By Mayesvara dasa
The Vedic Planetarium in Mayapur, West Bengal, India (presently well under construction as of December 2015), is an attempt to depict the map of the Universe according to the ancient Vedic literature, primarily the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam as translated and presented by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Canto 1, chapter 5, verse 11 of Srimad-Bhagavatam predicts that this literature will bring about a revolution in the impious lives of this world’s misdirected civilization
(janatagha-viplavo). To this end, the Mayapur Vedic Planetarium, which is based on the Srimad Bhagavatam’s cosmography, is one of Srila Prabhupada’s main projects to counteract the prevailing materialistic world view of life and the cosmos.
The Srimad-Bhagavatam’s depiction of the universe,however, immediately creates a clash of world-views that most people may prefer to avoid, and that includes many of the followers of the Vedas who either don’t understand, or can’t conceptualize the Srimad-Bhagavatam’s depiction of Earth and its relation to the greater universe. We have all grown up with an image of Earth as a rotating ball in space, and we’re pretty happy with that. But how did we get that image and conception of a globe into our heads? Is the globe-shaped Earth an authentic image, and is the Earth truly a round planet rotating in space around the sun? Will it come to be, that one of the most earth-shattering events in our life is the discovery of the real nature of Earth itself? What will the Mayapur Vedic planetarium reveal? To quote from the Book of Revelations, a Christian book of prophecy:
And I saw a new heaven and a new Earth, for the first heaven and the first Earth were passed away (Rev 21.1)
Will the Mayapur Vedic Planetarium reveal a new looking Earth? Or will it look like the one that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA) has been presenting ever since the first photographs of Earth taken in 1969, reputedly taken from outer space as the Apollo spacecraft made its way to the moon? This subject can be of interest to all of us; not only because we certainly ought to know the location and shape of the Earth that we live on, but also because the position and shape of the Earth has wider implications in regard to the world views we will adopt, created by either a materialistic or transcendental perspective. We have on our hands a clash of world-views that is truly mind-blowing. *Sailing to Jambudwipa; The Mayapur Vedic Planetarium and the Flat Earth According to Srimad Bhagavatam* can be found in the link below:
http://krishna.ie/images/docs/sailing-to-jambudwipa-20151221-2006.pdf