The Puranic cosmos is arranged vertically in fourteen lokas. Seven ascend from the earth: Bhu, the earth itself, then Bhuvar, Svar, Mahar, Jana, Tapa and Satya, each subtler than the last, with Satyaloka the abode of Brahma. Seven descend below: Atala, Vitala, Sutala, Talatala, Mahatala, Rasatala and Patala. The scheme appears in the Puranas with considerable consistency and is recited daily in abbreviated form in the Gayatri, whose vyahritis name the first three.
The lower worlds are the ones most often misread. They are not hells; the Puranic hells, the narakas, are a separate category with a separate function. The talas are described as realms of considerable splendour, wealth and sensory abundance, inhabited by nagas, asuras and daityas, and some accounts describe them as more luxurious than the earth. What makes them lower is not suffering but density and absorption in enjoyment, which is a moral geography rather than a punitive one.
The tradition also reads the whole scheme psychologically without abandoning the cosmological sense. The upper worlds correspond to progressively subtler and more expansive states of consciousness and the lower ones to progressively more contracted and self-enclosed states, so a being does not so much travel between worlds as occupy one according to what it is currently identified with. This is consistent with how the cosmos is described as a single body in the account of the Virat Purusha, where locations are parts of an organism rather than addresses.
The fourteen lokas are a map that can be read as geography or as psychology, and the tradition declines to choose. To see the cosmos described as one body, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 74 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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