Equanimity describes a complete openness to experience, without being lost in reactions of love and hate. It’s a powerful quality in its own right, and it fortifies other qualities. It supports wisdom because when the mind doesn’t shake, we can stay with the truth of things long enough to have a deep insight.
Equanimity has a balance that empowers loving-kindness (metta) with patience, so that we care, even in times when the people that we love do self-destructive things. Without equanimity we might demand that happiness occur in the ways that we think it should, rather than stay connected and loving with things as they are.
Equanimity endows compassion with courage, so that we have the courage to face the pain in life and to face the cruelty in the world. When we care deeply, we try to help, but we can’t always alleviate pain. Sometimes what we do doesn’t actually help.
The fourth and last immeasurable thought is equanimity. It is the attitude or thought to treat everyone without partiality or discrimination, and further, the wish to free all sentient beings from attachment, hatred (ཆགས་སྡང་) and all other forms of bias and prejudice. The practice of equanimity is founded on the Buddhist philosophical view that all sentient beings are equal in their empirical and ontological states of existence. All sentient beings, irrespective of existential differences, seek pleasure and happiness and avoid pain and suffering.
Similarly, all sentient beings are essentially ontologically clustered psychomatic parts that are intricately interconnected, and inherently dependent on numerous causes and conditions. They lack any independent existence. Thus, all sentient beings are equal and undifferentiated in their natures; it is only concordant with nature to eschew differentiation and partiality when generating benevolent thoughts.
BE EQUANIMOUS NO MATTER WHAT LIFE IS THROWING AT YOU.
