Understanding why Bhagavatam considers Sun to be closer to the earth than the moon

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Then there is another controversial statement which sometimes Prabhupada says which simply agitates people. Prabhupada seems to say that the sun is closer to the earth than the moon. Now, people who know some amount of cosmology say that if it were like that, we would not be able to live.
Mercury is the closest planet. Neither Mercury nor Venus are actually suitable for human habitation because they are just too hot. So, what is Prabhupada saying actually when he is saying sun is closer to the earth? So, this is the question.
The moon is not that far away. That’s what modern cosmology tells us. So, how do we understand it? So, the Bhagavatam’s vision itself is different.
When it talks about distances, it is talking about distances from different perspective. It’s a vision based on the evolution of consciousness of the residents. And within the Bhagavatam’s universal description, there is a vertical dimension.
Vertical is not just physically up. It is in terms of karma. Like I mentioned, heaven is up.
So, there is a vertical dimension to the universe and the cosmos. And then, when we say the Svarga Loka is above and Satya Loka is above that, that is in terms of a karmic hierarchy. Now, we may depict it in terms of geographical hierarchy when we draw diagrams of the universe.
But there is much more to the description of the universe. So, with this basic understanding of the vision of the universe, let’s move forward. So, here, let’s consider three buildings.
So, there is somebody living in flat A on the ground floor. Yeah, I’ll just come to that. So, at the bottom of the flat A ground level is the earth.
That’s at the right side. So, now somebody is living here and then far away from them somebody is living. So, that is the sun.
That is the left top, leftmost. The yellow one. That is flat C. So, flat A is the earth, flat C is the sun.
And flat B, you’ll see it’s at a very high level. You can say it’s at the 20th level. But it is very close.
So, when Prabhupada is saying the sun is closer than the earth, it’s closer to the earth than the moon, he is referring it in terms of the vertical dimension. Vertical dimension means the height of the sun is, in terms of height, the sun’s plane is closer to the earth’s plane than the moon’s plane. If you consider the plane, then the sun is closer in its plane.
But not in the geographical distance. So, the earth is at the ground level, the sun is at the second level. So, earlier I also described that the earth is the Bhumandala and Manasattar Parvat, the sun is moving around.
But Soma is way above. So, flat B is horizontally, if we consider, in terms of horizontal dimensions, flat B is much closer to flat A. So, here now we have three ways of measuring distance. One is, look at the planes of all the three places, the plane in which they are existing.
The earth, the sun and the moon. If you look at the three planes and measure the distance between them, then the sun is closer to the earth than the moon. But if we look at it in terms of the horizontal distance, the sun is much much further away.
And then, if we look at the effective distance, that is the diagonal distance. During the diagonal distance also, the sun is much further away. So, when Prabhupada is talking about the sun being closer, it is primarily in terms of the plane at which the sun is existing.
It’s not the physical distance of the sun to the earth, but the distance of the solar plane to the earth’s plane. So, that, yeah, Manasattar, just now we started the class. It is described that the solar plane is at a particular level.
No, that is, the Bhagavatam itself is saying that the sun exists at a particular height and then in between, there is the Kim Purusha Loka and the Upadevata Lokas. And then below that, there is the earth. But the Swarga Lokas are way above.
The Swarga Lokas have already been described. And Chandra exists over there. So, this particular dimensions, yes, dimensions about the heights of various planes, that’s mentioned in the Bhagavatam itself.
So, this is the resolution