Equanimity

The theme tonight is equanimity. This is an uncommon word in English as well, so can we have a few Finnish words? [background voices, laughing] Good! Okay. It's not a very common word in English. I want to talk a bit about what it means and how we can develop it. It's not a very common word in English; it's rare to meet a friend on the street and say, "How are you doing?" and he or she says, "I'm feeling very equanimous." It doesn't really happen. Only a little bit around Gaia House. [laughter] Otherwise it doesn't really happen. It's not a word that for most of us -- it doesn't sound very kind of sexy, either, you know, to say "I feel equanimous." Oftentimes, even among people who have been practising for a while, we kind of wonder, what does it mean? What does it mean, equanimity?

So one very simple word -- and maybe some of the Finnish words actually convey this -- is steadiness. The heart and the mind is steady, it doesn't wobble, it doesn't shake, in the face of everything, absolutely everything. So all situations, events, all experiences and conditions, there's a steadiness of the heart and a steadiness of the mind. Some years ago, actually almost the night before I left America, I was at a party, and there was a guy there. I'm assuming everything he told me was true. He said he was a scientist from Germany, and he was a climate scientist, studying climate change. He would go and work -- I can't remember if it was the North Pole or the South Pole, Antarctica. He would study, he would take measurements with a team of other scientists, take measurements on the ice, how thick it was and stuff. He said they would have a base there and they would fly by helicopter over, you know, miles and miles of ice to take measurements at different places on the ice shelf. And oftentimes they would fly in this helicopter, and they would be flying over a big flock of penguins. You know what penguins are? Yeah? So apparently the penguins would hear the sound of the helicopter and would look up and see the helicopter. Thousands of penguins looking at the helicopter. It would come towards them, nearer and nearer, and they would be looking and looking and looking, and the whole flock of penguins ... [laughter] They don't hurt themselves because they've got the blubber. That's an example of what equanimity is not, okay? [laughter]

In a similar kind of way, something happens in our experience, in our consciousness, and we lose our balance. We get so, "Wow! Look at that!" or "How terrible!" or something, and consciousness loses its balance. This is a very common part of being human. We all know this to some degree or another. The Buddha, when he talked about equanimity, he pointed out some particular situations which every human being has to deal with. He said this is what you have to kind of develop your equanimity with. He talked about what's called the eight worldly conditions. I'll explain what that is. They're four pairs, so fair pairs of opposites. The first one is praise and blame. The second one is success and failure. The third one, gain or profit and loss. And the final one, pleasure and pain. So four pairs. Each of them -- we like praise, we like success, we like gain, and we like pleasure. But we have difficulty when we're blamed, someone's saying, "Oh, you really made a mess. You're not very good," when we fail, when we lose what we want, and when we have pain. The Buddha said that whoever you are in this life, whoever you are and no matter what amount of practice you've done or anything, you will be subject, just by virtue of being alive, to your experience going between these two poles. Sometimes we're praised. Other times we're blamed. Sometimes we succeed. Other times we fail. Sometimes we make a profit or we gain, and sometimes we lose. Sometimes there's pleasure. Sometimes there's pain, whoever you are.

So certainly the Buddha, after his enlightenment, experienced all of that. Jesus, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi. All of these people. How much is our mind state dependent on these conditions? So someone blames us, and do we just plunge into despair? Or we fail at something, and we get really frustrated and angry? The mind then is off balance. Or when there's pain, what happens? How much is the mind state dependent on that? Or is it a bit more able to stay steady?

So it's really, really important to see right away, to understand right away, that what's being talked about here is not indifference. Another Finnish word, for indifference? [background voices] Okay. It's not välinpitämättömyys. Indifference is what's called the 'near enemy.' It means it looks like equanimity, but if you look a little closer, it's actually quite different. With equanimity, the heart is actually open. There's a warmth there. The heart is not shut down, okay? Indifference, there's a kind of disconnection, a coldness, an aloofness that's there. Also very important that this equanimity that the Buddha spoke so highly of, really praised it as a quality, it's not boring or dull or kind of like everything's just grey, everything's just eh. It's not like that. There's a real life in it, a real vitality, a real depth, a real beauty actually in it. It's juicy.

Oftentimes in life, our sense of juice in life, our sense of juice is usually bound up in a sense of drama -- something "whoa," you know, and then we get a sense of real life here. This, again, is very normal, very human. But is it possible -- what happens when we let go of that drama a little bit, not so involved in the drama? Is it boredom? Could be, depending on how we relate to it. Or it could be something else. It could be something very alive, very juicy. So steadiness. Spaciousness is also quite a good word, because oftentimes -- not always, but oftentimes the quality of equanimity is very spacious. It feels very spacious. It feels like the mind, the heart, the consciousness is very broad and can actually hold a lot. So whatever is going on -- praise/blame, pain/pleasure, whatever it is -- it's just something there in the space, and it's okay, it's just part of the space. The heart can be bigger than it. The mind can be bigger than it. So spaciousness is quite a good word relating to it.

We can cultivate equanimity. It's something that we can develop. We don't have to kind of just sit around hoping that one day, maybe if we're lucky we'll have a little bit of equanimity. It's something we can actually move towards. We can develop it. And it's not random. It's not something, as I said, that we just -- "Maybe one day it will show up. I don't know how." Kobe this morning talked about mind states. In a way, equanimity is a mind state. It's a state of mind. Mind states are not random. They can feel very random. You're sitting a day in meditation and it's like, this thing, then we're happy, then we're suddenly sad, then we're peaceful, and then we're depressed, and then we're angry, and it feels like they're just coming out of nowhere, like they're random. Actually they're not random. They're not random. Nor does a mind state need to be completely determined by something that's happened. So he/she said I was an idiot, so I have to feel, or they blamed me, so I have to feel a certain way, or they say something else and I have to feel this way. We can either, oftentimes with mind states, believe that either it's random or that it depends on what's happening in the environment or in relationship. And actually, a big part of the Buddha's teaching -- again, and I'm going on about it probably in every talk; I realize -- we can cultivate, we can develop, we can understand what it is that gives rise to equanimity and everything else that's beautiful.

[10:43] That means that the path is active. It is a path not only of sitting and watching -- there is that part of the path, just sitting, just watching, not trying to change anything, passive. That's important. But the path is also active. They're together like two wings of a big bird. So the path is active. Sometimes -- it may not be yet here, but sometimes many people are very shy of this more active cultivating part of the path, because it can very easily be that immediately we get a sense of ambition: "Oh, I'm going to develop equanimity. I'm going to develop loving-kindness. I'm going to develop my concentration," and immediately the sense of measuring can come in. "How far have I got? How am I doing? How am I doing compared to you?" Very easy for that. And so much of our life is caught up in this kind of striving, ambition, competitiveness, measurement. So when we come to spiritual practice and we hear, "Don't do anything. Just be with it. Just watch. You don't need to make anything happen," it's like, whew, what a relief! And it is. It's huge. It's really important. But still, it can't be the whole path. It can't be the whole path.

Rather, it's a matter of finding ways to hold the process of cultivation and development lightly, that we're not measuring and everything like that. Now, actually, with equanimity, there is a way you can measure. There is a way you can measure sort of how you're doing with equanimity. Check it out. "If you can sit quietly after difficult news; if in financial downturns -- that means you've lost a lot of money -- you remain perfectly calm; if you can see your neighbours travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy; if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate; if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill; if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably ... a dog." [laughter] I don't think it was from the Buddha, but. The point is to hold it lightly, to hold this -- this measurement that we do, we get into this measurement thing, just to hold it very lightly. We don't have to get so tight and suffer over it.

So the question, then, very important question, is how can I develop equanimity? How can we develop that? How can we move towards that? So most commonly what's suggested in the Insight Meditation tradition is this contemplation of the changing nature of things, the contemplation of impermanence. So realizing that everything is changing. No matter whether I like it or I don't like it, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, praise/blame, all the rest of it, it's changing. It cannot last. So how off balance do I want to get with things that aren't going to last? How excited can I get? How depressed can I get with things that aren't lasting? Everywhere I look, everywhere we look, we see change on every level -- microscopic level, everyday level, every level. We need to train ourselves to see this change over and over, because when we see it there should be a natural letting go. What's the point of holding on when the world is actually slipping through our fingers? It's slipping through our fingers. There comes a letting go and an opening with that.

The contemplation of our own death -- how seriously can we take this stuff when we keep contemplating the fact of our own death? The contemplation of death doesn't need to be morbid or frightening or depressing or anything like that. The more we do it, it can be very powerful, very freeing, and actually give a real sense of beauty, urgency to life, put our priorities in order. Everything is anicca, the Buddha said, meaning changing, impermanent, uncertain. The more we see that, it shouldn't bring with it a kind of [inaudible], it should bring this letting go, letting go, letting go, and the beauty of everything that letting go brings with it. So there's certainly the contemplation of impermanence. We could talk all day about that. I'm not going to talk any more right now about that.

Another way that equanimity gets built is just in our humble practice of paying attention to the breath that we're doing. Every time we're coming to the breath and not getting so caught up in something else, we're training in equanimity. Because a mind that is not equanimous is caught up in something. When we just come back to the breath, we're training that steadiness of the mind. Now, some of you, I know, have decided to do the whole retreat just staying with the breath and letting that deepen. That's very lovely. It's one of the possibilities that I said is available in practice. And for some people, what happens is the mind deepens in calmness, and with that it starts to feel quite nice. The body starts to feel quite nice. This actually is also on the road to equanimity. As the practice of calmness deepens, can come a very nice feeling, which doesn't feel like equanimity -- it can feel very exciting and sort of bubbly for some people. But in a long unfolding in time, months and months, maybe even years, it moves towards a very deep equanimity. Even if none of that is happening and it's just returning to the breath and returning to the breath, still building this equanimity by virtue of not getting so caught up in things.

I want to talk a little bit about another approach to equanimity that's not that commonly spoken about. It is sort of the way via joy, via happiness. We've spoken a little bit about this in other talks. If I can, if we can, gradually, over time, slowly, with all the ups and downs, learn to develop inside this reservoir of happiness, happiness as an inner resource that's not so dependent on what others or the world is giving me, it's less dependent on outer circumstances, can you see how that would give me a steadiness? If I feel happy inside, when there's praise or blame, it makes less wobbles in the heart. If I don't have that happiness, then what happens in the world, what happens even in the body, makes a big difference. Do you see the connection there? Does this make sense to you? Yeah? This development, the Buddha put tremendous emphasis on the development of joy, and just kept saying this is really possible, this is really possible. It's possible to develop this inner joy, this reservoir, resource of joy. And through it, from that, comes more and more equanimity, more and more steadiness. We are less needy, in a way. There's nothing cold in that, as I think I've already said. This is a theme I'm repeating, but I really feel it's important.

[19:21] So then the question: okay, how can I get the happiness? We've touched on this too. The development of beautiful qualities. So the loving-kindness practice that we're doing, really, really huge as a quality that brings joy and happiness to the heart. Now, sometimes, for some people, that joy is really like a fountain erupting in the heart. It's very, very strong. But for most people, it's actually just a quiet joy. It's not that kind of remarkable, but its effects are strong. Just to have access to a sense of quiet joy in life. Can't be there all the time, because joy, like everything else, is impermanent. But it can come and go enough that we just know it's not too far away. It makes a real difference. It transforms the heart. Jesus talks about the pearl beyond price. Could it be that the heart of love is our pearl beyond price? We have a treasure there that no one can take away from us. The way they can take away everything else from me, they can't take away a heart of love. One will take that to one's deathbed. No one can take that away. No one can change that in you. If we take care and develop this heart, develop the loving-kindness, that's something that's ours. No one else can take that.

But also compassion, caring for the suffering in the world, wanting to heal the suffering in the world. Beautiful. Wanting to serve the world, wanting to give to the world, generosity. These qualities -- sometimes we think of compassion as a kind of sad quality: "Oh, I'm going to be weeping with all the weeping in the world." It has that part of it, but it also has a joyous part of it. It brings joy. Compassion brings joy. When we care for the suffering in the world, there's actually joy that comes with it. And for many people -- and I see this working with people -- a person can be really struggling with their sense of the problems in their life, and gives a little or a lot of attention to service, to giving, to caring for others, and little by little, the sense of "my problem" begins to fade, begins to decrease a little bit, and the sense of isolation in my problem, because we're bridging that and we're giving it a bigger context. We're connecting with others, and the heart is finding, in a way, a bigger home. It's stretching itself. A person can think, "Where did that particular problem go? I don't understand. All I did was open my heart and care or act generously." We can see this in very little ways. We're miserable about something -- just do something generous, give, be with someone who is needing some support, and watch what happens to your heart. Very healing.

Very unremarkable story. I have a very good friend who -- we've been friends for years, since we were in high school. He's not a meditator, not a practitioner. Some time ago, he was on the subway in London, on the tube, going to work, I think, and a couple, a tourist couple, he noticed as he got off at his station -- he was actually in a bit of a hurry, a bit late for work -- but he noticed they were with their map and completely confused on the London underground, which is very complicated. They were confused, and so he stopped, despite the fact of being in a hurry, and he just helped them. He helped them find their way. And they said thank you and he walked off. And then he was telling me about this and he said, "Then I started to feel happy." [laughter] He was like, "Could that have ...?" It's very unremarkable, very small incident. Actually, for someone of practice, the connection is obvious. It should be obvious that when the heart goes out in care, happiness comes. When the heart moves in generosity, opens in generosity to give, happiness comes, a happiness that's less dependent on what I'm getting from the world, what someone says about me, this or that.

So loving-kindness, compassion, generosity. I remember many years ago I was living in the States, and I had just started a psychotherapy process. I was going in psychotherapy. I was very, very unhappy, and suddenly -- well, not so suddenly, but relatively suddenly -- face to face with a lot of issues. Felt like such a complexity and such a mess inside. And it felt like to me at the time that my personality was just somehow put together wrong. It was just, pff, I don't know -- wrong. A wrong personality. And it was extremely painful. I really felt I had been built wrong in terms of my psychological structure. It felt impossible to change it. I couldn't conceive of finding a way of reconfiguring that. It was a lot of pain with this, a lot of pain in the heart. One day, I think it was a weekend, I wasn't working, and I got up and I just decided to do the mettā practice. I got up and I meditated, and then I went to the grocery store, and I kept the mettā practice up. So the person in the grocery store: "May you be safe, may you be ..." Not out loud, because that's ... [laughter] In myself. And then I went and did whatever I had to do, went and sat in the park, just sat in the park on a bench: "May I, may you, may all beings," etc. Hour after hour, I think two, three, four hours, nothing else, just clinging to it the way a drowning man would cling to a piece of wood in the sea. Something happened after about three or four hours. Something happened. And I started to feel really happy. At first just a little bit happy, and then a lot happy, and then totally beaming happy. Something struck me so clearly because it was so black and white. I was so unhappy before, and then I was so happy. I thought, "The happiness or the unhappiness depends on the quality that's in the heart at the moment." When there's loving-kindness there, when there are these kind of beautiful qualities, the happiness is there. Nothing happened in those three or four hours to reshape my personality, to reconfigure it. It wasn't on that level. And because it was so black and white, a coin dropped in a way that it can't move back. It's just totally clear. Totally clear where the happiness comes from, where it doesn't come from.

So this wisdom about where is happiness and where is it not. I know I've touched on it before, but it's so crucial. What do we feel is bringing us suffering, but maybe that actually doesn't need to bring us suffering? Maybe this thing that this person said, or this event that happened or didn't happen, maybe that doesn't need to bring us suffering, but we believe it does, and we get caught up in it, and we have the wrong relationship to it, and so it does. Maybe it doesn't need to. So loving-kindness, generosity, compassion, service. There's another Pali word called muditā. It's usually translated as something like 'sympathetic joy,' which means joy in the joy of others. So instead of being jealous when someone else is happy because they've got something nice, we actually feel joy with them. But I want to give it a bit of a bigger meaning and call it something like 'appreciative joy' or 'spiritual joy' or something like that. What I mean is a joy that's not dependent on me, this ego, getting anything. It's something about life, something sensitive, open to something in life. We might be in a park and we see some children playing -- it has nothing to do with me; there's something about the flowing, the outflow of life, the manifestation of life. It's right there in the children playing. Or even you're just on the street and there's something in the movement of all the life. Or someone else is happy and you feel happy with them. Or wonder, marvelling at existence itself, at the universe. It's a really important quality. And again, it's a quality that we can develop. We can cultivate it.

[29:03] Last year -- only a few people were here last year, but last year I quoted Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher and teacher. He has this saying which I'm going to ask someone to translate. "We come to the infinite well of life with a thimble, and so we go away thirsty."^[1] You understand? We're not asking enough from life. We ask too little. We ask only this much. Why? Why is that? Actually, that's a really important question. Why is it that we ask only this much from life, when actually the infinite well, Krishnamurti says -- infinite, it's infinite. Somehow something happens along the way that our relationship with life becomes one of not asking too much. We just want to get by kind of okay, a little bit of pleasure, happiness, security, comfort, convenience, etc. Why is that? How would it be possible -- I know that's not an easy question. It's a question we need to all ask.

But how would it be possible to encourage, to feed, to allow a sense of wonder to open in the heart? How do we do that? How is it that a sense of wonder, of awe, gets squashed in life? How do we squash it so we end up only asking a little? One of the ways we squash it is actually by pursuing the ego too much, by wanting to puff up the ego too much, to be important or to have lots of things or to be somebody special. The more we do that, the less the wonder. It will squeeze the wonder out of life. The more, even, we obsess about ourselves and our problems -- this is a difficult one if one is actually wanting to look at one's difficulties and get beyond them, but the more we obsess about it, that will also squeeze the wonder out. Can there be a looking that goes -- it's not just about this and what's happening in the body, in the mind. Can we actually let go of that and open up the seeing and the sense of wonder to the universe?

Earlier today someone lent me this beautiful book of photographs that we were looking at after lunch, photographs of the tiniest things in the universe -- cells and viruses and the inside of the body. And then huge galaxies and ... absolutely beautiful, but also just wondrous. The heart just -- there's a bowing to that, something magnificent. How much can we encourage that sense in our life? It's so, so important. What is the place then, in encouraging that, of being in nature, time with friends or alone in nature? What's the place of art? And I don't mean art as distraction, just kind of seeing a movie because we're bored or something, but the kind of art that really touches something deep and makes us want to live in a different way, or music, whatever it is. That we're living with a kind of receptivity to something much bigger than this and what I want, something much bigger than that; that we're encouraging and allowing that kind of receptivity, that kind of openness to something other, something much greater.

And then, in a way, the more we get a sense of that or the more we touch into that or have glimpses, then the more the ups and downs of life and all these worldly conditions, praise and blame and all that, the more they're seen in a different context. It's like all the ups and downs are much smaller than this vast mystery that we find ourselves in just by virtue of our existence. Much smaller. We can be fed by this sense. And on one level, then, the more we can open in that way, on one level, there's even an okayness with death when it's the time for death, because we know I've drunk deeply, I've drunk deeply from life. It's those that kind of haven't felt like they've really tasted life or really drunk from life or really opened, when death comes, there's a lot of terror, because, well, you've missed your chance.

So going back to these eight worldly conditions and other avenues into this equanimity. Can we see the emptiness of them? Can we see that these things which seem really important or significant may not have the value that they seem to have? So praise/blame, success/failure, gain/loss, etc. Just looking at my own life, if I track in my life, if I think back and track what has been really important to me, like what have I had a lot of "this really matters" over. You know, when I was very young, our house wasn't that nice. I was a little bit ashamed to bring friends back, because the carpet had holes and the furniture wasn't nice. Now that -- for many years now, that stuff doesn't seem important at all, and yet, somehow when I was a child it felt really important. Then for long periods when I was a teenager and also younger, football was really -- I played a lot of football, and really serious competitive football, and it was really important. If I played well, if I scored a goal, I felt great, fantastic. And if I didn't play well, or if someone criticized how I played, oy. Really painful. Now it's like -- I played the other day with some of the people from Gaia House, a bunch of old men sort of ... [laughter] And who cares, you know? Who cares? Then I was sent to this kind of academic high school and everyone's, "What grade did you get on these? What grade did you get?" It's a very hyped-up atmosphere around academic stuff, and for a while that was really important. Then I left that and three weeks later, one week later, forget it, you know? Then I went to be a musician in America, and then it was, "How well do you play?" Really happy when I felt like it was going well, and really sad when it wasn't.

If things were important by themselves, they would stay important. They would stay important, but they don't. We can track this in our life. We attach on something as being important, and then we get bored with it and move on to something else, then something else. When will we learn? We get really excited about things. Something coming up in the future, "It's going to be fantastic!" Like the penguins with the helicopter, "Ooo, what's that?" When I was a musician, I was a composer in my sort of final years as a musician, and a very famous English orchestra said they would perform a piece of mine, which was really -- for a composer that wasn't famous, it was a big thing. I was in America and got this letter, and they called and said, "Yeah, we'd love to do this, and we'll fly you over," and da-da-da-da. And wow, you know, wow. All my composer friends, "What a fantastic career break. Great. Brilliant. Amazing." I was also excited, but a little voice at the back of my -- I had been practising for quite a while, and a little voice was like, "Just pay attention." [laughter]

So the time got nearer and I went to England. And a whole series of things happened. There wasn't enough rehearsal time, and they had made a mistake with the scheduling of the rehearsals and this and that, and it was agony for the composer to sit there in front of a huge audience and hear your piece being completely -- you know, it was really, really painful. And all the build-up to the concert, thinking, "They're not going to get it together in time. They're not going to get it together in time. There's nothing I can do about it." It was really painful. And then I flew back to America, and about two or three days later, I went to do my laundry around the corner at the laundromat, washing my clothes. I was walking back with my laundry in the street, and it was the afternoon, and the sunlight was just coming through the clouds. I think it was -- I can't remember the time -- it was spring. It was just coming through the clouds and landing, the sunlight, on the houses and the trees. Nothing in particular, but I was just open, and was so taken with the beauty of it, and so moved. There was just this joy that started welling up. Nothing, no big deal -- it wasn't the ego being in any way made a big deal of; you know, someone says, "You're going to be famous" or this or that. That also made quite a deep impression.

[39:46] A lot of the time, some of this business about praise and blame, success/failure, gain/loss, a lot of it is that unfortunately we've just become -- I don't know a polite word -- brainwashed a little bit by society, a lot of what we come to agree with everyone else is important: what does my car look like that I drive, or what status do I have in society, what's my role, or I'm this and I'm that, whatever. I remember teaching in France a few years ago. We were doing a small group, and a woman there, she began -- we were having a dialogue -- by saying how she had become really interested in honesty, in the whole area of truthfulness in communication with herself. We had this long, lovely dialogue about that, about honesty and all the different ways she was trying to be completely honest with herself and with others, and looking into ways where maybe she should be a bit more gentle with the truth, all this. Beautiful investigation. A lot of integrity there. And then we sort of finished that and she said, "There's another thing. I'm having these feelings of worthlessness." We talked about it. She said, "The last two years I've been mostly travelling in India and mostly doing retreats or helping run retreats," the way Sampo is doing here. "I feel like I should kind of have a job or I should be working or I should have a role, and I feel a bit worthless."

This was really interesting to me. We kept with it. I was saying, "Just ten minutes ago you were talking about this beautiful authenticity, wanting to be honest and wanting to bring that, and how rare that is in the world, for someone to care that deeply and that carefully about that. Why are you not giving value to that? Why isn't there a sense of self-worth coming out of that? Why has it gone to the way society measures? Why is it not worth something to be inquiring into yourself on retreat and to be helping others do the same?" We're inundated by all kinds of advertising and TV and other role models and stuff like that, and it's actually -- even for people involved in the Dharma or slightly alternative lifestyles, it's exerting quite a powerful effect. It's almost constant. And I think we actually need each other with this. We need the support of other people who are also kind of travelling with a similar path. It doesn't have to be the same path, but not so interested in being sucked down into that way of seeing things, of valuing those particular things. We really need to help each other with this, sometimes ask a friend, "What am I not seeing here? What am I not seeing?"

These, again, success/failure, gain/loss, all that, they're also empty in another way. Empty means they're not really what they seem to be; they don't really have the significance that they seem to have. This is a really dumb example; I'm sorry, I couldn't think of another one. You're driving along in your new car -- what's a nice car in Finland? A Porsche? You've got a Porsche. Somehow you got a lot of money and you got a Porsche. You have a car crash. Or you're not driving, but somehow someone's damaged the car in a way that you can't even get the insurance. Your nice, new, red Porsche with the convertible and all that is damaged. What if on that day nothing happened, that was all that happened? You feel really upset at that. Someone's damaged your Porsche and you can't even get the insurance money. What if, though -- a different scenario -- your red Porsche, there it is, and you come out after it's parked and it's damaged and you don't know what happened. What if, that same day, you're coming out of where you work and your boss had said to you at work, "We don't want you any more. You're fired"? How much bigger would then the damage to the Porsche seem? It's dependent on our personal circumstance. What if, earlier that day, you had met the man/woman of your dreams and said, "Will you marry me?" and they said yes, and you were over the moon, and then you saw that your red Porsche with the convertible was damaged? It's okay. It's still, on the balance, a pretty good day. What if your child had cancer, or your best friend, or your partner had cancer, and you just found that out, and you were coming out of the hospital and you see your Porsche? Doesn't really make any difference, does it? You just got told they had terminal cancer. Who cares?

The point is the thing we react to is totally dependent on the mind state in the moment. By itself, it means nothing. It's empty. It means nothing. All this, too, this praise/blame, success/failure, gain/loss, etc., it's all dependent on this self-view, this ego-structure that Kobe was talking about last night. This is the centre for praise and blame. This ego-centre wants praise, doesn't want blame. They're all dependent on the ego-centre, the ego-structure, the self-view. And again, as practice goes deep, it's really questioning that whole structure of the ego and that whole self-view so that we don't really believe in it so really. And then all this other stuff begins to be seen differently. We might say, what about pleasure and pain? That's not really dependent on the ego. But as we really go deep in practice, you can begin to see that even pleasure and pain depend on my reaction to them. Some of you might have even seen this. If I struggle with pain, if I push it away, not only am I causing more suffering, but I'm actually making the pain itself stronger and making it worse. This is something to be checked out in meditation. So even pleasure and pain are not, in themselves, something. They're empty. They're dependent on my relationship with them.

Sometimes in practice, sitting meditation or walking meditation, we're just present. There's just presence, mindfulness, without a lot of force to it, and we're just kind of present. And there's a way of being present that we can develop that's just not putting pressure on oneself. One is just present. There's just mindfulness there without any pressure on the self to be anything different, to be better. Not any pressure on experience to be different, to be better, to be more this or less that. Not putting any pressure on the self, not putting any pressure on the world. As the mindfulness develops a little bit, we can actually experiment with this as a way of practising. What would it be to just be there and just check, just let go of any pressure on the self, any pressure on experience? A couple of things can happen. One is that we'll notice a peacefulness comes, and actually a happiness. The less pressure we put on self and experience, the more peace opens up. It's quite simple and it's something we can really feel it, and that peace is on its way to equanimity.

We might also, when we're just present and not struggling too much with wanting more or less, or this or that, or to change experience -- and again, some of you may have tasted this on the retreat; you're sitting, maybe in the stillness of the night or the stillness of meditation, and there's pain in the body, but somehow it's really okay. It's really okay that there's pain there right now. Somehow even, there's a sense of mystery. The mystery of having a body, of being alive at all, the mystery of feeling anything is shining through even when there's pain. As we let go of the struggle, that sense of mystery is not so dependent on pleasure or pain. It's not only when it's a nice, pretty sunset that we feel, "Ah, lovely," or the beautiful stars. The more we let go, the less we put pressure on our experience, the more it begins to shine through everything. I'm sitting here with a pain in my knee, and there's a sense of mystery coming through it, gives it all a beauty, a whole other dimension. You know you're kind of hooked on meditation when the idea of a good evening is sitting at home watching the pain in your knee. [laughter]

[50:18] There's a Tibetan teacher who defines equanimity as "to be equally near all things," to be equally near all things. Not pushing some things away and grabbing some things towards me. To be equally near all things. It's a very beautiful definition. But just finally, I want to go into this. We could say "equally near all things," and that works. But if I can, with time, develop some sensitivity to when I'm pushing away experience, when I'm aversive and trying to get rid of what I don't like, and some sensitivity to when I'm trying to hold on or keep what I do like, some sensitivity to the push and the pull, and I learn, over time, to actually relax that, to relax the relationship -- we've touched on this -- to relax the pushing away and to relax the pulling so that one isn't struggling with experience, I just touched on it, but what can begin to happen is the actual perceptions begin to change. They begin to change. The perception of pain or pleasure or this or that, whatever it is, begins to change, because actually this pushing away and pulling is something that is shaping the perception itself. It's colouring the perception. When I push or pull a lot, I'm moulding the perception. If I let go of the push and pull, the more I let go of the push and pull, actually what happens is the perception itself begins to die down, it begins to fade, begins to quieten, and just fade from consciousness.

Now, it may fade a little bit, and that's lovely, just whatever pain or whatever else is going on feels like it's receding into the background. Or it can fade really a lot. For some, dedicated meditators, it can be that one is sitting there and nothing is really happening; it's just a sort of very light, very insubstantial flicker of experience. Almost nothing happening. And it can also fade completely. There's really, really, really nothing happening. There's a whole continuum. No objects are appearing, no objects. So this equanimity is the letting go, the relaxing of the push and pull, the relaxing of the struggle with experience. When I go really deeply into it, I find that if I really let go of the struggle, no objects appear. No objects, what is there to be a problem? No objects, no problem. In a way, the whole meaning of equanimity is turned on its head, because equanimity means being steady in the face of something that's quite strong. But when we really go deep into it, it's like the actual object itself begins to disappear. I'm describing an experience that's available for, as I said, dedicated meditators. I'm not sure how that sounds. It could sound a little bleak or a little lonely or sort of, well, nothing, or scary in some way. There's actually a profound beauty in that, a really profound beauty in that, whether it fades just a little bit, or a lot, or completely. There's something very, very beautiful there, and a real nourishment to the being. At a very deep level, the being is nourished in a way that's long-term.

It also, that kind of experience, has love in it. It's kind of shot through, washed through with love, warmth, openness. So that's just describing an experience. Sometimes we hear about experience and we attach in some way or we judge ourselves in relationship to it. The experience is actually secondary. What's more important there is the understanding. This goes in general. Understanding is more important than certain experiences. What is the understanding with that? The understanding is that a thing, any thing, so-called inner or outer, depends on me pushing it or pulling it. It depends on my relationship to it. My relationship to it is actually what's creating it, what's building it, what's shaping it and moulding it. We begin to understand things in themselves are immeasurable. We can't say this pain is this much in itself. It's actually immeasurable. It depends on the way I'm seeing it. It depends on how much push or pull. Everything, inner or outer (so-called), its true nature is immeasurable. We begin to understand. This is what's important, the understanding. We begin to get a sense, more and more and more, of the immeasurability of all things. And it's that, that understanding beginning to come into the heart, knowing that in the heart, that immeasurability of all things, that brings, in a way, the deepest equanimity. Because even when something seems bad, we know that's not really how it is. When something seems amazing, it's not really how it is. As I said, it doesn't bring a dryness or a greyness or a dullness. It's not like everything then is grey. There's a real beauty and wonder and a love in that, in that understanding. This is available to us as meditators, as people on the path. What I'm talking about is not only for one or two people in the world. It's available to us if we want it.

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1. Cf. J. Krishnamurti, Letters to a Young Friend: "We go to the well with a thimble and so life becomes a tawdry affair, puny and small," http://legacy.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-daily-quote/20150719.php, accessed 9 June 2021. ↩︎