8 Jhanas = satchitananda
Recall the Eight Jhanas or levels of meditative realization in Buddhism:
- Awareness of universal understructure (consciousness) as Pleasant Sensations
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Joy
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Contentment
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Utter Peacefulness
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Infinity of Space
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Infinity of Consciousness
- Awareness of under-consciousness as No-thingness
- Awareness of under-consciousness as Neither perception nor non-perception
Is it so far fetched to correlate these (many-to-one) with Saccidānanda?
That 1, 2, 3, and 4 are BLISS?
That 5 and 6 are CONSCIOUSNESS (KNOWLEDGE)?
That 7 and 8 are TRUTH (BEING)?
Note
Once you hit 5, the sequence begins to exhibit some aura of logical progression.
- The dialectal resolution of 5 and 6 seems to be 7. No-thingness is subject–object identity writ large—infinite space and infinite consciousness are isomorphic. Subjective attainment of Infinite space is of course a (spatially) infinite consciousness.
- And the next transcends the spatiality of this infinity and submerges into an unconditioned infinity, which is of course no less Infinite Conscious(ness).
- But the end of the object (and space is the object as such) is just the attainment of No-thingness. But this saying is an attainment, and so something like a presence (object)—which is still not at the level of the totally unconditioned.
- So we must then abstract even from pure presentation and zoom out to insanity—into the state (but not of a subject) of Neither perception nor non-perception.
After that, all the conditioning biological and local-physical determinations have been shed, and simple being is reduced to its minimal essence, as Transparency or the Unconditioned.