“Higher Dimensional Travel” (SB 3.16.15)

TRANSCRIPT:  Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 3, Chapter 16, Text 15. “Higher Dimensional Travel.” Alachua - July 14, 1996 / (082)

[Text 15]: 

The four brāhmaṇa sages were nevertheless extremely delighted to behold Him, and they experienced a thrill throughout their bodies. They then spoke as follows to the Lord, who had revealed the multiglories of the Supreme Personality through His internal potency, yoga-māyā.

Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:

The sages were almost too puzzled to speak before the Supreme Personality of Godhead for the first time, and the hairs of their bodies stood erect due to their extreme joy. The highest opulence in the material world is called pārameṣṭhya, the opulence of Brahmā. But that material opulence of Brahmā, who lives on the topmost planet within this material world, cannot compare to the opulence of the Supreme Lord because the transcendental opulence in the spiritual world is caused by yoga-māyā, whereas the opulence in the material world is caused by mahā-māyā.

om ajñāna-timirāndhasya

jñānāñjana-śalākayā

cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena

tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ 

śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale

svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam

So, the translation: 

The four brāhmaṇa sages were nevertheless extremely delighted to behold Him, and they experienced a thrill throughout their bodies. They then spoke as follows to the Lord, who had revealed the multiglories of the Supreme Personality through His internal potency, yoga-māyā. 

So the four Kumarās are visiting Lord Viṣṇu in Vaikuṇṭha. Śrīla Prabhupāda points out here that the conditions in the spiritual world of Vaikuṇṭha are quite different from the conditions in the material world. There may be a great deal of opulence in the material world, but that is not comparable to the opulence of the spiritual world. So, in the spiritual world, the very nature of things is different from what we experience in the material world.

In the Brahma-saṁhitā, there's a description of the spiritual world. Here it is stated: 

I worship that transcendental seat, known as Śvetadvīpa where as loving concerts, the lakṣmīs in their unalloyed spiritual essence practice the amorous service of the Supreme Lord Kṛṣṇa as their only lover; where every tree is a transcendental purpose tree; where the soil is the purpose gem, all water is nectar, every word is a song, every gait is a dance, the flute is the favorite attendant, effulgence is full of transcendental bliss and the supreme spiritual entities are all enjoyable and tasty, where numberless milk cows always emit transcendental oceans of milk; where there is eternal existence of transcendental time, who is ever present and without past or future and hence not subject to the quality of passing away even for the space of half a moment. That realm is known as Goloka only to a very few self-realized souls in this world.

So, that's a description of the spiritual world. The nature of the spiritual world is quite different from that of the material reality. First of all, we see that time in the spiritual world is different from what one finds in the material world. In the material world, time is characterized by past, present, and future. The past, present, and future are determined by the processes of creation, maintenance, and destruction. That is, something comes into being through a process of creation, and then it goes out of being through the process of annihilation. So, things are continually passing away, and any given material state of affairs exists only for a very brief moment, and then it is succeeded by another material state of affairs and so forth.

But it would appear that time in the spiritual world is of a different character because nothing passes away. At the same time you have pastimes. So, you do have events which occur according to a sequence, but at the same time, nothing passes away. Nothing is lost. So, this is difficult for us to conceive of from a material perspective, but that's the description of time in the spiritual world. This description has reminded me of the basic idea of acintya-bhedābheda-tattva, where you have something inconceivably, simultaneously one and different. It appears that time in the spiritual world is like that in the sense that all of time is present, all events are present, and yet you have a succession of events. So, you have difference and you have oneness simultaneously in some way. So, that's the situation in the spiritual world.

[5:47]

So, if the spiritual world is categorically different from the material world, then one question is: How is it possible to travel from one to the other? Nonetheless, we find that that does seem to be possible. Here, of course, we have a description of the four Kumarās visiting Lord Viṣṇu in Vaikuṇṭha. So the four Kumarās were somehow able to travel from the material world to Vaikuṇṭha. The four Kumarās are very great yogis and they can also travel anywhere within the material world. For example, at one point they came to visit Maharaj Pṛthu on the earth. So, it is possible then to travel all the way from the earth to Vaikuṇṭha and back. Of course, Nārada Muni is famous for doing that on many different occasions.

So, that would imply that there has to be some kind of change of time zones. Of course, we have experience that even if we take a small trip to the east or west in this world, we may find that the time is different at our destination than it is at the point where we left for the trip. But the difference is not very great. It's a matter of a shift in the time by so and so many hours. But it would seem that if you travel from the material world to Vaikuṇṭha, you somehow go from material time into a state of transcendental time, which is completely different. And then it is possible it would seem to travel back. So you can leave material time and then reenter material time. And that leads to the question of what the time interval would be if you reentered material time.

Even within the material universe, it is described that there are various scales of time. For example, there's the description of one King Kakudmī who was a somewhat unusual king. He was connected, by the way, with Dvārakā in its previous manifestation as Kuśasthalī. In any case, this King Kakudmī had a daughter, Revatī, that he wanted to get married, and he decided that only Brahmā would be allowed to choose her husband for her. So he went with his daughter to Satyaloka to see Lord Brahmā. He had to wait a little while Lord Brahmā listened to a musical performance being put on by the Gandharvas, and then Lord Brahmā informed him that: Well, you'd better hurry back to the material world (of course, this was in the material world in Satyaloka) but: You'd better hurry back to the earth, because while you've been here, 120 million years have passed on the earth. And he recommended that his daughter should be given to Lord Balarāma who is still present on the earth at that moment. So, it seems that he had a uniquely qualified daughter also. So, what you see then is a radical change in the rate of passage of time.

So, what then happens if you go from the material world all the way to Vaikuṇṭha or Goloka Vṛindāvana and then come back? It would seem that when a personality such as Nārada Muni does this, he must be able to reinsert into material time at a desired point so that he doesn't have a time gap of millions and millions of years. Otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing him around. Let's say he might leave for Vaikuṇṭha and come back after a half hour of his experience and it would be billions of years later. So in the interval, he wouldn't be here. Evidently though he can come back a short time later. So, he must be able to somehow re-insert into the material time continuum in such a way that there's not a very large gap. 

[10:23]

The question can be raised that if it is possible to travel from the material world to the spiritual world, the path on which one travels must be somewhat different from ordinary roads within the material world, because any ordinary road within the material world simply leads to another ordinary material place. So, a road that ends up in Vaikuṇṭha must be somewhat of an unusual nature. And that indeed seems to be the case.

The world as we know it is embedded in a larger reality, which is in turn embedded in still larger realities, culminating ultimately in the spiritual world. So, one form of motion is to move around within the gross material world. There are types of motion one can execute that always take one to another gross material place. And if one only knows that form of motion, one can think that the gross material world is the total reality. But there are other forms of motion it would appear, which take one out of this continuum altogether into other continuums in which this is embedded. So, there's some information in Vedic literature about these different possible forms of motion.

First of all, I'll read one interesting account of an unusual way that you can travel within the material world. It is stated here earlier in the Third Canto. This is a verse also about the four Kumarās. It says: 

The sages came from the highest planets down to the lower region through the water of the Ganges, and therefore the hair on their heads was wet. They touched the lotus feet of the Lord [This is Garbhodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu] which are worshiped with various paraphernalia by the daughters of the serpent-king when they desire good husbands. 

So, Śrīla Prabhupāda here explains how to travel through the universe by the waters of the Ganges. Purport: 

The Ganges water flows directly from the lotus feet of Viṣṇu, and its course runs from the highest planet of the universe down to the lowest. The sages came down from Satyaloka by taking advantage of the flowing water, a process of transportation made possible by the power of mystic yoga. If a river flows thousands and thousands of miles, a perfect yogi can at once transport himself from one place to another simply by dipping in its water. The Ganges is the only celestial river which flows throughout the universe, and great sages travel all over the universe via this sacred river.

So, this is a mode of travel, which is a little bit different from what we normally experience. According to this, this should work in the Ganges in India. Let's say you're a yogi and you're up at Haridwar or someplace like that in the Himalayas, and you want to go down to Allahabad, let's say for the Kumbha-melā. So, instead of walking through all kinds of different circumstances in India, we just dip into the Ganges and you at once come out in Allahabad. So, this method of travel is possible for yogis, it would appear. This is what I would call an example of higher dimensional travel because you're cutting across space in a way that is not within our ordinary three dimensions. Within ordinary three dimensional space you have to go point by point. So, to go from say Haridwar to Allahabad, you'd have to cross all the different points in between. But this seems to be a different way of traveling.

[14:48]
However, one can do more than this. The Ganges that we know is part of a larger Ganges. And of course this isn't directly visible because it would appear that the Ganges we know begins somewhere up in the Himalayan mountains. I understand that the starting point of the Ganges is with water coming out of a glacier up in the Himalayas, but it is understood that in a higher dimensional sense, the Ganges connects with a larger river that extends throughout the universe. And this goes all the way from the higher planets where the Ganges first flows in through the hole kicked by Vāmanadeva through the shells of the universe. And it goes down all the way to the lower planets. In fact, all the way down to the Garbhodaka ocean. So, the four Kumarās in this case, we're able to travel from the higher planets down to the Garbhodaka ocean through the Ganges. So, this is one indication of this higher continuum.

There's another interesting description in the commentary on the Vedānta-sūtra by Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa. Let's see. Where is the description? There are many different quotations from the Upaniṣads in this text. And there's a description here of the deva-yāna path by which one can attain liberation. So it's an interesting description. It says now, when a person dies who's going to be on this path: They go to the plane of arcis [?], from the arcis [?] plane to the day plane, from the day plane to the bright fortnightly plane, from the bright fortnightly plane to the northern six monthly plane, from the northern six monthly plane to the annual plane, then to the sun, from the solar plane to the lunar plane, from the lunar plane to the plane of lightning. There a nonhuman person approaches them. He leads them to Brahman. This is the path guarded by the devas, the path that leads to Brahman. That doesn't just mean the brahmajyoti, but the spiritual world in general. That's explained here. Those who proceed on that path do not return to this round of humanity. Yes, they do not return. So, that description Is given.

It stated further on here. Let's see, the names of these different paths, stages of the path are given. And it's pointed out that these are not exactly places, but there are conducting demigods or devas. So, this is also a different mode of travel than what we're normally accustomed to, but this is part of the structure of the material world, which in this case leads up ultimately to the spiritual world. So, an interesting thing about this description of different stages is that there are a lot of astronomical references in it.

Recently I've been working on the project of presenting Vedic astronomy and cosmology. And one can see that the entire system of the material and spiritual worlds described in Vedic literature links up with the specifically material subdivision of Vedic cosmology and astronomy. And since this part of the description deals with what we directly see and experience, it's therefore important to have a coherent account of it so that we can then give credence to the whole description of the material and spiritual reality as given in the Vedic literature.

So, recently I gave a lecture at the University of Virginia. There is a scientific meeting there of something called the Society for Scientific Exploration. This is a group of scientists who are interested in exploring somewhat controversial topics. So, they are dealing with such things as parapsychology. Ian Stevenson was the chair of the meeting. He's the person who investigates cases of past life memories in young children. There were a number of astronomers there who were discussing different, somewhat controversial topics.

[20:19] 

It is interesting that many of the discussions involve the statistical analysis of various unusual correlations from which conclusions are then drawn. For example, there was a lady there who was giving a presentation on the Nazca lines in Peru. These are very long straight lines that are cut through the surface of the desert in southern Peru. And people have speculated a lot about what they might be. Some people have speculated that they might be landing strips for extraterrestrial spaceships. There's no justification for that however. But it turns out that if you look at these lines, you'll find that they exist in different groupings and each group of lines has a large pictograph of some kind of creature associated with it.

So, one group of lines will have a gigantic spider, another will have a gigantic eagle and so forth. And it turns out that the lines with the particular creature associated with them, point to the direction on the horizon where certain stars in the Milky Way Galaxy will rise, when they rise from the horizon at certain points in the year. And if you look at the traditions of the Indians in that region of Peru, you'll find that they in fact assign those animal names to those parts of the Milky Way, just as we assign animal names to different parts of the Zodiac, such as the lion and so on and so forth. So, she was arguing on the basis of the correlations that this must be the meaning of these lines in the desert. So, the interesting thing here is that this provides an opportunity for presenting the Bhāgavatam cosmology in planetariums. This person has been basically presenting planetarium shows in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago for the last 23 years.

In fact, they do present shows occasionally of this nature, in which they deal with, what they call archeoastronomy or ancient astronomy. And typically what they will do is point out that certain things line up with certain other things in a way that indicates some ancient astronomical knowledge. The idea is that some ancient culture was carefully observing the positions of stars and planets and so forth, and that we have record of this surviving down to the present day. So the same sort of presentation can be made with the Bhāgavatam. And it would be interesting to see if we can do something like that. So, in any case, I'll stop there. Murli? 

Question:  [unclear] 

Answer:  A yogi traveling by entering the asphalt of the super highway. I have a feeling that would be a rather traumatic method of travel, but I don't really know what it is about water. It would appear that the water has some higher dimensional unity so you can tap into it at one point and come out at another desired point. But I really don't know the details. I do know that there are other traditions in the world in which the same kind of thing is described. In fact, the first place I encountered it years ago was in the Carlos Castaneda books because he has his... Don Juan described the same thing. You dip into a river somewhere and then come out in another place. 

[25:02]

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  I've wondered that. I don't know any example where it said that that happens. But, It does...it is sort of suggestive, but I don't know. Yeah.

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Well, there's some question about that. Now, Brahma-saṁhitā [5.5] gives a description of Śvetadvīpa (unfortunately, this book is disintegrating). Yes, it's described here. The surrounding external plane of Goloka is described in this verse: 

There is a mysterious quadrangular place named Śvetadvīpa surrounding the outskirts of Gokula. [Yes. It says Gokula, not Goloka.] Śvetadvīpa is divided into four parts on all sides. The abode of Vāsudeva, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha are separately located in each of these four parts. These four divided abodes are enveloped by the fourfold human requirements such as piety, wealth, passion and liberation, as also by the four Vedas [etc. Let's see]... Ten tridents are fixed in the ten directions, including the zenith and nadir. 

Various descriptions here. So, that's one description of Śvetadvīpa as an outlying region of Gokula. And Vāsudeva, Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha are situated there.

Then again, you have the Śvetadvīpa where Lord Brahmā came to the shore of the ocean to petition Kṣīrodaka-śāyī Viṣṇu. And the impression one gets is that that is well... Well, it is stated that's in the milk ocean in the material world. But then the question is, where is the milk ocean? Now, there is a milk ocean in Bhū-maṇḍala, that's described. But then again in Dhruvaloka, it's described that there's a milk ocean and Śvetadvīpa. So the question is, did Brahmā and the demigods go to Dhruvaloka or to the milk ocean in Bhū-maṇḍala? It's not completely clear, but anyway, that's as much as I know about it. Yeah? 

Q:  [unclear]

A:  These are present in the material world. You're saying the material world’s a reflection of the spiritual world, therefore these things should be present there? 

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Well, of course, if you look at a reflection – if you pursue that analogy – the interesting thing is a reflection in some way resembles the original reflected object, but it's also different. And a reflection may acquire aspects due to the reflecting substance, which are not present in the original object. Suppose, for example, you see a reflection of the sun in muddy water with ripples. So, when you look at that reflection, you'll notice the mud and the ripples, but there's no mud or ripples in the sun.

[30:08] 

 So, it would seem a reflection can have aspects that aren't there in the original. So, as far as birth and death are concerned, I don't know of any counterpart of that in the spiritual world, but of course some things do have a counterpart. Time as a counterpart, but it's a bit different from material time as I was describing. And there are many other counterparts as well, but you don't have everything, I think, in the material world represented in the spiritual world. Yeah? 

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Well, time certainly has its subjective aspect because if there were no subjective experience, even if time was there, there'd be no one to experience it. Of course that's like asking if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, it might make a sound that nobody hears, but there'll be no experienced sound, that's for sure. 

So, time has its subjective aspect, but it would appear that time also is something external to the individual because when something passes away within material time it's gone, and you can't get it back through subjective perception. Consider your experiences as a child. You might have some degree of memory of those experiences, but the actual situation of yourself as a child is gone. So, time it would seem is an external process that is constantly changing things. So, you have the subjective consciousness that then links up with the external process. And by changing the subjective consciousness, you can alter the experience of the process but the process still goes on inexorably. Yeah?

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  Yeah. Well, it's described that Śukadeva Gosvāmīi visited the sun by traveling on the sun beams. So that's another route. 

Q:  [unclear] 

A:  It's often described that he travels through ether. There are many descriptions of travel through the ether. And when Śrīla Prabhupāda says he's traveling through outer space, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's up there in what we think of as outer space. Because what's referred to as the ether, which is right here also. So starting from here, you could travel in the ether to another place. So, jaya. All glories to Śrīla Prabhupāda.