How do we understand the Puranic statements about the distances of earth moon and sun?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So when you say that it says in the books that they are… Okay.
So the question is, what is the exact relationship between the distance between the sun, the moon and the earth? Is the sun closer to the earth than the moon? Is this visible? Yes. See, first of all, in the Puranic literature, they just don’t talk about distances in physical terms. They have a vertical dimension.
There is this, they talk about the cosmos in terms of the evolution of consciousness of its residents. So vertical dimension means that there is, we talk about the heavenly planets. Now a simplistic idea would be that, oh heavens are up there.
But then people in India say the heavens are up. People in America say heavens are up. The earth is circular.
So up is two opposite directions. So what is up? So it is not a simple, simplistically geographical up that we are talking about. We are talking about up.
When Krishna says, वुद्धों वेच्छें सम्पस्ता, so leave goodness, they go up. It’s not just a simple geographical up. It’s a karmic up.
So there is a vertical dimension to cosmology in which up means the areas where people with higher karma, with better karma. And down means people with lower karma. So now the exact relationship between this vertical dimension and the dimension that we know of, that is not very clear to us from whatever knowledge we have in the scriptures right now.
But with this point in mind, of this vertical dimension being there, now it places planets in hierarchy according to the level of consciousness of its residents, the level of karma that the residents have formed to attain that planet. So let’s look at the channel now. If there are three flats, flats A, B and C. So flat A is the ground floor.
Flat B is the 24th, 20th floor of the next building nearby. And flat C is the third floor of another building far away from flat A. So look at this. So here flat B is there, here flat C is there.
Now, we just change this. This is the earth, this is the moon, this is the sun. Now, if you see, from the horizontal perspective, flat B is much closer to flat A than sorry, what is this? Okay, let’s go back.
See here, if I look from simply the horizontal perspective, from the horizontal perspective, flat B, what is its distance? That is much closer. Vertically, it’s much further. And in the next instance of distance, what is happening? The flat C, the flat C is actually further away.
So like that, in terms of vertical dimension, the moon is higher than the earth. The moon is higher than the sun as compared to the earth. But, in terms of physical distance, the sun is further away than the moon.
Is it clear? Simple point here is that the distance you talk about, the distance which the Bhagavad Gita is talking about, is from the vertical dimension point of view. That is not so easily comprehensible for us. But, in terms of net distance that is talked about, in terms of net distance, it is true that the sun is actually at the periphery, at a much further distance than the moon.
So there is no contradiction if we understand the complete picture given by the Cosmos. If we just take one thing out of the context and try to emphasize that, then there seems to be contradiction. Okay, any other questions?