"Parallel Reality" (CC Adi-lila 5.18)

TRANSCRIPT:  Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Ādi-līlā, Chapter 5, text 18. “Parallel Reality.” n-d / (210)

Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Ādi-līlā, Chapter 5, text 18: 

Like the transcendental body of Lord Kṛṣṇa, Gokula is all-pervading, infinite and supreme. It expands both above and below, without any restriction. 

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:

Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī, the great authority and philosopher in the line of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, has discussed the abode of Kṛṣṇa in his Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha. In the Bhagavad-gītā the Lord refers to “My abode.” Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī, examining the nature of Kṛṣṇa’s abode, refers to the Skanda Purāṇa, which states:

yā yathā bhuvi vartante, puryo bhagavataḥ priyāḥ

tās tathā santi vaikuṇṭhe, tat-tal-līlārtham ādṛtāḥ

“The abodes of Godhead in the material world, such as Dvārakā, Mathurā and Gokula, are facsimiles representing the abodes of Godhead in the kingdom of God, Vaikuṇṭha-dhāma.” The unlimited spiritual atmosphere of that Vaikuṇṭha-dhāma is far above and beyond the material cosmos. This is confirmed in the Svāyambhuva-tantra, in a discussion between Lord Śiva and Pārvatī regarding the effect of chanting the mantra of fourteen syllables. There it is stated:

nānā-kalpa-latākīrṇaṁ, vaikuṇṭhaṁ vyāpakaṁ smaret

adhaḥ sāmyaṁ guṇānāṁ ca,  prakṛtiḥ sarva-kāraṇam

“While chanting the mantra, one should always remember the spiritual world, which is very extensive and full of desire trees that can yield anything one desires. Below that Vaikuṇṭha region is the potential material energy, which causes the material manifestation.” The places of the pastimes of Lord Kṛṣṇa, such as Dvārakā, Mathurā and Vṛndāvana, eternally and independently exist in Kṛṣṇaloka. They are the actual abodes of Lord Kṛṣṇa, and there is no doubt that they are situated above the material cosmic manifestation.

The abode known as Vṛndāvana or Gokula is also known as Goloka. The Brahma-saṁhitā states that Gokula, the highest region of the kingdom of God, resembles a lotus flower with thousands of petals. The outer portion of that lotus-like planet is a square place known as Śvetadvīpa. In the inner portion of Gokula there is an elaborate arrangement for Śrī Kṛṣṇa’s residence with His eternal associates such as Nanda and Yaśodā. That transcendental abode exists by the energy of Śrī Baladeva, who is the original whole of Śeṣa, or Ananta. The tantras also confirm this description by stating that the abode of Śrī Anantadeva, a plenary portion of Baladeva, is called the kingdom of God. Vṛndāvana-dhāma is the innermost abode within the quadrangular realm of Śvetadvīpa, which lies outside of the boundary of Gokula Vṛndāvana.

According to Jīva Gosvāmī, Vaikuṇṭha is also called Brahmaloka. The Nārada-pañcarātra, in a statement concerning the mystery of Vijaya, describes:

tat sarvopari goloke, tatra lokopari svayam

viharet paramānandī, govindo ’tula-nāyakaḥ

“The predominator of the gopīs, Govinda, the principal Deity of Gokula, always enjoys Himself in a place called Goloka, in the topmost part of the spiritual sky.”

From the authoritative evidence cited by Jīva Gosvāmī we may conclude that Kṛṣṇaloka is the supreme planet in the spiritual sky, which is far beyond the material cosmos. For the enjoyment of transcendental variety, the pastimes of Kṛṣṇa there have three divisions, and these pastimes are performed in the three abodes Dvārakā, Mathurā and Gokula. When Kṛṣṇa descends to this universe, He enjoys the pastimes in places of the same name. These places on earth are nondifferent from those original abodes, for they are facsimiles of those original holy places in the transcendental world. They are as good as Śrī Kṛṣṇa Himself and are equally worshipable. Lord Caitanya declared that Lord Kṛṣṇa, who presents Himself as the son of the King of Vraja, is worshipable, and that Vṛndāvana-dhāma is equally worshipable. 

So, in the philosophy of Krishna Consciousness, one very prominent feature is the idea of parallel realities. One can go to Vṛindāvana, for example, by purchasing a ticket. Well, you can go to Mathurā at any rate, then take a rickshaw over to Vṛindāvana. But according to Vaiṣṇava philosophy, the spiritual world is existing in Vṛindāvana. Most of us won't see that if you go there. So this is a parallel reality. 

[5:05]

Furthermore, the spiritual world that exists in Vṛindāvana is corresponding to or is a facsimile of – Śrīla Prabhupāda used this word “facsimile” – the spiritual world, which is completely transcendental and beyond this material manifestation. Being transcendental, you may ask: Well, where is it? Of course, what we see with these senses, by definition, is not transcendental – its material. These senses are quite limited. So, for example, the sense of sight… of course the modern explanation is that you have a lot of atoms, and the atoms give off photons of light, which are like little particles of light, and some of the photons entered your eye, and they’re focused by the lens form an image on the retina of the eye. And then there are more material actions and reactions that go on. You have nerve cells being stimulated by the photons, then a bunch of chemical reactions occur in the shell. and an action potential is produced, and this goes traveling down an axon, and goes into the brain, and a lot of things like that happen: all sorts of things involving shells and electrical currents and so on. That's the modern understanding of what's going on. 

Now how that results in seeing is that hard to understand. In fact, no one has the faintest idea how those electrical impulses and chemical reactions and so forth result in seeing. Of course, you can understand how they might result in a reaction. Just like if you have a mouse trap set up with the springs and you push down on the little lever that catches and the thing snaps down. So, mechanically you can see how a stimulus yields [unclear] in a suitably organized material system. So, likewise with all those millions of neurons in the brain and so forth, you can understand the least in principle how various impulses coming in through the nerves from the eye and other nerves in the body and so forth, could result in a complicated reaction. and perhaps you could even explain human behavior in that way. including me sitting here talking. This could all be explained – you can break it down into nerve impulses going through different cells and synapses and so forth. 

But the question comes: Well, how is it that I'm aware of any of that? Why is there awareness there? For example, let’s say you hear the sound of a violin; you can imagine that sounds like. Now that's certain nerve impulses and certain parts of the brain, in the area the nerves in the ears project to, and you can imagine seeing a sunset and that's nerve impulses and another region of the brain. Well, why is that the watershed of nerve impulses produces the sound of a violin and the other set of nerve impulses is producing a perception of the sun set? The answer would be: No one has any idea, it’s a total mystery. But it would seem that there's more to the human being than just the material body, namely all these cells and the nerve impulses and so on and so forth. There's something else there which is perceiving. You could certainly… scientists have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to understand the brain and you can understand a lot of things going on in the brain, but they haven't the faintest idea what perception is, which at least is consistent with the idea that what is perceiving is something other than the brain. The reason they haven't been able to understand perception by looking at the brain, is that the brain is not the thing that's perceiving, it's something else. 

[9:57] 

So somehow we are something else, which is receiving through the apparatus of the body and the senses. So we actually belong to a different domain of existence, that would be the idea. And this receiving is something being done by something other than the material apparatus. So, that itself points to the possibility that in addition to this material continuum with these atoms and protons and so forth, there's another continuum in which we're actually existing, that somehow we've been linked up to this material continuum. Computers provide a nice analogy for this, especially the idea of virtual reality, which I guess hasn't made it commercially yet because computers aren't powerful enough. But there's the concept that you can have a computer simulation running which produces a complete world in which there are different things that could be rivers and mountains and birds and trees and so forth, and your sensors get linked up in the computer simulation. And you're wearing goggles that have little TV screens in them, and you have ear probes with sounds produced by the computer, and you can even imagine a feeling system: you put your hand on a high-tech steroid and it pumps nerve impulses into your hands, which then produce the appropriate tactile sensations for being in some kind of world. 

So you're then projected into that world, and you're seeing what is in that world. This has been done crudely – you have people wearing these huge goggle arrangements; it’s actually quite a weight on their head. And they're wearing data gloves which go over the hand so that when you move your fingers the data is sent to the computer and the hand of your simulated body also moves. So I saw once a simulation in which two people in the simulated world were shaking hands with each other. Actually, each person was sitting in the chair, and they were separated by about 20 feet, and each one had these gloves on and goggles and so forth, and they were going through motions. But what they were seeing was they were walking in these simulated bodies in the simulation room toward each other, reaching out and shaking hands. The only trouble was that the simulation wasn't good enough to have solid body contact – it's too complicated. There's so many different ways that surfaces can touch each other. So, their hands pass through each other when they try to shake hands, which was a little bit of a letdown.

But they were actually acting within that world: picking up sense data and then acting accordingly, even in a simulated world. So the idea would be, similarly, we are transcendental entities, and we are perceiving what is going on in this world due to some sensory link-up – some data connection with considerable bandwidth so that we see ourselves and perceive ourselves as acting and experiencing things within this world even though we're not part of this world. So what is that world, then? So we've seen that there are different, you might say, levels of reality, from various analogies to enable one to refer to this. You can speak of higher dimensions or different planes of reality; these are all metaphors to try to convey the idea. The concept of the parallel world also is a metaphor because the word “parallel" comes from geometry, where you can have two parallel lines which are right next to each other but they don't touch unless they're in very close proximity. So similarly, there's this other world that we're actually part of, although we don't generally know it, which is parallel to this material world. 

So what is the nature of that world, and how does it link up with the material world, anyway? Of course your computer, your data link, there's some kind of cable, a [unclear] cable. So we're talking about a much more subtle kind of data link. And again, in the whole realm of science no one has any idea what that would be – just completely beyond anyone's understanding. So there's the data link and then there's the parallel reality. Now this parallel reality apparently has rather complex structure. 

[15:13]

The first point to note is the material world is not the ultimate source of reality. That would be one concept. There's the idea that: Well, the material world sort of gives off a subtle parallel world in the same way that… well, the analogy was made of the liver producing bile or something like that, that was Darwin's analogy. You might know he would come up with something like that! That's what he was saying: The brain secretes thoughts just as the liver secretes bile. So the thing is, a thought is something rather different from bile, at least for some people it is. But in any case, so there's a concept which would say that the subtle level of reality is emanated from the material level. But what we find here is exactly the opposite, namely that there is an ultimate spiritual level of reality, you might say, and that tends to be infinitely expanding. 

So we have the description here of Gokula. By the way, Gokula and Goloka: apparently kula basically means a group, or in this case a herd, because Gokula would be the group of cows. And loka is like a world or a place where beings live. So Goloka would be the world of the cows; there’s an emphasis on cows here. So this Goloka is said to be all-pervading, infinite, and supremely expands both above and below without any restriction. So the lotus, actually, is in a way a natural metaphor for infinity because you have spirals and spirals of pedals, which of course in the actual lotus there's only a finite number, if you can imagine it spiraling in infinitely. In fact a logarithmic spiral, which you see in plants, would increase the spiral infinitely far. So in that sense the center of a flower, which is like a symbol of infinity… but this lotus of Goloka or Gokula is infinite and expands in all directions. Of course, what do you mean in this case by directions? 

Actually in the Brahma-saṁhitā it’s described… the whole arrangement of the spiritual world is described in terms of three dimensions, namely ten directions. Of the ten directions are north, south, east, west and then north east, south east, and so on. And that gives you eight, and then up and down, making ten. So that's how the description is given. But that would apparently be metaphorical because those are not the directions that we know. So this Goloka expands in all directions. It consists of many in which Kṛṣṇa is carrying out His different pastimes and no doubt many other things completely beyond our imagination.

Now it's described here that there's a place called Śvetadvīpa which is just sort of outside the realm of this lotus, even though the lotus is all-expanding and infinite. Just outside of it (now how can that be if it’s all-expanding and infinite?) there's this square region. It's interesting that this Śvetadvīpa is square, but Śvetadvīpa is associated with Anantadeva, Who’s an expansion of Balarama. Now in the material world there is also a simulacrum or facsimile of Śvetadvīpa. So you have the original Śvetadvīpa and Śvetadvīpa within the material world. 

[20:02] 

Śrīla Prabhupāda has said a number of things about where that Śvetadvīpa is. It's described as an island in the ocean of milk. So there's an ocean of milk in Bhū-maṇḍala in the region called Sapta-dvīpa that's a ring-shaped ocean, the way it's described. So one possibility is that Śvetadvīpa is there. But in another place Śrīla Prabhupāda says that on the planet of Dhruvaloka there's an ocean of milk and Śvetadvīpa is there. However, there is actually a third description. In one place Śrīla Prabhupāda cites the Laghu-Bhāgavatāmr̥ta and that describes that there's the saltwater ocean and then the ocean milk and Śvetadvīpa is located to the east of Meru in the ocean of milk. Even the dimension is given of two hundred thousand miles in that reference. This, by the way, doesn't refer to the order of the oceans given in the Bhāgavatam. But there's a different order of the oceans given in the Siddhānta-śiromaṇi and in the Matsya Purāṇa – that information is given. 

In any case, this Śvetadvīpa is where Kṣīrodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu is resting on Anantadeva, and that's where Brahmā goes to inquire… to pray to Lord Viṣṇu to resolve various difficulties in the material situation. So it's also described here of course, that Vṛindāvana, Mathurā, and Dvārakā will have their counterpart in the spiritual world. And there are spiritual facsimiles of those (Vṛindāvana, Mathurā, and Dvārakā) in the material… on this earth, so those, in turn, being different from mundane locations. I understand also that there are celestial Vṛindāvana, Mathurā, and so forth, suggesting that you can go to Vṛindāvana on the gross physical level and then you might go from there to the celestial Vṛindāvana; but that’s still not the transcendental Vṛindāvana. There are many different levels of existence and all of this in one sense is existing in the same place, which is another aspect. Because Kṛṣṇa is greater than the greatest and also smaller than the smallest, so where Kṛṣṇa is, His entire abode is to be found, which would mean that it’s all right here also, that you could only access the whole thing. Any questions? Yeah.

Question:  [unclear] 

Answer:  Well, the thing I was saying about perception to begin with, you see, we have this idea of the parallel reality: there’s a transcendental reality parallel to this material reality. The interesting thing is we're actually part of that transcendental reality. We think we're part of the material reality so our senses are linked up to the material nature. But in relation to what you were saying, basically that means a limitation on our sense perception. In other words, our natural sense perception would enable us to see the spiritual world and the material world. And it wouldn't limit us to, for example, seeing things through these gelatinous eyeballs. I mean, it is a rather curious thing. There’s this eyeball. Well, there's a spherical shell, and inside there’s this [unclear] and so forth. 

[25:00] 

There’s this line from Shakespeare in King Lear: “Out, out vile jelly!” and pulls the guy's eye out with the hook. “Where is thy luster now?” So it is rather odd that this ball of jelly could see 

In the first place – how does that work? When you just pass the buck back to the brain: Well, you see because your brain is doing something with the nerve impulses that are sent in by the eye. Well, that's a glob of jelly also, so how does that see? So somehow I think it would appear as a restriction of the natural spiritual seeing, so that is limited to what a certain glob of jelly is doing. It's a very unusual situation. 

So there are descriptions in out-of-body experiences and so forth that people’s seeing becomes much less restricted. In other words, they can see what's going on in the other room, for example. There's the case of this lady who had an out-of-body experience from a heart attack, or something like that. And when she regained consciousness she said, “You know, this hospital is so dirty. I was looking up on top of the light, and there are all these bugs and dirt up there. And out on this window, men jump on such-and-such floor, and there’re these tennis shoes laying on a ledge. This is supposed to be a place where you recover from the illness,” and so forth. 

And of course, people were a little bit shocked about that. But someone went to check, and they found the tennis shoes were on the ledge, up on some floor. And the only way you could see that was she had to go up to the appropriate place and lean way out the window and look around, and you could see them. So how could she see that? Because she was confined to her bed and had had a heart attack. So even… there appears to be a subtle platform of seeing which is much less restricted than our physical seeing. I’d still be interested in finding out about out-of-body experiences in blind people. That would be interesting. Especially if someone is congenitally blind, that is from birth. What would happen if they have out-of-body experience? But beyond that, there is a spiritual level of seeing in which you could actually see Goloka and enter into that and so forth. Yeah?

Question:  [unclear] 

Answer:  Well, the difficult thing is to understand how the material world can connect to some higher reality. Now physics tends to be presented as a self-contained system – that's the problem. That's one of the main causes for, you might say, atheism in science. Because the physicists write down their equations describing different entities such as electromagnetic fields and things like that. And it's a closed system, there's no way out. Actually it's kind of ironic, but the Big Bang theory offered a way out because the Big Bang starts with a singularity, and in a singularity, by definition, all the mathematics breaks down. So at that point anything goes. So Stephen Hawking, the famous crippled scientist, went to a lot of effort to patch that singularity, so that as you approach the singularity, instead of coming to a singularity where everything breaks down, we sort of zip around in another dimension and come back out again in the smooth continuum. So then the whole thing becomes seamless again. And he called this the “no boundary” theory. So the idea then is there's no room for God because the material system is a seamless continuum. And you just go here, there within it, which is like being restricted to the surface of the sphere. And you just go around then around this way and that, as long as you stay restricted to the surface of the sphere. In fact, that's all there is. So that means no room for God or any of this spiritual stuff. And there you are. It’s left to the neurophysiologist to explain somehow how all these nerve impulses can give rise to perception. 

[30:20]

So it would seem that there must be some limit to the physics. It's not being presented properly. Now in one sense, if you look at physics from a historical standpoint, you can see that there's good reason to think that it’s subject to limitations because it keeps changing with time. So right now, the latest thing in physics is to try and figure out the so-called superstring theory. Oddly enough, superstring theory is based on the idea that instead of particles moving in three dimensional space – where particles are like a little puck, and it moves around in space – what you have are little vibrating strings. It's almost like the string of the guitar, vibrating in different harmonics. But they vibrate within ten-dimensional space because, in order to explain all the things that they needed to explain, they had to have ten different degrees of freedom to vibrate in. 

Now the way they get rid of the other six dimensions – you've got three dimensions of space and one of time, then you add six more – well, they curl them up into a tiny little ball. Let's see how to explain this: just like you can take a sheet, a square, so that has two dimensions. But imagine curling one into a tube, like a very thin drinking straw. It still has two dimensions, but if you stand back from it, it seems to be just a one-dimensional line. So they say similarly you take the extra six dimensions and curve them into its own little tube which you can't see, it’s too small. So in this way you have got ten dimensions, but you can only see or experience four. So this is what they try to do. But what if they're… I mean it's very recently that they've introduced these ten dimensions. I think since about the 1980s, really. So then what else may they introduce at some future point? So the system that we're part of materially could be part of something much bigger, part of a larger continuum going off in different dimensions. 

So in that sense, this is just a limited sub-continuum, you might say. Then of course this is all within the realm of duality. That's another thing. In the spiritual world, everything is connected. In the material world, things are, let's say, loosely connected. Just like the features of this microphone, they can all come apart. Then they’re just separate pieces. Eventually you can break the thing down into atoms and they’re just separate little atoms. But in the spiritual world, everything is integrally unified and connected. Kṛṣṇa’s limbs are all interchangeable, so that He can perform the action of one limb with another limb and so forth. So how this interconnectedness relates to the material continuum where things are all split up, is one of the mysterious areas. But there's a lot of room, I think, for further extension of physics.

Question:  [unclear]

Answer:  …become co-creators of thought? Well, you said, “Man proposes and God disposes.” That phrase is there, which means that we do have a capacity as co-creators. If we imagine a certain state of affairs, then God may bring that about for us even though it may not be even the best thing. Still that may be brought about. So you have people today putting tremendous imagination and willpower into developing different kinds of technology. So you have this fantastic development of technology and it historically doesn't even make sense. I mean, for thousands of years people were doing things in a certain pretty limited way, and now they're creating the computers, the gigabytes of memory, and all this kind of thing. That's a bit odd, if you think the characters who were content with chipped flints for hundreds of thousands of years would not suddenly be creating computers within 50 years, let’s say? But it's happening. So it would seem some input of higher information is taking place, but people are desiring it. Now people might be well advised to desire something a bit different. But you get what you ask for, ultimately.