Notes on equanimity from the inside

I've always thought of myself as even-keeled and equanimous; that my mind is still. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was talking about. Halfway through my second ten-day meditation retreat, I experienced a depth of equanimity that broke my existing frame of reference.

It’s hard to convey in words. My reflection afterwards was something like “What the fuck was that?” More poetically: it felt deep and dark, like my entire experience was submerged in a deep sea trench.

Two things about this experience seem worth taking seriously. The first is that equanimity, felt from the inside, doesn't sit neatly on the scale I'd previously used to think about good and bad experiences. The second is stranger: from inside the state, certain questions I'd taken for granted about how to act well in the world stopped quite working.

Equanimity and axiology

The closest thing in the EA-adjacent literature to what I'm describing is probably Lukas Gloor's tranquilism, which notably also is inspired by Buddhist sources. It's a partial axiological theory that roughly says well-being is freedom from cravings. This contrasts with classical hedonism, where experiences fall on an axis from suffering through neutral to pleasure, and the goal is to maximize the positive side. For tranquilism, the implication is that states of deep contentment without pleasure can be just as valuable as states of intense bliss. Pleasure matters only instrumentally, insofar as it indicates less craving, or displaces it.

In light of my own experience, there is a lot that tranquilism seems to get right:

Craving seems like a large part of what makes some experiences “bad” or turns pain into suffering. Equanimity wasn’t just a feeling alongside other feelings. It changed the entire field of experience, and how other feelings showed up in it: It was somehow okay that there was pain in my back. Joy arose and passed without me getting involved in it.

The equanimous state didn't seem to fit the standard pleasure/suffering axis. By that point in the retreat I'd already experienced bliss, joy, and other fun states. Equanimity was different in kind: somehow more refined, more real, and unmistakably preferable, but not by being more positive in the same direction.

Equanimity and emptiness seem comparable in some sense. Inside the state, there's no felt urge to propagate it, and there’s no feeling of loss when it ends. Where bliss or joy shout “more please,” equanimity has a subtle draw that made me go on retreat a second time but didn’t have me cling to it. 

I think classical hedonism has a harder time making sense of this. You could try to handle it by saying equanimity is just an unusual kind of pleasure, but you'd then expect a state preferable to bliss to generate exactly the propagate-this-everywhere intuitions that bliss generates. It didn't.

Equanimity and consequentialism

For all that it gets right, tranquilism stays in a frame of “what is the good and how can we maximize it.” Let’s do consequentialism, population ethics, effective altruism, but with a tranquilist axiology. Let’s answer questions like whether a fully content experience is of the same value as unconsciousness. And I can see how this approach makes sense from the outside. You treat it as an empirical debate about what the most or least valuable states of consciousness are, and, as I’ve sketched above, the experience of equanimity has something to say about this.

But there is a deeper thing going on, too. Equanimity came with a sense that — maybe for the first time ever — nothing needs to change. This experience is perfect as it is.

Now, to be fair, I wasn’t exactly having a bad time. I was well-fed, warm, and relaxed. But at one point during the meditation, my mind conjured images of all my friends dying horribly. I didn't experience this as bad or painful; I was merely witnessing it.

This gave me a taste of a different relationship to the world and all of its horrors and tragedies; one in which these things exist but there isn’t a reflex to change them, to fix anything.

Deep down consequentialism is a judgmental philosophy that evaluates world states as better or worse. Equanimity, on the other hand, strikes me as a deeply non-judgmental space where this activity does not seem to make much sense.

Equanimity and epistemology

Stepping back, how seriously should I take any of this? Now look, I know what this seems like: just another guy two-shotted by meditation retreats. There are strange experiences aplenty, and it’s super unclear what epistemic force they ought to have. People on psychedelic trips often report seeing a deeper truth, and sometimes that coincides with them talking to imaginary trees. I don’t personally give those reports a lot of weight, but what about mine?

The phenomenological claims stand on solid ground for me: These states appear flawless. They seem preferable to pleasure. It’s possible to experience pain without the associated suffering. There can be deep acceptance of the way things are. They don’t generate any wish to propagate themselves. The experience just is the way it is, and I would trust similar claims about somebody’s experience on a psychedelic trip.

It’s harder to say what weight the implications carry. As a data point about what’s valuable in the world, I do give them significant weight. It seems hard to be confused about the valence of an experience, and from the little that I have looked into this, other more seasoned meditators report similar preferences.

More confusing to me is the different stance it seems to induce toward maximization and consequentialism. Is this the more appropriate stance compared to the one I inhabit in everyday life? I’m not sure how I could even tell. From inside the experience, it certainly seems like the view is more clear-eyed. If there is a point of view of the universe (whatever that means), it does feel closer to it. How much to trust this, I don’t know. It could be that everyday consciousness is distorted by craving and attachment, or it could be that those attachments are what make us human in the first place.

What I can say is this: When I introspect now, I still have the wish for more beings to experience equanimity and to be free from suffering. I still have the sense of "I want to apply myself skillfully to that task," with its kind of maximization flavor. But the project feels less tight than it did before. And from what I hear, it’s possible to go further down this road with more meditation practice. Importantly, though, that still doesn’t answer whether this would be deepening wisdom or confusion. One person’s growth is another one’s value drift.