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Hi, this is Margaret Meloni, and welcome to the Death Dhamma Podcast. In a series I used to read, occasionally one character would say to the other, may you live in interesting times. It was understood that this was a curse where interesting times meant chaos and difficulty. Well, we do live in interesting times. I mean, don't we always? So this season, together, we will explore equanimity and chaos, recognizing that many aspects of life are beyond our control. Let's find a sense of balance and peace amid external chaos. Welcome back, everybody. And last time, we were deep into the Brahmavaharas with, you know, focusing on the context of equanimity within the Brahmavaharas and also talking about Metta and Karuna and Mudita. And today we're gonna go back and visit the Brahmavaharas, but really with just really much more focus on equanimity, because that's our season, right? And as I do this today, I want you to know that I'm really drawing on an. On Buddhistspirituality.com and the article is about the four divine abodes. And so it's all about the relationship of the four Brahmavaharas. And again, like I said, you know, coming back to equanimity, spending time with equanimity today. Equanimity, that unshakable, perfect balance of mind. But it comes from insight, right? And, you know, I've said this before, and I'll probably say it multiple times, so thank you for listening, is that this is difficult. It's difficult to attain and it's difficult to maintain, right? Because you can see in life how things are moving between contrasts, success and failure, or as we perceive success and failure, loss and gain, honor and blame. And we feel our hearts responding to all of this. Happiness and sorrow, delight and despair, disappointment and satisfaction, hope and fear. These are things that we might go back and forth between, which makes it hard to be in one place, unwavering. These are waves of emotion. And we go up, and sometimes we go down. And maybe when we find a place where we're resting, right, we're resting comfortably, we're in that balance. A new wave comes, and that new wave might impact us more than the previous wave of emotion or events. And so, you know, we're trying to get that footing, right? How do we get that footing so that we can go up and down with the tides, but not reacting to the tides. So we are just with the water and we're bobbing like a floating device, right? Like a buoy. Or something. We're just floating. How do we do that? And that's, you know, the article calls it the island of equanimity. And I'm going to use that phrase because I like that. You know, we can become that island of equanimity in the ocean, but not dramatically impacted by the ocean. So, you know, we've got this little share of happiness that comes to us, and we want to have courage to start again when we need to, and we want to have joy when it makes sense to joy, grow joy, even though there's sickness and, you know, death and difficult things are happening. And so this also brings us to this thought where in this world, as we are also practicing the Brahmavaharas, we will be connected to somebody with sympathetic joy. We will be happy for someone that something good has happened to them. But then maybe next week, that person who had something that we celebrated with them, we were happy for them. We had mudita. Something else may come along that now that same person is going to need our compassion, right? Our compassion. Because we do go from these moments of, look at this thing that has happened to me in my life. And then we don't know what's going to come next. But maybe the thing that comes next is something that now this person needs, our compassion. And for us to be able to respond, we need that equanimity, right? That equanimity to understand. This week I'm happy with you. Next week I may be sad with you or actively helping you with a difficult situation. And that's why equanimity is about that focus, that insight. Because it's not indifference. It's not like I'm like, oh, okay, you're happy today, but tomorrow you might be sad, so I'm gonna do whatever. I mean, I'm using my. My best Eeyore voice there, right? This is the result of our own training in. It's not just a mood, a passing mood. Like today I can be balanced, right? So. But would it deserve its name if it was exertion over and over again, right? There's a thought that if equanimity was exertion, like, ah, you know, like lifting a strong, strong weight or running a difficult race, would that weaken it? Would it be weakened and defeated if equanimity came from us overexerting ourselves all the time? And in a way, though, equanimity does require us to meet very difficult tests, very difficult tests where we are perhaps exhausted, but we regenerate strength from within and from within that's that's our practice, right? So it's this power. We develop a power of resistance and self renewal, but we can only do that with insight, right? So now what is that insight? It's that clear understanding of how all of these experiences of life originate and an understanding of our own true nature, right? I am of the nature to suffer. I suffer because. Right? And to understand that the experiences we undergo come from our karma. And I think we did talk about karma last time. And so here it is again, because this is what is behind these. Why one week we have sympathetic joy for someone and the next week it might require compassion is because of the karma we've created and the karma they've created, right? In this life and in earlier lives. And it's not blame. It's not. Well, that happened to you because you did something bad once and now it's coming to fruition. It's just karma. It just is. It just is, right? Nothing that happens to us comes from some other foreign thing. And that's a hard one, right? I've heard people in psychology talk about that. You know, the external locus of control, right? So if you go through a period of time where everything is happening to you and it's not your fault or you have that friend, it's like, oh, I guess I'm just unlucky. This is not my fault. Why did this happen? It happened because of karma. And knowing this and understanding this is meant to be freeing. It's meant to be freeing. It's not meant to make me be afraid because I don't know what I did in a past life. So I don't know what is going to surface. I just know that something will surface. And I'm doing the best I can in this life to generate positive karma. And let's see what happens. And so that knowledge, that might be considered the first basis of equanimity, right? If everything that happens to me comes to me from me, what should I be afraid of? Should I be afraid of me? Should I be afraid of past me? Where's the value in that? Right? So, but sometimes fear or uncertainty is going to arise, and we know that what we try to do. Then again is good deeds. Do good deeds so that you can grow confidence and courage and know that the good deeds that you perform are in some way generating some kind of protective power, right? Again, we don't know when that will come to fruition, but we just need to have faith that it will and to keep doing more good deeds. And even if you go through something discouraging and difficult. Don't let that dissuade you from doing good deeds, because maybe what happened to you was not as difficult as it could have been because of good deeds. And you know, right now, and I've, I've shared this with you all before, I remember when, you know, my mother and my husband died very close together, five days. And, you know, people saying to me, well, you must have had some really bad karma. You must have done something really bad in a past life. And sure, also not helpful to me. And maybe that was helping people think, well, nothing like that will happen to me because I didn't do anything bad. But again, you don't know unless you have past life recall. You don't know and they don't know. So one of the practices that one of my teachers gave me during that time was to meditate on and reflect on loving kindness and compassion for other people who were going through grief and death and the loss of a loved one. And calling to mind the fact that I'm not the only one going through this, not the only person who has had family members die. I'm not the only person who've had family members die close together. And in that way, it was calming, right? It takes you out of yourself. Right. It took me away from my own grief and my own, you know, being focused on my own difficulties. And, you know, when you generate loving kindness towards others, that is an action that can help prevent, help create, excuse me, some positive karma, right? So we try to do those good deeds. And then there's this quote. It says, more and more ceases the misery and evil rooted in the past. And in this present life, I try to make it spotless and pure. What else can the future bring than increase of the good? Uh, so, you know, we think of it that way and work to create a serene mind when we can. And that was the other thing that this practice, you know, helped calm me, helped bring me to calm, and helped me bring me to some peace over the things that had happened to me, right? So the events of our lives are the results of our deeds. Uh, and in a way, those results, whether I perceive or you and I perceive those results to be bringing sorrow or bringing joy. They're our friends. Our deeds come back to us. We don't recognize why they're coming back to us always, but they are friends. Because one, you're burning off some karma and it's allowing you to practice, right? So sometimes our actions are going to return to us in a way based on how someone treat you, right? A difficult relationship with someone or a good relationship with someone. Sometimes it comes through upheaval, losing a job, losing a person, losing money, you know, experiencing natural disasters. Sometimes the results are expectations are not what we thought was going to happen to us in life. But like as in most of a lot of life isn't what we thought life would happen. Whether we perceive that to be better things have happened or more difficult things have happened, right? So we don't want to try to hide these things from ourselves. We don't want to cover them up with, you know, pretext. This happened because of that, it happened because of karma. And again, we don't want to say, why me? Why is everything happening to me? I'm unlucky. No. Even though sometimes it feels like we go through times where, wow, it's a lot of difficult things going on. It's coming to us because of our own karma. It is part of our own practice. And even suffering can be our friend. Even if it's a difficult friend, it's a truthful and well meaning friend who's teaching us knowledge about ourselves. And you know, who are we and how are we behaving. So we can look at suffering as our friend and our teacher. And then that helps us to think about it, to live with it with equanimity. If you wondered if equanimity was getting lost in that whole discussion there, no. When we can accept what has come to us through our karma, it is our equanimity that allows us to understand and accept what is coming to us. And that when, you know, things come again and again and we have repeated births, it is our resistance, our equanimity eventually, which helps us overcome our own craving, our delusion, right? Our propensity to create situations which can generate difficult karma. Okay? Now another insight is the teaching of no self or not self. Because this shows us that in the ultimate sense, deeds are not performed by a specific self. We cannot say things are mine, my own, right? And that delusion of a self creates more suffering. And I'll say gets in the way of our ability to practice equanimity. Because if I'm always blaming myself, I am blamed. I have failed. My house is gone, my car has been broken into that shakes our equanimity. So to establish equanimity, we need to give up mine, me, mine, mine. And so of course we begin with small things, right? We don't begin with, most of us can't begin with big things. But you know, maybe I Begin to detach myself from. Okay, if something happened to my car, was it really my car? It was a vehicle that I was using in my life. Was it ever really my. Mine? Someone maybe. Let's start with something even easier. Someone ate the last piece of dark chocolate. How dare they. Was it ever really mine? It was a piece of dark chocolate that was there. Was it ever really mine? Perhaps it brought that person more joy than it would have brought to me. And so I need to let go of the thought of that person ate my last piece of my chocolate, right? So starting with the small things, we can practice this sense of detachment. And when we begin to develop this ability to stop, you know, mine self, then it's easier for equanimity to enter our hearts, right? Because how can I, How. How can anything that I think of as foreign, something that's not really mine, how can it agitate me? How can it agitate me? How can it make me become greedy, you know, or have hatred or even grief if it wasn't ever really my piece of dark chocolate to begin with? It was just a piece of dark chocolate that was there that maybe I was going to eat. How can I be agitated, right? And so this is a big one, this whole teaching of not self. But it is a good guide to help us to perfect our equanimity. Uh, and there's a final statement here in this. You know, I've been drawing from this article again the four divine abodes from buddhistspirituality.com and here's this statement. Equanimity is the crown and culmination of the four sublime states. But this doesn't mean it's the negation of love, compassion, and sympathetic joy, or that it leaves them behind as inferior. So it's not like that at all. It doesn't mean equanimity means you don't have loving kindness, you don't feel compassion, you don't feel sympathetic joy. And even though we're calling it the crown and culmination, it doesn't mean the others are lesser, lesser characteristics, lesser divine abodes, right? Equanimity includes them. And when we have equanimity, we're able to pervade them, right? To think, to infuse them, to fill them with. To have a loving kindness that is full of equanimity, to have a loving kindness that is full of balance. In previous weeks, in the previous episodes, we've talked about that ability to have loving kindness for others who we don't agree with, who do things that we don't like. It's equanimity that allows us to do that. That's what it means when we say equanimity is pervading metta, or loving kindness. To be able to feel compassion for someone without being drawn into compassion, fatigue or sadness, right? Or depression, because someone you care about is experiencing difficulty. But to really feel that compassion, to notice their suffering and to be feeling like you want to act to help them decrease their suffering, but to be able to do that without being bogged down by it again, that's equanimity. Pervading it, infusing it, allowing us to do that just as being happy, having that sympathetic joy, that mudita for someone who has experienced something, to be able to do that without becoming overly caught up, you know, overly excited by your feeling of joy for them, but to feel joy for them, that is equanimity. And so this is our dividing in and spending more time concentrating on equanimity and how we get to it and how it interacts with the other divine abodes.