Question: Is there any particular reason, or something inherent in women, which makes spiritual Masters like Sri Ramakrishna and the Buddha not want to accept women as disciples?

Sri Chinmoy: There is something which often makes women not suitable for the spiritual life. You people are my daughters, so you will forgive me. But I wish to say that when women get married and have a few children, very often what happens is that they forget their need for Truth or God. They also forget about their husbands. Their goal becomes only to please their children and to be pleased by their children. Their children become their God. When children come into a woman’s life, earth sometimes binds her most powerfully. Then she often no longer cares for Heaven.

Both women and men have inner difficulties. Men have millions of defects, but their worst difficulty is ego. For women, their worst difficulty is jealousy. Women’s jealousy binds them and tries to bind others. Jealousy does not want to allow others to grow. Men’s ego is destructive. It says, “This has to be done the way I want it to be done; otherwise, I will destroy it.” Men are breaking, women are binding. Both these characteristics are bad.

In order to destroy, men need courage and strength, so they aspire for power. When they get power, most of the time they use it for the wrong purpose; they use it to destroy. But at least they are aspiring to get it. When women are jealous, they do not aspire for anything. They are jealous because they see that somebody else is surpassing them, but instead of aspiring to surpass the other person, they just want to pull that person back.

If women used the time that they waste in jealousy to cultivate their own inner lives, then they would easily surpass those whom they are jealous of. If one girl plays the piano very well, the other girl who is jealous of her does not practise harder in order to do better. No, she may only pray for hours, “O God, break her fingers.” When men want to exert their ego, they usually aspire for something. When they want something that another person has, they do not think of how they can pull the other person down. Instead, they aspire for strength to break that person. But women do not usually aspire. They just want to hold back those who surpass them.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Soul-education for the family-world, Agni Press, 1977
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/sef