Recent American Artemis mission sent to the Moon made a little splash in our devotee community as well, with the same old questions about Moon travel. We have decades of debates on this – was it fake, was it real this time? Was it fake this time, too? In retrospect, most of it looks like a waste of time and eventually we all get tired of rehashing this over and over again.
It has also been a decade since Risiraja Prabhu’s book Mystic Universe – An Introduction to Vedic Cosmology was presented on Dandavats and it provided a fresh and simple perspective on this matter which resolves all these questions once and for all. So let’s rehash Risiraja’s explanation instead. It has been enhanced by his numerous articles and books that followed. I might deviate from his line of thought here and there so I present what I have learned myself, and I welcome corrections.
We assume that our most often used word for planet, loka, comes from English word local but this is an incomplete understanding. It rather comes from English look, which also gave us Sanskrit words like locana. Joking aside, the root lok means to see, and Wikipedia says that loka “may be translated as a planet, the universe, a plane, or a realm of existence.” This last part is the key to understanding what it means – loka is what we see and experience, and in a certain context it becomes “a planet”, and in another context it might mean “environment” or “society” or whatever else that comprises our experience.
As residents of Bhuloka we see and experience gross sense objects. This is not a new idea but the implication is probably escaping the minds of many – as long as things are seen with our eyes they belong to Earth, not to any other loka, and, conversely, objects from other lokas are invisible to us. In other words, we can’t go to the Moon without changing our bodies – just as we have learned from Srila Prabhupada.
Let’s explore it a little deeper. Since we are talking about the Moon and its often associated with mind and mental states, we’ll assume that feelings and emotions are what people see on the Moon. So our reality – what we see and accept as real – are gross objects. We know what emotions are, but we can’t see them, we can only infer them from seeing facial expressions, and when we want to communicate them over the internet we use emojis, which are geometrical symbols we can actually see. On the Moon, however, they see feelings directly and they accept them as reality, and they don’t even have gross objects there (because the Moon, Candraloka, is not part of the Bhuloka system).
How can they see emotions? It’s actually easy to understand because we already associate emotions with colors – “green with envy”, for example. Red is for anger, blue is for sadness, white for tranquility and so on. Moreover, we know which emotions are close to each other and which are directly opposite. If you search online thesaurus for any emotion it would give you several grades of synonyms and antonyms – stronger, strong, and weak, and in case you don’t quite catch the difference there are explanations where to draw the boundary between two synonyms exactly.
This is all we need for seeing things – a space where things are located, boundaries between things, distances between things, and their colors. There is nothing else to the process of seeing – just colors and shapes. Shapes mean they have boundaries so you know where one thing ends another thing begins.
This should be enough for technical understanding of how seeing on the Moon could work. It’s not magical and we all have some experience of this – we all experience feelings and emotions, just not with our eyes but with our minds, which we also can’t see, btw.
I have mentioned the space of emotions and it won’t be controversial if I say that it’s real even though unseen. Some emotions are close to each other and can easily transform and merge, others are so far apart that we don’t know how long it would take us to move from one to another. This moving from experiencing one emotion to experiencing another is travelling. Your body might stay in the same place but emotionally you might be flying all over the universe. Likewise, one overwhelmed by grief might fly around the world but not move an inch in his emotional space. This shows that physical space and emotional space are not identical and not mapped to one another directly.
In other words, flying to the Moon here, like Artemis did, does not mean you also move inside the Candraloka space. There is practically no connection. As long as you see the Moon with your eyes – you are on Earth. The conventional distinction between planets in modern astronomy does not apply to distinctions between lokas in Vedic universe. This isn’t a controversial statement either – demigods are not supposed to be visible to humans, if it ever happens we accept it as an exception.
Then there is a question of distances – Srila Prabhupada insisted that the Sun was closer to the Earth than the Moon. How do we explain this? It’s very simple, actually – when we measure distances we speak of visible things – we see the Moon, we see the Sun, we see other planets, we triangulate and perform all kinds of mathematical operations, and we eventually get exact distances. But these are distances between things that can be seen – this is crucial. On the other hand, what’s the distance between your heart and your anger? We know it’s not very big but we can’t measure it in inches or centimeters, can we? It doesn’t apply. It’s even more different than if I said “it’s apples and oranges” because both apples and oranges are visible objects. Physical places and emotions are really different categories here.
If we accept that different lokas in Vedic universe provide different perceptions of what reality is, and a body suitable on one loka won’t be suitable on another, we have to accept that going from one loka to another means transformation of our bodies, not moving in the same body within the same kind of space. Modern science is built on the assumption that the same object moves within the same space and that no other spaces exist in any meaningful sense, but this does not apply to Vedic space travel. First of all, it’s not one space. There are many many kinds of spaces, barely connected to each other. Vedic distances, therefore, are measurements of transformation – how much do you need to transform your body to get from one state to the other.
Bhagavatam distances, however, are given in yojanas, as we all know, and this creates a problem because yojanas are translated into miles or kilometers. I don’t object, but definitions of yojanas given in Puranas have been written down to apply to the Earth already, they are not universal. A typical list of measurements might have everything tied to the size of the human hand, for example. Another definition is tied to how far you can hear a cow mooing. This is useful for measuring things here but not universally. They are not really putting cows every few miles “in space” to measure distance to the Moon in Bhagavatam, do they? So, just like with the word loka – in one context it means one thing, in another context it might mean something else, but the root “what you see” applies everywhere. In the same way, understanding of yojana as a “unit of yoga”, for example, does not break any other definition local to context. Yoga, after all, means connection and, eventually, transformation into another state of consciousness. Even travelling on Earth is a kind of transformation. One definition of yojana is how far a yoked bull can pull a cart without needing a break. “Yoked” comes from the same root, btw. This is an interesting subject to delve into but let’s move on
So the statement that the Sun is closer to the Earth than the Moon means that transformation of an earthly body into the body suitable to the Sun environment requires less steps than transforming it to the body suitable for the Moon. How exactly we would count it is not important – maybe it refers to what space travelers like Siddhas do to get from one planet to another, maybe it is related to the amount of pious activities and sacrifices one needs to perform to get a body for the Sun or for the Moon. In any case – it’s not related to the distances between visible objects in the space of gross reality as presented by modern science.
We, however, are conditioned to accept this gross space as the one and only and try to fit the entire Vedic universe inside it, and this brings arguments about humans flying to the Moon. Maybe comparing the Moon to Vrindavan could be helpful here. Just like I said that the visible Moon is the part of Bhuloka so Vrindavan is present on Earth even though spiritual Vrindavan is not inside the universe, is unmanifest and practically unreachable. There is a physical distance to Vrindavan we can find on Google maps but to get to the spiritual Vrindavan we have to transform our consciousness through fourteen “planetary systems”, starting with sraddha, then sadhu sanga, then bhajana kriya and so on. Each step is transformational. I said “fourteen” because different acharyas enumerate these steps slightly differently and, I believe, Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti gave a list of fourteen once. Therefore one can go to Vrindavan and share selfies taken there as proof, but in the real sense of reaching Vrindavan and becoming part of Vrindavan’s life together with Krishna and His devotees – that doesn’t normally happen. Even within Vrindavan itself distances are not uniform for earthy human visitors and for spiritual residents. Govardhan size is not the same in the earthly and in the spiritual space either.
Just like Vrindavan, the Moon we see in the sky is a replica. It’s like an embassy. Let’s say Greenland opens an embassy in Delhi and you go there. In one sense you are in Greenland, but in the real sense of Greenland being the place of ice and snow where the Sun doesn’t shine for six months in a year – you aren’t going to see that in the Delhi embassy. The Sun will be relentless, the temperature will be the same as in Delhi, vegetation will be the same, and animals, birds, and insects would see absolutely no difference. Only humans would agree to a convention that this embassy is a Greenland’s territory. In the same way we can point to an object in the sky and say “it’s the Moon” but because it’s a gross perceptible object it also isn’t the actual Moon, it’s part of the Earth, it’s the Moon’s embassy, so to speak. This embassy is open to provide cool, refreshing light when the Sun is not there, and to nurture growth of plants and vegetables. Using it for other purposes might break our user agreement. I suspect Moon people are not very happy with rockets and landers and all this human curiosity. It might also not affect them in any meaningful way but better be safe than sorry.
So a couple of simple but crucial points here – just because we see something in the sky it doesn’t mean we see another loka, and going to another loka requires transformation, not the same body moving through the same space. And there isn’t one space to hold everything either. There are many other kinds of spaces populated by many different kinds of things but, due to our particular conditioning, we consider only one kind – the visible one – as real. Beings living in those other spaces probably think exactly the same about their space, too. Conditioned reality is not the same for everyone.
For myself I can say this – once these ideas “clicked” inside of you, you can’t unsee it and all the doubts about Moon travel go away. I might not be able to answer all the questions but I know where to proceed in case it for some reason becomes necessary.
Your servant,
Sitalatma das
Source: https://www.dandavats.com/?p=117805
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