On Sri Ramakrishna: Why have some sages advised caution against ‘woman’?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Acharya Ji, what is meant by ‘woman’ when Sri Ramakrishna says, “Souls enmeshed in worldliness cannot resist the temptation of ‘woman and gold’ and direct their minds to God, even though these things bring upon them a thousand humiliations.”

Acharya Prashant: It is not possible to go through this reading and not be astonished as to what Ramakrishna really means by ‘women’. In our time and age, it comes as a bit of a shock that a holy man, a wise man, is nullifying one particular gender.

But that is not really the case.

When Ramakrishna says ‘woman’, what he means is :

‘Prakriti’ — everything that appears, moves, can be seen, can be touched.

And when he says ‘you must be cautious of women’, what he means is :

You, the one you are, the individualized eye, has the tendency to ‘not to watch Prakriti’, ‘to not to have a healthy relation with it’ but to rather acquire it and exploit it.

This tendency is called LUST.

Lust is the tendency of the individualized self, the ego, to seek salvation in the material world.