Article – Belief in Other Worlds

One of the biggest blind spots among humans is the belief that our world is the only one out there. But both physicists and philosophers suggest that there may be many worlds — nay many more universes. If you do a deep-sea dive you realize that there is an extraordinary self-sustaining universe even under water.

And because these many worlds past and present, seen and unseen, are so intricately interlinked, what we do in this world matters even beyond our finite existence. Life right now is neither meaningless nor inconsequential. There is every reason to cultivate our minds and our spirit while in this world.

Certain Biblical passages suggest that the Abrahamic God has created — and perhaps destroyed — other worlds besides ours. In Hindu cosmology, the world is cyclically created and destroyed, meaning that there are infinite worlds.

If God created our world, it is entirely plausible from a religious perspective that God may have created other worlds like ours. Or, our imagination is delighted to take flights of fancy to describe how the other worlds might be. Whether or not these worlds exist, they have been creatively conjured up through time — in literature, film, and storytelling — reflecting man’s universal need to come to terms with this possibility.

In Buddhism, there is a vertical hierarchy of different realms of rebirth besides earth, including pure lands which are the realms where buddhas and bodhisattvas reside, and hellish realms, where “hungry ghosts” and beings who committed evil acts in previous lives reside. Taoism—somewhat similar to Buddhism—believes in the existence of realms where demigods reside.

In other Indian religions like Hinduism and Jainism, the universe is divided into various worlds that correspond fairly closely to those of Buddhism. In all 3 religions, there are 3 types of worlds: heaven and hell realms, and the earthly realms in between. In Buddhism, these are subdivided into a total of 6 worlds and in Hinduism they are subdivided into 14 worlds, or “lokas.” The heavenly lokas are called “Svarga,” the earthly lokas are “Prithvi,” and the hellish lokas are “Patal.”

You don’t have to subscribe to any particular belief system to recognize the logical possibility of the existence of other worlds. As revealed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, thousands of galaxies can now be seen very clearly in stunning detail in a very tiny area of outer space suggesting an unfathomable amount of planets in the universe besides Earth. Whether any of those other planets are home to life, whether there are other universes besides our own, and whether there are parallel realms where gods and goddesses dwell are questions that remain a mystery, to which different religions offer their own unique, speculative, and provisional answers.