Chandigarh, Nov 16, 2025: Across cultures and centuries, scriptures and scientists have spoken of worlds beyond our sight — from frozen oceans on distant moons to unseen realms described in sacred texts. Together, they form an old, persistent question: where does all of creation live, and what does it mean for the small human life traveling through it?
Astronomy insists that the known universe is only a fraction of the whole. Religions have long proposed that creation exists in layers — skies, depths, dream-plains, and unseen domains. And between these two vocabularies of knowledge — the scientific and the sacred — lies a growing curiosity about the vastness surrounding us.
In the cold outposts of our solar system, spacecraft have detected entire oceans locked beneath ice.
On Europa and Enceladus, water moves in darkness where no sunbeam enters; it is warmed only by the slow pulse of the planet underneath. Scientists believe that life, in some form, may be hiding there — microbes adrift in black water, or structures shaped by pressures unknown to Earth.
These silent oceans challenge the idea that life needs light, soil or familiarity. They whisper a different possibility — that creation thrives wherever it can, even in places that seem abandoned.
If such oceans exist around one planet, they likely exist around thousands.
The universe may be full of worlds born in solitude.
But the human story of worlds is not limited to outer space alone.
Across civilisations, dreams have been seen as a geography of their own.
Ancient Indian texts called it svapna-loka, a realm reached when the mind loosens its grip on the waking world. Sufi teachings speak of ʿālam al-mithāl, the imaginal world where forms exist without bodies. Aboriginal traditions describe an expansive Dreaming, older than sky or sand.
These traditions do not speak of dreams as illusions, but as vistas — a kind of spiritual frontier where memories, fears, ancestors and unknown beings coexist. We return from those realms carrying fragments, never fully able to describe where we were.
If frozen oceans are one universe,
perhaps the dreaming mind is another.
Most major religions insist that life is not confined to the human world.
The Qur’an says:
“He has scattered living beings throughout the heavens and the earth.”
The Bible speaks of angels and “ministering spirits” crossing between realms.
Jewish mysticism describes multiple heavens, each inhabited differently.
The Sanskrit cosmology names planes where ancestors dwell, where gods intervene, where souls pass through cycles unseen.
These texts, though separated by continents, offer a similar architecture — a layered universe populated by more than what human eyes can meet.
They propose skies with inhabitants, earth with hidden depths, and transitions where physical life ends and the next begins.
If angels belong to the sky, religions quietly leave another question open: Where do other beings dwell?
Folklore across continents names watchers in deserts, guardians in forests, wanderers in storms, and spirits in rivers.
The scientific world may not recognise these inhabitants, yet belief systems across the planet refer to forms of existence that move differently from us — neither mortal nor material, but still part of creation.
It raises a possibility that frightens and comforts at once:
the universe may be crowded, even if we feel alone in it.
In this tapestry of frozen oceans, dream realms and sacred maps, one theme remains constant:
humanity keeps asking why it exists.
The search for meaning is not an error of the species — it is its signature.
Even in the smallest villages and largest cities, people look upward and inward, trying to understand their place in a structure too enormous to draw.
If creation is vast enough for oceans without sunlight and worlds without bodies;
if scriptures speak of scattered beings and layered skies;
if dreams carry entire landscapes of their own —
then human life may be one of many threads in a fabric that outgrows comprehension.
The universe may not be one world or many.
It may be a collection of realms — physical, spiritual, cognitive — arranged like invisible rooms in a house whose size no one has measured.
Scientists measure galaxies; mystics map souls.
Neither contradicts the other. Each is simply describing a different wing of the same architecture.
If all existence is a house, then humanity is wandering its corridors with a lamp too small for its ceilings.
Yet the search itself is meaningful.
It keeps us aware, humble, curious.
Somewhere beneath a frozen sea,
or drifting in a dream,
or hidden in a scripture’s verse,
another part of creation may be asking the same question we do:
What lives beyond our sight,
and why are we here at all?
