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Brahmavihāras: Equanimity (1 of 5)

I want to welcome you to the land of equanimity, the time of equanimity. This is the topic for this week's five talks, and in particular, it's the equanimity brahmavihāra^[1]. It's a form of love which is characterized by upekkhā^[2], which is the Pali word for equanimity.

It is maybe counterintuitive for many people to think of love as being synonymous with or connected to equanimity because love seems to be something that's more proactive, engaged, going towards people, and doing something. It's being expressed in many ways. But in fact, I think it's not too difficult to analyze love the way that it's often practiced in the world around us. It's often mixed up with other attitudes, needs, and desires. Sometimes love is mixed up with what we need. We need company, we need security, or sometimes people feel like they need admiration. Sometimes love is mixed up with fear, sometimes love is mixed up with lust, sometimes it's mixed up with power, and sometimes it's mixed up with status. All kinds of things come along with love, and sometimes it's very hard to see the difference between love itself and some of these other elements that come along with it.

I like to think of the practice of mindfulness, as well as the practices of loving-kindness (mettā^[3]), compassion (karuṇā^[4]), sympathetic joy (muditā^[5]), and equanimity (upekkhā), as being practices that purify love. They simplify it, like you would simplify gold down to its beautiful essence—take out the dross, take out the impurities that are there. As we simplify our love or clarify the love, so it's not mixed up with these other needs and other things going on, it becomes more and more a wonderful treasure. A wonderful jewel inside of us that is a source of nourishment and support.

For example, loving-kindness gets purified from any form of ill will and any form of love that has to do with our self-centeredness, self-preoccupation, or asking, "What's in it for me?" As we practice or connect to compassion, compassion is freed certainly from any tendency for cruelty or to harm people, and it's also purified from any sense of distress, dismay, or horror that might be there that sometimes is confused with it. Appreciative joy gets purified of envy and jealousy. Sometimes that's a very strong motivator for insisting on love, or holding on to love, or protecting our love with someone else when there's jealousy and envy going on. It's also purified from any kind of self-centered focus on oneself around feeling a discontented feeling, or feeling giddy, or feeling like, "I'm the one who's now enjoying or delighting in the delight of someone else." It's a vicarious^[6] way of living where the focus is really on oneself rather than just being open to the joy of others.

Equanimity also is a purification. It's a purification from two things: from repulsion and pursuing. Sometimes the Pali word is translated as attraction or greed, but it has the connotation of pursuing, following after something. So, love that is neither pursuing nor has any kind of repulsion towards anything as a result of it or part of it.

One way to appreciate this quality of equanimity is not so much to try to understand it directly, but to understand its alternatives. The mind that is not centered in this restful, easeful place of equanimity is a mind that is either for or against things. In some kind of way, it has qualities of pursuing, or of repulsing or pushing away in a way that's not so healthy. That's not really a place of freedom. So, we can begin discerning and noticing the small ways or the big ways in which we're pursuing with love, wanting and getting. For some of us, especially when we were younger, maybe teenagers, the drive to pursue can be quite strong. To find equanimity, to find a place where love is not pursuing, is not repulsing anything, or pushing anything away, but is able to stay open and clear. In that openness and clarity, the purity of equanimity allows the love to radiate and shine quite broadly.

The purification of love is the task here, and it's closely connected to freedom. These different forms of love are freeing, and freedom is a means for loving; it's an opening to loving. There's a wonderful reciprocal mutuality between the greater and greater degrees of freedom that the practice brings, and the greater love we have. The greater love we have supports the freedom we have.

The Buddhist Theravada tradition provides an analogy for these four kinds of love, and it has to do with parenting. We can see it as maybe an ideal parent situation. If parents have four children, one who is recently born, and everything's healthy with the kid, there's enthusiasm, happiness, and lots of loving-kindness. Lots of well-wishing and goodwill for their future, and delight. That's very simple and clear, just all around delightful goodwill and loving-kindness.

Then there is compassion. As a child grows up, or one of the children maybe has an illness or has some disadvantage, the parents feel a lot of care and compassion. They support that child in a different kind of way than the others because of the sickness they have, so there's a kind of compassion.

Someone else is in the flush of youth and life is just opening up for them brilliantly and wonderfully. There's just a lot of joy and appreciation that things are working out so well, and that the world is opening up for them and the opportunities are there.

And then the fourth one is well established in their life. They may be in their 40s, well-established in career and family or activities, whatever their life is going to be about. It's well established and it's going along just fine. The parents don't have to think about them so much, or be concerned with their welfare, and so there's a kind of equanimity towards that child.

Whether this is a good analogy or not is not exactly the point here; we have to kind of shape these analogies for ourselves. But the idea being its association with a kind of ideal parental love. Parental love generally doesn't have the complexities that romantic love has, for example. It can have its own complexities, but the idea is maybe it's easier with parental love to feel a kind of simplicity and purity there. Sometimes parental love is not about the parent. This is especially true, I think, for many parents when the baby's just born. It's just so directed towards the baby that there's sometimes a self-forgetting that goes on for the parents because they're just caring for the baby's every need.

So, this ability to love without it being self-preoccupied love. Without it being for "me, myself, and mine," "what's in it for me?" and "what I need and what I have to get." There's nothing wrong with having needs, there's nothing wrong with pursuing what you need to be safe and happy and content. But it's useful to separate that from our capacity for love, so that our capacity to love can be simple, pure, just a wonderful openness and clarity.

One of the ways that I've experienced this in my life, the door to really appreciate this in a deep way, was or is through meditation. Through my first ten years of meditation practice, where I'd had a lot of suffering and sat with a lot of suffering, unexpectedly it opened to a lot of compassion. I learned to appreciate this beautiful capacity for just compassion without any need. Compassion without being for or against, even though there's certainly a movement toward help and to do things. The movement towards supporting others, or helping, or caring for others can be done without this self-centered being for or against anything.

Then, in my next years of practice, especially when I practiced vipassanā^[7], I discovered this wonderful capacity of goodwill, of friendliness, of kindness. Also the simplicity of it, and the purity of it, without it needing to receive anything in return.

And then sympathetic joy. I've really come to appreciate that a lot in my time as a teacher. Just feeling so much appreciation, so much delight in other people and other practitioners. Learning there also a way in which, coming out of meditation, that delight and joy can be so simple, without any needs or needing to do anything—really just a delight and joy.

And then equanimity. The love of equanimity has a lot also to do with meditation, and the way in which I've discovered freedom in meditation—freedom from attachments and clinging. Just feeling sometimes this tender warmth, care, and kindness that extends to people who I don't really like, or have trouble with, or am disturbed by what they do. To have this ability to have love and equanimity, to allow^[8] so widely my love and equanimity to spread out in such a clean way, is also one of the great treasures.

So, this topic for this week is equanimity, and it's one of the great, important topics. It has a lot to do, more than the others maybe, with wisdom. We'll see that the wisdom comes into play, and how the practice really comes into play to cultivate and develop this equanimity factor, and how it also leads to freedom. That's the topic for the week. We'll end it on Friday with the new year. On the 1st, for those of you who are up early enough, we'll begin the year with an evocation of this quality of equanimity. And who knows, maybe it'll be a great resource for 2021. Thank you so much, and I look forward to tomorrow.