Equanimity is a pleasant emotion. It is not dry at all. It is better than you think. You may be forgiven for having the impression of equanimity being a dry scientific sort of apathetic state. But it is not like that. It is a very rich emotion, and the freedom it brings feels slightly ecstatic actually.
Equanimity is a balance of all the different energies of the mind all tuned so that they are in sync and working together harmoniously. It is flowing through life without clinging. A state of non-attachment.
One doesn't care for pain or pleasure anymore. It just doesn't bother one. You can be walking with pain in the joints and it just doesn't matter. One still feels pleasure, but when it ceases one doesn't cling to it, or want it back. It is no big deal anymore.
Equanimity is neither love nor hate.
Neither greed nor self-denial.
It avoids all extremes.
Neither greed nor self-denial.
It avoids all extremes.
What is love anyway?
What is hate?
The eight worldly winds of pain and pleasure, success and failure, gain and loss, praise and blame just don't matter when one is equanimous. The worldly winds can blow and blow but the house of cards isn't there anymore. There's nothing to defeat. Just emptiness.
One no longer cares about impressing people, or pleasing anyone, or trying to tick another's boxes, or being perfect. One just doesn't give a shit about that anymore. Worldly views are just those, they change like the wind. They're insubstantial, empty, not-self.
There's no ill-will towards anybody though, no conceit. Just a sweet freedom from being concerned about the opinions of others. One still listens to the opinions of the wise however, the noble ones. Those who have more experience on the spiritual path. To not take on board their advice would be foolish. But the opinions of the world, they no longer matter or effect one.
Praise and blame is like honey and bee-stings. Both can be dangerous. Praise can get to our heads. It gives us a dopamine hit, excites us, fluffs up the ego. Which can compel us to behave in unskillful ways, cause us to make poor choices, and crave more praise. This feeds the unwholesome roots of greed and delusion.
Blame can make us feel like shit. Dampen our spirits. We take it personally, and resentments can arise and fester. This feeds the unwholesome root of hate.
To walk the middle way. Is to stand outside of the extremes. To look at both from a vantage point that is beyond good and bad. To see both sides clearly and understand them.
It is to pay wise attention to the fault, and wise attention to the beautiful.
With equanimity one can feel okay whatever happens, one's peace remains unshaken.
A good spiritual exercise to practice sometimes is to allow ourselves to be misunderstood by someone else and not feel the need to correct them. Not feel bothered at all. One can learn a lot about how we crave praise and construct the self from this exercise.
With equanimity one stops taking everything so seriously, so personally. It just doesn't matter, because one clearly sees that all formations are empty. Conditioned phenomena is transient, dissatisfying, insecure, it doesn't lead to lasting happiness and wellbeing. It just leads to more suffering. Attachment is suffering. The things we are the most attached to in the world, are the things that cause us to suffer the most.
With equanimity one feels undisturbed by anything. One can walk passed a corpse smiling serenely. It is a freeing emotion, and one I am keen to explore more in my practice.
How to get there? The practise of samhadi naturally leads to it. Equanimity is the seventh factor of enlightenment:
Mindfulness --> Investigation --> Energy --> Rapture --> Calmness --> Samhadi --> Equanimity.
Mindfulness --> Investigation --> Energy --> Rapture --> Calmness --> Samhadi --> Equanimity.
Wanting things is stressful. It is tiring and unpleasant. Through our day to day experience, through being mindful and investigating. One starts to understand this at a deep level. Then the mind reaches a point where it feels fed up with yearning, sick of craving and naturally becomes dispassionate towards worldly formations. Without the pain of wanting, freed from the feeling of lack that comes from craving. One becomes content and one's mind feels invincible, unshakable. At peace. It's not dangerous, the feeling of equanimity doesn't get to one's head. It is not apathy, it works well with the emotion of kindness, kindness and equanimity complement one another.
Equanimity is a pleasant cooling of the senses. A relief. A harmless state of non-grasping. Of non-acquiring, non-hating. There's no conceit there at all. One sees clearly that the self is a delusion. And that seeing is truly liberating for the energies of the mind.
To be a person, to have an identity, to be somebody is tiring. It is stressful, dissatisfying. Being caught up in the self-centred dream is to suffer. How wonderful it feels to let all that go.To go beyond all of it and taste true freedom. Freedom from the prison of the self. The psychic energy involved in this delusion becomes unbound, limitless, no longer subject to conditions -- deathless.
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