What do you imply when you say that the heaven is not above the earth in a simplistic geographical sense?

From Panca Pandava P

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. You say that the heaven is not simply above the earth, because people in India and America both say that the heaven is above, and those two above will be in opposite direction. What exactly do you mean by this? The single point that I mean is that when we use words, we are using our language and we have certain meanings which we associate with them.
But those meanings may not always be valid when we are looking at different world views or in different contexts. For example, the word virus, for a computer specialist, will mean something different than for a doctor. One is a computer virus, other is a biological virus.
So, this is, words can have different meanings depending on context. Similarly, when we use the word above, we just look at the sky and that’s what we mean by above. So, if we use this physical sense of above, then we come to a logical fallacy.
Fallacy means incorrectness, mistaking. So, what is the logical fallacy? People everywhere say that heaven is above, but as I said, if the earth is round, then what is above India will be in one direction, and what is above America will be in another direction. So, then if heaven is above, in which direction is it? The two aboves are in opposite directions.
So, what does this mean? This actually means that when we talk about above, the heaven is above the earth, that above is not in the, the word above is the same in the Vedic scriptural sense as the word above in our normal conversation. We say the word is the same, but the meaning is not exactly the same. Why is the meaning not the same? Because there when the scriptures talk about above, it is not seen in a geographical sense above.
Because the geographical above will be opposite for two different countries, like India and America. So, of natural sciences, Siddharth Mukherjee, who is a scientific disciple of Shri Prabhupada, he has written a book called Vedic Cosmoplathy, in which he explains how the cosmology described in the Vedic scriptures often talks of concepts from a higher dimensional perspective. And although what is talked about seems to be similar to what we are talking about, but actually something much deeper and sometimes quite different is being talked about in those scriptures.
So, one of the aspects he gives us for this is the vertical dimension. So, this vertical dimension that the scriptures talk about is not in a physical or geographical vertical sense. It is actually in the sense of the karmic qualifications.
He says that, but when we say go down, what does it mean? Does it mean that they go inside the earth, if down is below, inside the earth, no. And so what it means is that they go to, those who are living in Tamoguna, they go to lower planetary systems and they go to higher planetary systems or they go to higher destinations. So these higher, now if you understand what the mode of goodness causes us to act, IS The mode of goodness causes us to act in person, simply, and accordingly we get karmic reactions.
And those karmic reactions propel us to certain destinations where we will get future karmic reactions. So when Bhagavata talks about going above or going down, it is not talking about geographical above or down, it is talking about karmic above or down. What is a karmic above or down? Karmic above or down means that there are certain places which are meant for people with better health.
So those people going down, they will go to the higher planets. And that is what it means above. So when we say heaven is above, that above is not in a geographical sense, that above is in the sense of an area of existence where the living conditions, the material comforts and pleasures are much higher than what are available on the earth.
So the above is in terms of karmic qualifications, it is not in terms of geographical directions. And that is what I mean by the logical, the physical conception of above in our normal language and the Vedic conception of above in terms of karmic qualifications.