Text 10] Answers by Citing the Lord’s Version 475
TRANSLATION

In that personal abode of the Lord, the material modes of ignorance
and passion do not prevail, nor is there any of their influence in the matter
of goodness. There is no predominance of the influence of time, so what
to speak of the illusory external energy that cannot enter in that region.
Without discrimination, both the demigods and the demons worship the
Lord as devotees.

PURPORT

The kingdom of God, or the atmosphere of Vaikuntha nature, which is
called the tripdd-vibhiti, is three times bigger than the material universes
and is described here, as also in the Bhagavad-gita, in a nutshell. This
universe, containing billions of slurs and planets, is one of the billions of
such universes clustered together within the compass of mahat-tattva.
And all these millions and billions of wmiverees combined together consti-
tute only one fourth of the magnitude of the whole creation of the Lord.
There is the spiritual sky also; beyond this sky the spiritual planets are
there under the names of Vaikuntha, and all of them constitute three
fourths of the entire creation of the Lord. God’s creations are always
innumerable. Even the leaves of a tree cannot be counted by a man, nor
the hairs on his head. However, foolish men are puffed up with the idea of
becoming God Himself, though unable to create a hair of their own bodies.
Man may discover so many wonderful vehicles of journey, but even if he
reaches the moon by his much advertised spacecraft, he cannot remain
there. The sane man, therefore, without being puffed up, as if he were the
God of the universe, abides by the instructions of the Vedic literature, the
easiest way to acquire knowledge in transcendence. So let us know through
the authority of Srimad-Bhagavatam of the nature and constitution of
the transcendental world beyond the material sky. In that sky the material
qualities, especially the modes of ignorance and passion, are completely
absent. The mode of ignorance influences a living entity to the habit of
lust and hankering, and this means that in the Vaikunthalokas the living
entities are free from these two things. As confirmed in the Bhagavad-gita,
in the brahma-bhita stage of life one becomes free from hankering and
lamentation. Therefore the conclusion is that the inhabitants of the
Vaikuntha planets are all brahma-bhita living entilics, as distinguished
from the mundane creatures who are all compact in hankering and lamen-
lation. When one is not in the modes of ignorance and passion, one is
