This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Mostly Quiet Sit; The Divine Abodes: (5 of 5) Equanimity. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, welcome folks. Good morning for most of you. It’s lovely to see the names. I just posted at the request of some sangha members a link in the chat, but it’s also in the YouTube video description for today, and it’s also on the IMC calendar. I posted it with a link to an optional Zoom meeting at 8:00 today, so 15 minutes after this ends, if you want to come say hello to fellow practitioners, that Zoom room will be open at 8:00 Pacific time. So in an hour, we’ll just have a chance to say hello and for you to talk to each other.
Okay, so let’s sit.
Sensing into where it feels appropriate to attend. We take our cues from the teachings, from the Buddha, from the lineage, but in an important sense, we actually have to blaze our own path. We have to find how the Dharma will incarnate in our life.
Treat all phenomena as if the Buddha were whispering in your ear to let go, to not be afraid of silence.
Just letting the silent presence of the Sangha support you, a kind of network of goodwill and care. Just to remember how much ordinary goodness there is in the world. Let that soothe your heart, make the letting go feel safer.
We offer a kind of radical permission for the conditions of our life to be as they are in this moment. And in another moment later today, the rest of our life, it’ll be wisdom that determines the relative balance of passivity and activity. To say yes deeply to this moment does not imply passivity for all time. It is to cease disputing what has already arisen now.
Okay folks, it’s good to sit with you. It’s a mostly quiet sit, it’s nice. So thank you for having me this week. It’s nice to know enough of your names that it doesn’t feel like a weird substitute teacher gig where students are kind of a little weary or something. Anyway, I appreciate the warm welcome and I’m grateful to all the people who’ve been supportive. I was scheduled by Nancy a long time ago. Dimitra, Julie, Kevin helping edit, Gil, the steadiness of Gil over all these years to sustain this. People involved with setting up the YouTube thing, Paul the treasurer doing accounting work with donations, and there’s a lot I’m leaving out. Anyway, the point is it actually takes a lot of goodwill and kindness just to be here together, and I’m appreciative of that.
Ajahn Bhaso1 wishes that all beings dance at ease in the breeze with minds left silent by laying to rest all things. And dukkha2 has displaced dukkha, which has displaced dukkha. And in a way, it’s hard to keep track of all the things we might worry about. There’s so much to care about, so much to love, and it’s almost like our nervous system wasn’t really designed to care all the time. That’s how it feels to me. It’s like, I don’t think this system was designed to care all the time.
Equanimity is love in the face of the endlessness of samsara3, the ungovernability of suffering. And because we can influence sometimes, it lures us into the delusion that we govern something. So equanimity is still, but not rigid. Ajahn Sucitto4 said it’s a kind of quiet love, respectful. And this capacity is so important because the central biological impulse is really to influence conditions, to influence this realm, and to act upon the world to control conditions. This runs very deep, maybe is the deepest impulse in an animal, and we need to find ways of resting. So equanimity is important, but it’s not alone. It’s in deep relationship with compassion. They really need each other. One without the other would be very awkward.
So compassion is essential, and caring is costly. There’s a whole backstory to this, but there’s a research study from a couple of years ago. The author writes, “Many suggest empathy, which involves sharing others’ experience, can be biased and exhausting, whereas warm, compassionate concern is more rewarding and sustainable. If compassion is indeed warm and a positive experience, then people should be motivated to seek it out when given the opportunity. Here we ask whether people spontaneously chose to feel compassion and whether such choices are associated with perceiving compassion as cognitively costly. Across all studies, we found that people opted to avoid compassion when given the opportunity, reported compassion to be more cognitively taxing than empathy and detachment, and opted to feel compassion less often to the degree they viewed compassion as cognitively costly.”
So these are meditation-naive people, people who have not practiced. And I’m sure we can get better. I’m sure compassion can be less costly. I’m sure compassion can be more deeply rewarding, but I don’t think the cost is ever zero. And so how do we balance our love and our peace? I can kind of sense the evolutionary mismatch, in the sense of what helped my beloved monkey ancestors thrive doesn’t totally work in 2024 in Berkeley. It’s just intense to care—to care about one’s life, to care about others, to care about the world, to care about people wherever they may be in time, future generations.
So equanimity is about purifying the nature of our care, of making it sustainable, of loving efficiently, of relinquishing inefficient suffering—a kind of suffering that feels like our heart has to do, but it’s doing no good for oneself or for others. A flower is not meant to bloom all the time. We can consider sleep, which has real risk, real opportunity cost, a pervasive sense of disconnection from the environment, right? Totally undefended, but necessary for our functioning, for our brain health, for learning, for growth. Sleep’s important. And what’s the equivalent of sleep for our heart? Our heart needs to rest too. And maybe equanimity is a kind of deep rest for our heart. Our heart needs moments of being unstimulated, but unstimulated does not mean closed or collapsed. We try to rest through more stimulation. We sort of chase one intensity with another—compulsive technological use, whatever it may be. We sort of cocoon in unconsciousness, and I’m not entirely dismissive of that. That’s a kind of rest, but our heart is still highly stimulated even in the cocoon of unconsciousness. And equanimity is a kind of true rest.
“Teach us to care and not to care,” T.S. Eliot writes. And it sounds harsh. What do you mean, teach us not to care? We practice caring, but also the appreciation that our wishes do not govern the First Noble Truth5. And in some moments, it’s actually skillful to put down all of the wishing.
The Buddha was worried about nihilism. In emptiness, one experience is highly interchangeable with others. In a sense, the raw material of samsara does not matter much at all. A sight is a sound is a sensation. Pleasant is unpleasant is neutral. It doesn’t matter at all. And sometimes people get the sense that nothing means anything. And on the other side, we often live with the sense that everything means everything. But between “nothing means anything” and “everything means everything,” we find our life. It’s the middle path. This is a kind of balance of equanimity and compassion.
And one of equanimity’s functions, it seems to me, is to purify our compassion, to distill out what is not pure gold in it. And so equanimity is a kind of cross-check, in a way, a practice of purifying the nature of our care such that our compassion becomes less compulsive, less, maybe we say, codependent, less grandiose, less self-righteous. There’s something about moving between compassion and equanimity that helps illuminate those grizzled bits of whatever in our care.
Equanimity, I sometimes say, is about refining our relationship to helplessness. Even when all is lost, all is not lost. So we want to find a posture for our heart that is not collapsed, not nihilistic, not apathetic, but a way of resting in the face of our nearly complete helplessness. And can we do that in a way that doesn’t harm our heart?
And as we do this, as we refine our love, purify our care, the actions arising from equanimity become more potent, have greater moral force, greater persuasive force than those actions arising from clinging or the compulsive versions of compassion that we enact often. And so we zigzag our way through caring and not caring, through our power and our helplessness. We do our best to live a good life.
I offer that for your consideration.
So thank you. It’s touching to be with you. We’ll close here. And again, if you wish to join the Zoom meeting, that’s posted on IMC’s calendar, here in the YouTube description, on my website. You’re going to find the Zoom link, and I’ll open the room at 8:00. We’ll connect. Thank you all. Wish you well. Gil will be back next week. He’s with Andrea and I think Ines, and will be back next Monday.
Ajahn Bhaso: A Thai Forest Tradition monk. The quote appears to be from Phra Bhaso, also known as Luang Por Bhaso. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a fundamental concept in Buddhism, referring to the inherent unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Samsara: A Pali word that means “wandering” or “world,” connoting a cyclical, circuitous path. It is the beginningless cycle of repeated birth, mundane existence, and dying again. ↩
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravada Buddhist monk and author who served as the abbot of Cittaviveka, Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, from 1992 to 2014. ↩
First Noble Truth: The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha, which is the truth of suffering (Dukkha). It states that life in the mundane world, with its craving and clinging to impermanent states and things, is unsatisfactory and filled with suffering. ↩