Equanimity

So I devoted myself to anapanasati for 4 months, but I've brought back in the Brahmaviharas. I still sit with K sometimes on zoom and radiate qualities of the sublime abodes. 

How to proceed? Do I radiate the quality, or do I pick specific people in a 5 stage version from Buddhaghosa? You radiate the quality in the last stage, so I guess if you do that quite well, you could just radiate when you feel confident, but I'm not confident yet, so I fall back on the 5 stages. 

Metta, karuna, mudita are more straightforward. 

Upekṣā, Upekshā, or Upekkhā is equanimity. 

Building up metta, karuna, and mudita, equanimity also can build on anapanasati. In anapanasati you're relaxing the body, relaxing the emotions, gladdening the mind, steadying the mind, liberating the mind. How do you liberate the mind? Through insight into conditionality, disentangling, letting go of the conditions for suffering, relinquishing. Follow the breath. 

When it feels too complicated, I have a simple visualization. A circle touching a line. You are the circle, and you're not remote, and your not engulfed, you're aware of suffering through your compassion. You've coped with horrified anxiety, and you're not remote or pitying. You see others but it doesn't sink your ship, their problems. You wish them well, with a friendly smile. You appreciate virtue. 

For me, going to the breath is the door to piti, or joy. I wish joy on everyone, in general, and in meditative states. The good qualities of your friends who meditate deeply, and just the joy of seeing a stranger find a dollar on the street. Any kind of joy, and meditative joy.

I meditate on the two bodies, my physical body and the truth body (or the 3 bodies). Rooted in my body, in all it's glory and injuries and aging. All the mindfulness of the body work I have done, as part of the satipatthana sutta. I go for enlightenment with my body, feelings, mind and insight. 

I have worked on the 6 element meditation. I have taken my body apart, also in the 32 parts meditation. I have meditated on corpses. Life is so short, fragile. We must make use of our given time. 

I think about the beauty of it all. The devotional pujas, mantras and mythology that excites me, energizes me. 

All the work culminates on working through the 4 stages to the 5th stage and radiating equanimity out into the world. It feels kind of abstract to say it, but the embodiment and culmination of meditation cycles means it's something. Radiating upeksha. 

Radiating upeksha is all the metta, karuna, mudita, plus all the gladdening and steadying and insight, including the 6 element tearing down, and the resulting build up of a sadhana if you get that too with a guru, or without a guru, or no build up, just letting it sit there and stand, beaming out upeksha into the world, beyond the world, out into the universe and everything. 

All the friendships, past and present. All your study of the Dharma. All the ethical striving, all the simplifying to create the conditions. All the devotion. All the support you have received. All the conditions that allowed for your will to evoke in yourself to radiate upeksha, beaming it in all the directions. 

It is the culmination of hard work, circumstances, seeming luck and the will to enlightenment. 

This thing I call myself feel the fruits of the practice.

The wisdom of equality is embodied in Ratnasambhava (seen below).

In the insight tetrad of anapanasati, you contemplate impermanence, disentangling, cessation and relinquishment. These contemplations are supported by equanimity. 

In some sense a base of equanimity is freedom from the hindrances.

In DN9, the discussion of the jhana. In the first jhana there is no lust. In the second jhana there is no thought. In the third jhana there is equanimity. Delight in concentration vanishes too. The fourth jhana is beyond pleasure and pain and equanimity refines the state, neither happiness nor non-happiness. Passing beyond the infinite (5), into infinite consciousness (6) and into no-thingness (7), and cessation (8). The end is beyond perception.

I see Equanimity meditation as a culmination meditation. I've grinded on metta, karuna, upeksha, and now I'm putting it all together. I'm also utilizing the disentangling, cessation and relinquishment in the anapanasati. This is really trying to carry it across the finish line, no matter how basic I struggle. 

Last updated 4/19/24.

Equanimity and being a soccer fan

If you live in NYC, it's time to hop on the bandwagon. Our team is in the finals. The Mets made it to the World Series in 2015. Giants won in 2012, 2008. Yankees won in 2009. Jets last won in 1968. A New York team is in the finals! Being a Mets and Jets fan has been woe. 

I'm listening to Blue Balls NYCFC, a podcast about NYCFC soccer team. The team has a baby blue color. I used to watch Dudes In Blue, but they got older and one guy had children, and they retired. Podcasts and Reddit are the best sources for information about the team. I thought hockey was the red headed stepchild, soccer is below hockey, they're the 4th sport in America. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey are ahead of soccer in America. The immigrants to America often appreciate soccer. My upstairs neighbor is from Poland, plays soccer in the park, and likes the Premier League, how hard they always play. I asked him if he was going to watch the game today? He hadn't planned to but maybe I talked him into it. He had gone to some games the first year they began. 

My son got into soccer, and so I started watching soccer. As an American, I never really watched soccer. I played some when I was in elementary school. I always thought the soccer players were cool in high school. I guess I caught a few World Cup games along the way. When MLS started in 1996, I didn't really notice. So I started watching Barcelona. I read a bunch of books. How Soccer Explains The World is a good one, and Fear and Loathing in La Liga is another classic. Fever Pitch is the memoir of a someone obsessed. Watching Barcelona is choosing to see the best. Messi is a god. It was so weird for him to go to PSG.

I like to write about sports. Soccer doesn't get much writeup in the NY Times. NYCFC won the Eastern Conference finals and there's no article in the Times. There was a pathetic response about how they only have 20 staff writers. Yea, OK, you couldn't peel one off baseball, not playing right now, Football, admittedly the most popular sport in America, basketball and hockey? Tennis? Golf? NYCFC is going to the MLS Cup and there's an article today about French soccer. They make me go to that horrible rag the New York Post: The rabbid attack dog of wrong right wing thinking. Newsday and Daily News you need a subscription. Athletic you need a subscription. The Outfield is about NYCFC, because we play in Yankee stadium. Like my taste in jazz and other things, I enjoy the amazing sport in an under appreciating America. 

So the first years, NYCFC bought some high priced superstars: David Villa, Frank Lampard, and Andrea Pirlo. Lampard was injured, and Pirlo hid behind the wall and post, so they were a bust, but David Villa played pretty well. I wanted to get away from a superstar model, I wanted to move towards young players instead of fading stars. I can't help but think of the New York Knicks first twenty years of the century. They had all manor of major superstars who were fading and didn't have it any more.

Until this year, NYCFC only had one playoff win in their 5 years of existence. Last year was a painful loss to Orlando. The year before was crushed by a loss to Toronto in Citi Field. This breakthrough into the MLS Cup this year is amazing. I can't fall asleep after a win. How do I keep equanimity when you care so much about the team?

I was on retreat, and someone suggested that watching sports, following sports, is a distraction. I think now that it is. Honestly my question about equanimity is a way of injecting the Dharma into my experience as a fan.

Our win in Philadelphia wasn't without it's controversy. Covid protocols took 11 players, 6 starters. The Philly coach Jim Curtin thought it was wrong to keep players home with a sniffle. Looks pretty bad to me, I mean is he a pro-spreading science denying asshole? He also brought up the oil money.

So NYCFC is owned by Manchester City in the PL, City Football Group. The "oil money" is from UAE. Of course "oil money" wouldn't be so much if America wasn't so dependent on the individual fossil fuel vehicle. It's the same kind of sentiment that doesn't all Carter's insights. It's the same kind of idea that the news can only report when prices go up, but when they go down, that's not reported. For the the oil money ownership misses the mark. They got some good players.

There was a lot of complaining about getting reinforcements for the team. Three players arrived this seasons from South America: Santiago Rodriguez, Tallus Magno and Thiago Andrade. We'd lost our GM, and Alexander Ring to Austin FC. These three guys have added quite a lot of highlights to this season.

Dome Torrent quit because he thought the GM was going to bring in his friend to coach, but the GM left. So the assistant to Pep Guardiola who had a brilliant mind, turned out to be a thin skinned quitter. He went down to Brazil and couldn't last a season with the team he was coaching. 

Ronny Deila is Norwegian. He's not a verbose communicator, he didn't have any great resume. He coached Celtic for 2 years. Unfortunately the howling for him to be fired happened whenever the team dipped. I kind of associate the eject button as a Yankee fan mentality. The Yankees lose a few games and someone comes onto WFAN and demands a trade for Mike Trout, arguably the best player. Fanaticism is a kind of infantilism. I want, I want, I want. For me the journey of equanimity is that I can use my mind and maturity to appreciate a team. You can't always win. Yankees fan channel to departed George Steinbrenner, who expected to always win. You can't always win, and it's not the fan who holds the team accountable. Go or don't go, pay attention or don't. And I guess it's OK to be a baby who always quits when they don't have immediate success. Whatever. I find the immaturity of some commenters as silly.

Deila has been the manager who took the team to the finals, so all that fire Deila can be put to rest. Pep says he wants to come to NYC after 2023. 

Tre Filmore used the word "counterfactual". I love him.  He scouted Santiago Rodriguez and was very excited when we got him. Santiago Rodriguez is a great soccer player. Fillmore says Rodriguez is a laundered tallent, but forget that.

Proud Boys also go to the soccer games. They try to ban them, but it's hard to see ideas in people's heads, and you have to actually do something that makes you banned from the game. Fascism is an ongoing fight in America, no doubt. I just don't think the fact that that problem has been engaged with defines the team.

Beckhard points out with all the teams CFG own, we do have an extensive scouting network.

Anyway, all the salt is coming out because NYCFC are in the MLS Cup on Saturday at 3pm! It's going to be a challenge to my equanimity. An enjoyable diversion. I also connect with my son, an important factor. 

anger management quote?

From page 8 of the hardcover edition of Being Wrong:

"...it is surprisingly difficult to get angry unless you are either convinced that you are correct, or humiliated and defensive about being wrong."

I think anger is about control and trying to enforce your vision onto others in a world of different visions. This points to an interesting impact in emotional regulation and equanimity.

Here is an idea that heats me up. Surely the world would be a better place if we thought more into the future and made a decision based on how it would effect our grandchildren. But that's not the only viewpoint. Many people suggest we don't really know much about the future. Some make the here and now primary, forget the metaphysic of the future.

I am humiliated and defensive about my mistakes.

The irony of a so-called friend suggesting I'm not accountable is that I take too much responsibility. It was in that moment that I truly understood that he didn't know me.

Here is another quote from lovely page 8:

"Witness, for instance, the difficulty with which even the well-mannered among us stifle the urge to say "I told you so." The brilliance of this phrase (or its odiousness, depending on whether you get to say it or must endure hearing it) derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right--at any rate, really extremely right, and really, extremely delighted about it."

Equanimity

I saw an upsetting image of a marathon runner who'd had his legs blown off in the bombing yesterday. It's haunting me. (Here is the Wikipedia article.)

I've run 3 marathons, and I have about the ages of the child who died in Boston because of the bombing at the finish line of the marathon. Maybe that's why I was so deeply affected.

Meanwhile lots of people are dying in countries where there are more active wars. So multiply that horror times a hundred, a thousand, and that's what's going on in the world every day. That thought doesn't so much make me feel better, but it does give me a sense of reality.

I can categorize deaths, and some are more "natural" from old age and body failings. Man made deaths are harder to take, though I suppose it's "natural" for humans to be violent.

All life if precious to me, we don't need to kill anyone for anything, and we need to work to support and enrich life.

Somehow I was able to skate past the shooting in Connecticut several months ago without it getting to me too much. It seemed remote, I saw no images. I read and heard people talk about it affecting them, but somehow I wasn't too drawn into it.

Seeing the image triggered off the memory of other images. There's that "love story" of a wounded soldier who comes back missing most of his limbs and rehabbing and sitting in the sunset with his wife.

There's not much to understanding the angry rage that stikes out like that. It's like an impotent kid who knocks down the blocks someone is trying to set up. Surely we won't hear any message from the people who did this beyond the method of their communication, inarticulate anger.

I spent the morning volunteering at a food pantry, processing and organizing food to be given away. I've volunteered 8 times, at various things over the past several months. I want to put positive energy into the world.

There is a real issue of maintaining equanimity at such times, for me. I was perhaps too remote with the elementary school shootings, and I'm too engulfed with the Marathon bombings. I read about focusing the other day, and one technique was to put all your problems in a room, and push them aside so you can have some room to think, and stack them up in order of intensity, order them. I'm got lots of fish to fry in my life, so to speak, and the disturbing images and the horrors and violence going on in the world is something I have limited control of. I only want to be a little in touch with it so that I'm not burying my head in the sand, but not so much so that I'm engulfed. I like the image of a circle touching a line. Put the line through the circle and you're engulfed. Put the circle away from the line and you're too remote, not connected.

I like positive beautiful images to help me maintain my equilibrium. There is no one strategy and everyone is different.

The astronomy picture of the day is one awesome resource.