In Goloka Vrndavana there is an exchange of love known as parakiya-rasa. It is something like the attraction of a married woman for a man other than her husband. In the material world this sort of relationship is most abominable because it is a perverted reflection of the parakiya-rasa in the spiritual world, where it is the highest kind of loving affair. Such feelings between the devotee and the Lord are presented by the influence of yogamaya. The Bhagavad-gita states that devotees of the highest grade are under the care of daiva-maya, or yogamaya: mahatmanas tu mam partha daivim prakrtim asritah (Bg. 9.13). Those who are actually great souls (mahatmas) are fully absorbed in Krsna consciousness, always engaged in the service of the Lord. They are under the care of daivi-prakrti, or yogamaya. Yogamaya creates a situation in which the devotee is prepared to transgress all regulative principles simply to love Krsna. A devotee naturally does not like to transgress the laws of reverence for the Supreme Personality of Godhead, but by the influence of yogamaya he is prepared to do anything to love the Supreme Lord better.

Those under the spell of the material energy cannot at all appreciate the activities of yogamaya, for a conditioned soul can hardly understand the pure reciprocation between the Lord and His devotee. But by executing devotional service under the regulative principles, one can become very highly elevated and then begin to appreciate the dealings of pure love under the management of yogamaya.

In the spiritual loving sentiment induced by the yogamaya potency, both Lord Sri Krsna and the damsels of Vraja forget themselves in spiritual rapture. By the influence of such forgetfulness, the attractive beauty of the gopis plays a prominent part in the transcendental satisfaction of the Lord, who has nothing to do with mundane sex. Because spiritual love of Godhead is above everything mundane, the gopis superficially seem to transgress the codes of mundane morality. This perpetually puzzles mundane moralists. Therefore yogamaya acts to cover the Lord and His pastimes from the eyes of mundaners, as confirmed in the Bhagavad-gita (7.25), where the Lord says that He reserves the right of not being exposed to everyone.

The acts of yogamaya make it possible for the Lord and the gopis, in loving ecstasy, to sometimes meet and sometimes separate. These transcendental loving affairs of the Lord are unimaginable to empiricists involved in the impersonal feature of the Absolute Truth. Therefore the Lord Himself appears before the mundaners to bestow upon them the highest form of spiritual realization and also personally relish its essence. The Lord is so merciful that He Himself descends to take the fallen souls back home to the kingdom of Godhead, where the erotic principles of Godhead are eternally relished in their real form, distinct from the perverted sexual love so much adored and indulged in by the fallen souls in their diseased condition. The reason the Lord displays the rasa-lila is essentially to induce all the fallen souls to give up their diseased morality and religiosity, and to attract them to the kingdom of God to enjoy the reality. A person who actually understands what the rasa-lila is will certainly hate to indulge in mundane sex life. For the realized soul, hearing the Lord's rasa-lila through the proper channel will result in complete abstinence from material sexual pleasure.