Gita 08.17 – The immortal is not eternal
Bhagavad Gita 8.17 8.17 for a thousand yugas ahar is day for brahma that is the day and similarly the night is also of the duration of sahasra yuga such is the such is the night of brahma here Krishna is taking Arjuna through a verbal tour of the cosmos and therein Krishna is telling Arjuna that there is no destination that is eternal apart from his abode so in the previous verse he stated that that right from the heavenly planets right from brahma's abode down to the lowest planets all are places from which one has to return the question may come up oh but isn't it that the residents of the higher lokas are considered everlasting they are considered immortal so how can that be a place of death and destruction and return to the only level the people of this earth are called as martyaha and the people of heaven are called as amara so and brahma's abode is higher than heaven also so then how is it that from there also one has to come back so Krishna tells over here that actually there is no part of the material world that is eternal it is called as eternal because it is enormously long the life in brahma's planet and brahma's planet itself the life of brahma's planet is enormously long correspondingly life of brahma is also long for a thousand ages this the chronology across the cosmology is talked about here but spirituality lies beyond chronology and beyond cosmology at least when it comes to material level of reality so there are four yugas and the four yugas combined together are also called as a yuga they are called technically as divya yuga but here Krishna uses the word yuga to refer to divya yuga and like that thousand yugas comprise a day of brahma and a thousand yugas comprise night of brahma and beyond these is although from our point of view it is enormously long it might even seem like infinite but it is not infinite it has limitations and the word amara which is used in the Upanishads sorry in the Vedas primarily its import is explained in the Upanishads as being as implying great length not infinite length enormous length not infinite length and in that sense even in the heavens one does not gain an eternal result in the heavens we may live for very long but we don't live eternally there it is only in the spiritual world that eternal life is possible apart from the spiritual world the word so the words have multiple connotations and the word amara is used in the sense of having a very long life span not in terms of being immortal not in terms of being eternal rather so immortal we normally might think that it means eternal but here its not used in literal sense its used in the sense of in the relative sense so there are four levels of living beings talked about in the broad Vedic body of literature there is martyaha, there is amara there is chiranjiva and there is nitya so martyaha are we earthly beings we have a finite life spans in Kalyugites they are around 100 years or lesser and beyond that there is amara which refers to residents of the heavenly planets they usually live for about one manmantara devatas they rule for about one manmantara and that is their life that is their life span chiranjivas they live for a much longer life longer time usually it is for one day of brahma or sometime they may live on even for a lifetime of brahma actually lifetime of brahma is very very rare it is usually one day of brahma it is very very long but beyond that is nitya so nitya alone is eternal in the sense of having no end and nityatva is an eternality can be attained only at the spiritual level it cannot be attained at the material level no matter how high one ascends in the material hierarchy in the cosmos so brahmaji is in the highest position within the material hierarchy and even he is not eternal even his existence is terminated by time so the immortal is a relative usage to contrast with us mortals it is not equal to eternal it is not devatas they do meet with destruction and this is the theme which is repeatedly talked in the puranas and the itihasas although it may not be the stress in all the puranas and the itihasas but especially in the amala purana the insecurity that the devatas face because of attacks by the demons because of threats that their positions may be usurped by pious kings who perform lots of sacrifices in worship into that apprehension that fear is vividly depicted to drive home the point that even life in the heavenly planets is no happily ever after the only happily ever after that we can have is in the spiritual world and we can attain the spiritual world by practicing bhakti to Krishna by becoming devoted to Krishna … … … so the radically different nature of the spiritual world will be talked about by Krishna after this three verse section about Brahma's abode which begins from here text 17 and goes on to 19 and 20 to 22 we'll talk about the eternal spiritual world and we'll come to that in due course.