A Quiet Mind

Equanimity is the most serene state of mind we can experience. It means that all thoughts and emotions have the same impact on awareness, which is essentially no impact at all: no discontent, no feelings of emptiness, no distraction, no need or desire or sense of missing something, and no longing. It is the essence of a quiet mind.

We do not actually create equanimity: it is a condition that just “is.” But we can contribute to and encourage its likelihood as a more-or-less frequent occurrence in our conscious lives.

We contribute to the possibility of experiencing equanimity not by making it a goal, but by recognizing that all mental states that cycle through consciousness are transient. Most of the time, this includes the state of equanimity, too.

Transience is not always a pleasant truth to accept as even the most pleasurable states, the ones we might like keeping around for a while, never seem to linger. But that is a good arrangement. Any recovering addict will tell you that trying to hold on to any of them, or to replicate the best of them, is at the center of a pattern of enslaving compulsive cycling behavior that leads only to suffering. From an equanimity point of view, we are better off letting all states naturally pass.

We certainly do not mind that the painful ones pass. Usually, the sooner they leave the better. The problem is that even without prompting they all tend to come again, the enjoyable and the painful; the ones we again have to let go of before we want to and the ones we wish would not come at all.

What is most important is that we develop a perspective that we can readily employ in the here and now that fosters a quiet mind. An example about various points of view in life and their impact on the disruption of consciousness should help.

If you toss a pebble into a small child’s wading pool, the result will be a relatively significant disturbance in the placidity of the water. The smaller the pool, the greater the disturbance will be.
If you tossed that pebble into a pond, the result would be a disturbance that you would notice if you happen to be very close to it. But overall, especially compared to the wading pool, the disturbance would be minor.

If you took the same pebble out over a large lake and dropped it in, the result would hardly register as a disturbance at all. And the larger the lake, the less an impact would register until with the largest bodies of water the impact would be nearly an abstraction.

The obvious point is that the larger the point of view about who we are and where we come from, the smaller the impact that any thought or emotion can have on a quiescent mind. If we view this life as just one of many we have and will live, then even its most potentially disturbing events are reduced in impact.

Although most of us cannot avoid contexts where current local, national and international concerns can easily monopolize our attention, where past events such as wars and genocide are regularly replayed, and where a scary future is the one most often predicted, we can choose to view ourselves in terms of a broader swath of time.

Think again about that small wading pool. Once the pebble starts the concentric waves in motion, they not only spread outward, they hit the sides of the pool and start cycling back inward, crossing the still expanding waves to create a pattern of disturbance that affects every square inch of the surface. Even going with the flow insures an uncomfortable ride.