Bhagavad Gita 8.17

[Yahaira Petrov]

Howlong we live greatly depends on what kind of body we have. For example, an insect might stay around for only a month, while a human being sometimes lasts for 100 years. And as the time-honored Bhagavad-gita informs us, the inhabitants of planetary systems higher than ours have bodies of a still higher quality and so live much longer than we do here. In fact Lord Brahma, the administrative demigod who resides on the highest planet in the universe, lives not a moment less than 311 trillion 40 billion years.

Of course, modern scientists have some inkling that a single 24-hour span on some higher planets may equal an earth year or maybe more, but they have no idea just how much more. Bhagavad-gita ( 8.17) tells us this about the length of Lord Brahma?s day and night:

All of this may seem fantastic to us, but as Einstein learned some years ago, time is relative. Take, for example, an amoeba, whose life span is less than an hour. If we could explain our life span to the amoeba, just think how flabbergasted he would be. In the same way, although we may be astounded by Brahma's life span, to him it seems quite normal and, if anything, rather short.

On a grand, cosmic scale, Lord Brahma is an overseer - he manages the process of creation within this universe. At the beginning of each of his days, all varieties of life forms appear, and when his night comes there is a partial annihilation until the next day, when he sets everything in motion all over again. Although Brahma lives for such a vast span of time and has such awesome responsibilities, we can get a rough idea what his life is like.

Brahma starts his day by meditating on the Supreme Lord. He prays that he may "engage in the Lord's service in the creation of the material world," and that "I may not be materially affected by my works, for thus I may be able to give up the false prestige of being the creator." ( Srimad-Bhagavatam 3.9.23)

Although he holds such an exalted place in our universe, Brahma acknowledges God's supremacy and does not want to become illusioned into thinking that he is independently powerful. He wants to remember always that the original cause of everything is Lord Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Just as a gardener doesn't create seeds but simply sows and waters them to make a garden grow, so Lord Brahma does not create life (the soul), but receives power from the Supreme Lord to place certain souls into certain types of bodies.

So at the beginning of his day, Brahma places each one of us - each individual spiritual soul - into a particular body. As Brahma's day wears on, we transmigrate from one body to another, sometimes to the upper planetary systems and sometimes to the lower ones; sometimes to the body of a pigeon and sometimes to that of a prince - until, after 4.32 billion earth years have passed, Lord Brahma's day ends. Then we go into a dormant state, until his next day begins and the whole cycle starts again.

We may take exception to all this information, since we can't recall any of it. But after all, what can we recall of even our present lifetime? For instance, we know for sure that we were once in our mother's womb, but can we remember that experience? And what to speak of past lifetimes in other bodies? Brahma, however, sees our futile wanderings and feels compassion. He sees us suffering from various types of miseries - anxiety, anger, disease, insomnia, natural disturbances - because of our forgetfulness. "The material miseries are without factual existence for the soul," he assures us. Still, many of us refuse to hear about our actual identity and our relationship with the Supreme Lord, and as a result, we keep on suffering in this material world.

Just as the small seed of a banyan fruit has the potency to create a big banyan tree, the Lord disseminates all varieties of seeds by His potential brahmajyoti (sva-rocisha), and the seeds are made to develop by the watering process of persons like Brahma. Brahma cannot create the seeds, but he can manifest the seed into a tree, just as a gardener helps plants and orchards to grow by the watering process.

Similarly, Plato describes a creator god who envisions an impersonal, self-existent ultimate source and a realm of unchanging ideal Forms and then is able to manifest those Forms in pre-existing matter. Plato concludes that all Forms must have a single, ultimate source, the Form of all Forms, the essence of all essences. Calling this the Form of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, Plato examines those absolute values.

Plato mentions that the creator god made the stars, planets, and celestial gods and assigned to the gods the task of fashioning the mortal parts of the various souls. Similarly, the Bhagavatam says that Brahma assigned to certain higher beings the generation of the material bodies for the species of life.

evidently, people in ancient times had a much different view of the creation than the dominant view today, and the Greek view was broadly consistent with the Vedic tradition. My friend Sadaputa Dasa (the late mathematician Richard L. Thompson) wrote about antiquity, and this paragraph of his appeared in this magazine:

The description of Virgo illustrates that the Greeks held a widespread belief in a succession of four ages, just as the Indians did. Krishna says that a thousand cycles of four ages constitute a day of Brahma (Bhagavad-gita 8.17), and Suryasiddhanta, the Vedic astronomy text, calculates the length of his day as 8.6 billion years.

For various reasons, the West, in the course of two millennia, differentiated itself from certain early Greek understandings and ultimately overturned the order rooted in Plato. But Westerners who study progress, the highest goal of true Plato today can acquire some historical self-knowledge and new insights into how ancient thought has shaped their thinking.

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