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Once, I was speaking with a senior lady about second and third-generation devotees (children who were already born to devotee parents inside our movement). She made the observation that, generally speaking, the girls are doing better than the boys. She noted that girls get involved in different services or different devotional activities, or get settled in life and start their own Kṛṣṇa-conscious families, while the boys are frequently confused, without finding their place in the world. Many get involved with drugs or other bad habits, and so on.
When we have a son, we usually have great expectations for him, imagining that he will be a great preacher, a sannyāsi, or at least a responsible householder. For girls, frequently, the expectations are lower, and often parents are less careful about their education, considering that they will probably just find a husband and get settled into family life. If anything, girls have fewer facilities than boys typically. Why, then, do they frequently do better?
I believe this is connected with a point made in a previous article. There is an important psychological difference between men and women, and this directly influences the way they progress in life.
Women have a natural propensity to follow authorities. Thus, it is more natural for them to accept a spiritual master and be guided by seniors, including responsible parents, and when they do that, they flourish in spiritual life. Ladies can easily advance by accepting a dependent position, and this explains why many of our girls do well in their spiritual practice.
Another factor is that girls in our movement frequently receive a clearer picture of what adult life is supposed to look like. They learn practical skills, develop relationships with other women, participate in different devotional activities, and gradually become responsible adults. Some get married at a relatively young age; others do not, but in both cases they grow up.
Men, on the other hand, operate in a different way. Men can grow by accepting responsibility and performing their duties. Of course, the spiritual path demands that one always remain in a subordinate position, following the spiritual master and other spiritual authorities, culminating with Kṛṣṇa Himself, but there is a difference between following in a passive and active role. To flourish, men have to accept responsibilities, be it as a proper renunciant or as a householder. A man who is reluctant to accept responsibility usually gets stuck and becomes thus incapable of advancing in any sphere.
This means that boys, in particular, need progressively increasing responsibilities while they are growing up, progressively learning to do things, taking risks, and observing the consequences, etc. If we demand responsibility only when they are twenty or twenty-five, after a childhood and adolescence in which everything is arranged for them, the transition usually does not work as planned.
Another point is that just teaching boys that they are supposed to become leaders is not enough. Without qualification, leadership produces arrogance and entitlement. A boy has to first learn obedience, discipline, accountability, and other qualities before becoming capable of guiding others. As the saying goes, one has to learn to obey before learning to command. We learn more about leadership by following and observing a true leader than by simply being told to become one.
In a marriage, for example, the husband is supposed to be more emotionally mature and more in control of his senses than the wife is, for example. This creates the desirable dynamic of a qualified lady becoming inclined to follow a qualified man, which allows both to flourish. If a man does not develop these qualities, he cannot accept such a position of leadership and has a harder time finding his place in the world.
To take birth as a man is thus a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is greater potential in terms of the development of analytical intelligence, the potential to practice austerities and control of one’s senses, but when this potential is not realized, one can end up falling pretty low.
When men are not able to learn to control their senses and become reluctant to accept responsibilities in life, their growth is stunted, and they become confused, having trouble dealing with their desires and struggling to find their place in the world. This is something we can see all over the world nowadays, in both Western countries and in India, but it seems especially prevalent in our movement. One possible reason is that our philosophy puts a lot of emphasis on renunciation (especially on the part of men), but the teachings are frequently misunderstood and used as a tool to avoid responsibility. This was historically a problem in many of our gurukulas.
We often associate gurukulas with the cases of abuse that plagued many of our schools. That’s surely the most shocking sign of structural failure. There is, however, another aspect that is also relevant. Gurukulas run by renunciants often taught the boys to associate renunciation with prestige, resulting in young men unconsciously concluding that developing a profession, taking care of a family, money, or a house were inferior, while the prestigious path was to avoid all such things. This would result in boys who would not be suitable for the path of renunciation but would also avoid the path of responsibility, often becoming incapable of finding their place in life.
In the scriptures, men are recommended to become renunciants in the final part of their lives, after successfully going through family life and learning their lessons there. Some are able to do it earlier, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. There are many important lessons one is supposed to learn in family life, and such lessons make a man grow from a boy into first a responsible householder and then into a qualified renunciant.
Unfortunately, we often see boys successively failing in all these stages, being undisciplined students, and then becoming reluctant to accept responsibilities as householders (although simultaneously having trouble controlling their senses) and often ending up becoming show-bottle renunciants.
How to avoid that? That’s a tough question because producing a proper man is not easy. It requires a combination of proper training and motivation, proper social structures, and a generous dose of personal effort. It starts with the parents valuing their spiritual practice, cultivating the proper consciousness to attract a qualified soul into the womb, and them properly caring for this child and giving the proper example for him to follow, followed by the efforts of qualified teachers and eventually from a qualified spiritual master. None of that is easy.
Both the father and the community have essential roles here. A good father can transmit the right combination of responsibility and trust, which is much more useful than mere criticism or pressure, while a community can give meaningful roles to young men, who can be trained in practical services according to their nature, becoming gradually useful to other people who genuinely depend on them. This is, however, a test for the leadership. Traditionally, leadership in our movement is good at demanding loyalty but less effective at delegating responsibility, and that’s precisely the critical factor here.
This is a problem that we eventually will have to solve if we want our movement to have a future. As societies in the world become more degraded, it will become progressively more difficult to find balanced people to accept responsibilities inside our movement. In the future, most of our leading devotees will have to come from devotee families, learning to be balanced human beings from the beginning.
Our girls may be able to find some good men outside and gradually make them devotees, but it would be far easier if we could also properly train the boys to fulfill their roles.
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