soul has four defects: the tendency to commit mistakes, the propensity of being in illusion, imperfect senses and intelligence, and the propensity to cheat others. We are all trying to get rid of such defects, but unfortunately, they follow us quite far in spiritual life.
Lowering our guard when we start our spiritual lives can allow us to advance by associating with pure Vaishnavas, if we have the good fortune of meeting them, but also puts us at risk of being exploited by so-called Vaishnavas. Unfortunately, we can see that sincere people often become burned after being cheated by these wolves dressed as sheep.
It would be good if our movement would be a perfect society, composed of only perfect people, or if we could at least protect good-natured people from such bad elements, but unfortunately, we are not there yet.
As a result, this is something most of us face at some point in our spiritual lives. It can at the same time be a wake-up call in the sense of learning to discriminate between different classes of devotees, but also an opportunity to become more mature.
Often we see spiritual life as an escape from all the difficulties of the world, and then when we see that there are also problems in spiritual life we decide to just go back to material life. Instead, we should understand that this material world is a place full of problems, and canalize the frustrations caused by these difficulties in the direction of becoming more serious in spiritual life and gradually becoming free of it.
A mistake in this phase is to try to fix all problems of the world, trying to correct everything that is wrong around us. While this tendency can be highly positive for one in a position of leadership, for most of us it is actually not so beneficial. Things are the way they are because we are dealing with conditioned souls who are propense to commit mistakes and to be egotistical. Without solving the main problem (bringing people to a transcendental platform), it’s not possible to solve these problems just by activism. To bring people to a transcendental platform, the first step is for us to reach such a platform. Therefore, counterintuitive as it may seem, the best way to solve the problems of society is to step back and focus on our own practice. When we come to an advanced platform we will be finally able to understand the problems and contribute to their solution. If nothing else, we will be able to solve our own problem, by going back to Godhead, which is also not a bad outcome.