Mental Stability

Yesterday I went to a one day Vipassana retreat, a kind of booster shot for the 10 day course I took in September. Once again I was immersed in the power of equanimity.

Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities.  Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy?  But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.

Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.

For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing.  Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps.  It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.

Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.

Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.

Waking up

This morning I felt the thing I've been wanting to feel most in the eleven years since I've been writing this blog.  I felt the lucidity of being awake interrupt the blah, blah story (as Gary Webber calls it) on its own.  I didn't have to consciously notice I was storifying.

I believe that enlightenment it the process of making this lucidity intuitive, a place that is not only easy to get to, but a place that the brain goes to almost immediately the minute it starts to feel the agitation and dis satisfaction that leads to suffering.

Programmed properly this dynamic will happen so fast we're not even conscious of the spark of suffering that would trigger it.

But you can't rush it. Decomposing suffering is a gradual process, and I think Webber is right that even if we invented a machine that could immediately shift us out of that part of the brain that keeps us in the grip of suffering, most people might not have the supporting skills, or live in a culture that could  sustain the peace. For many people it might feel more like dark night of the soul, than a liberation.

As I've learned this year.  I have a bot that will clean my floors, but there is something still strong in me that doesn't want to use it.  I have the technology, but it doesn't matter if the belief that I need and deserve a clean and pleasant home isn't strong in me.

I wonder, even if we had the power to implant something in our brains that would give us emotional intelligence and stability, would we have the ability to adapt to it? Would our society want to actually pay for this in a culture than cannot imagine an economy based on anything other than craving and manipulation of craving?

It's a good question, one we may even be facing in this lifetime.  But I will take Yuval Noah Hariri's advice, and continue to cultivate the two most important skills of the 21st century: emotional intelligence and mental stability.