Contemplation on the Sublime State of Equanimity

Equanimity is a perfect, unshakable balance of mind. It is rooted in insight. When we look into life, we notice how it continually moves between contrasts: there’s always a rise and a fall, success and failure, loss and gain, and honour and blame. We can observe how our heart responds to all these whether it is happiness and sorrow, delight and despair, disappointment and satisfaction or hope and fear. The waves of emotion carry us up and then fling us down; and no sooner do we find rest, than we find ourselves once again in the power of a new wave. How can we expect to get a footing on the crest of these waves? How shall we erect the building of our lives in the midst of this ever restless ocean of existence? We need to erect it on the Island of Equanimity.

However, the kind of equanimity required has to be based on the vigilant presence of mind and not on indifferent dullness. It has to be the result of a hard, deliberate training. It cannot be the result of a casual outcome of a passing mood. But equanimity would not deserve its name if it had to be produced by exertion again and again. In such a case it would surely be weakened and finally defeated by the vicissitudes of life. True equanimity, however, should be able to meet all these severe tests and to regenerate its strength from sources within. It will possess this power of resistance and self-renewal only if it is rooted in insight.

What, now, is the nature of that insight? It is the clear understanding of how all these vicissitudes of life originate, and of our own true nature. We have to understand that the various experiences we undergo result from our actions in thought, word and deed, which are performed in this life and in the earlier lives. Nothing that happens to us comes from an “outer” hostile world that is foreign to ourselves; everything is the outcome of our own mind and our own deeds. It is because this knowledge frees us from fear, that it is the first basis of equanimity. When, in everything that befalls us, we only meet ourselves, why should we fear?