The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (9 page)

E
quanimity
is defined as even-temperedness and calmness. It would certainly seem to be a quality necessary for happiness in life. Equanimity is a virtue worth every effort to develop. How do we work at equanimity? How do we bring this quality into our experience of life, and how do we maintain it?

A sign that someone possesses this virtue is that they are undisturbed by the moment-to-moment ups and downs they experience in daily life. Things just don’t seem to bother these people. Why is this? It is because equanimity comes from the art of nonjudgment. Nonjudgment quiets the internal dialogue of our mind.

We judge everything in life, and most of it unconsciously. From the moment we wake up in the morning, we start judging. We even judge what happened while we were asleep: “I had a bad dream” or “I slept great.” We
judge everything that comes toward us during the day. Ev
ery experience, every word that is spoken, is evaluated and judged by filtering it through our opinions and our past experiences. This is necessary. It is how we make all our decisions, whether they are of great importance or relatively insignificant. For example: “I want this cereal for breakfast.” This means that I have looked at all the available options for breakfast and made a judgment against everything I don’t want this morning. Maybe tomorrow I will make a judgment against cereal in favor of eggs.

Judgment requires the process of evaluation, the process of comparison. This requires a point of relativity, an ideal. As I mentioned earlier in the book, judgments are always based on some preconceived idea of perfection. There is always an imagined ideal item, experience, or circumstance that allows us and even compels us to pass judgment. We compare the present situation either to an imagined ideal situation of the same nature or to a past situation of the same nature. When you are unaware that judgments are happening, they become self-perpetuating, and the “ideal” is always evolving.

If you watch a movie and say, “That was a good movie,” you are comparing it either to one or more movies you have seen in the past that you judged as good or bad or to some concept of what an ideal movie is. If you are comparing it to a movie you have seen in the past, ask yourself what made that particular movie good or bad. Your answer is a judgment. Whether you judge the present movie as good or bad, the experience of watching it, evaluating it, and finally judging it will be added to your
subconscious concept of the “ideal” movie. T
his ideal evolves because your perceptions and priorities evolve throughout your lifetime. A movie that seems good when you are thirty years old does not fit the same criteria you used to judge a movie as good when you were seven.

Judgments are necessary for us to function in life, but they have a downside: They are not executed with a detached nature. There is usually some emotion involved, and the amount of emotion is proportional to the perceived importance of the judgment. “The ideal breakfast this morning would be Brand X cereal, but there is none, so I will have eggs instead.” This is not a particularly emotional judgment, but you do experience disappointment at some level. “My ideal job would be one right here in town, but another job is open five states away. So I’ll take this new job and move my family away from our friends.” This is a different story. The emotions in this judgment are much more pronounced because your decision has great impact on your life and the lives of your family members. However, the emotions you experience have nothing to do with executing the decision. Instead, the emotions hinder you from thinking clearly and make you struggle as you work to determine your best choice.

I have a private pilot’s license. When you, as a student, are working on your certificate, you are taught to fly the airplane based on procedures and to not allow emotions to enter into your decisions. At some point in your training, the flight instructor will pull the throttle all the way back to nothing, usually when you aren’t expecting it, and say, “You just lost your engine. What are you going to do?”
What you are going to do is the procedure you have been
taught, the one that you’ve practiced over and over so that it has become a natural habit. One of my instructors told me that every time I got into the airplane, she wanted me to run through the emergency “engine out” procedure before I did anything else. She also instructed me to make it the last thing I did before exiting the airplane. She said that if I did this, should the situation ever occur in real life, there would be no emotion, no panic, and no extraneous dialogue stealing away precious seconds. I would just make decisions and execute them.

This practice works. The evidence of it can be seen in the heroic emergency landings made by commercial pilots and private pilots alike. I once heard a recording of an amazing conversation between a corporate pilot and air traffic control. The pilot was in heavy fog, and critically needed instruments were failing. He was flying at night between mountains, and being told by the air traffic controller when to turn and which altitude and heading to hold. The pilot could see nothing out of the windows, and one wrong move would spell death in a fiery crash. Though his emotions were probably beating at his mind’s door, screaming to be noticed, they had no power over him. He and his copilot were entrenched in practiced procedures, operating in total equanimity. They weren’t judging their situation at all, just reacting to it. At that point in time, judging their circumstance would have brought mind-numbing emotions into the situation that could have meant the loss of their lives. The air traffic controller was as process-oriented as the pilot and copilot.
He knew that the pilots’ lives depended on his ope
rating clear of emotion. It was an incredible conversation, and one that demonstrated that you are at your best when you are not operating under the influence of emotions and unconscious judgment making.

The emotions attached to a judgment stem from a sense that “this is right, and that is wrong.” “This is good, and that is bad.”
Right
and
good
make us happy, while
wrong
and
bad
make us upset or sad. We feel that right and good things at least approach the ideal, while wrong and bad things move away from it. We all want to be happy and have ideal lives, but what constitutes right and wrong is neither universal nor constant. When Galileo was jailed four hundred years ago for his observation that the Earth was not the center of the solar system, he was considered a heretic who spoke directly against God. Yet today we realize he was among the few who knew the truth. Instead of being wrong and bad, he turned out to be right and good.

If you were to follow a three-year-old child through his life, periodically asking him for his definition of “the ideal,” you would get a different answer at every age. At three, he might just want a particular toy. At the age of ten, he might want a new bike and no school, ad at the age of nineteen, a college scholarship and a date with a certain person. By the time he reached thirty, his ideals might be a high-paying job, a family, and a beautiful spouse. When he reached fifty, he might want a new spouse and early retirement. At seventy, he might want to either live fifteen more years or be ten again and back in school so he could fix all the mistakes he made and
then
have an ideal life.

Our concepts of
ideal
and
perfect
are alway
s changing. What we consider good or bad for ourselves doesn’t stay the same. Of course, in regard to right or wrong, we are not talking about eternal truths, such as the idea that it is wrong and bad to take someone’s life. We are talking about the evaluations and judgments we make unconsciously in every second of our lives that jump-start our emotions and bring us much anxiety and stress.

What can we do about this unproductive habit? How can we escape this perpetual cycle? First we must become aware of exactly when we are involved in the process of judging. Since most of us judge all the time, we don’t have to wait long for our first chance to observe ourselves participating in this exhausting act. And then we have a special opportunity: the chance to meet a quiet, nonjudging presence at the heart of all our beings.

We must work at being more
objectively
aware of ourselves. We cannot refine any part of our daily thought processes if we are not separate from those processes. At first, this seems to be a confusing concept to grasp, but with the slightest shift in perception, it becomes clear. If you are aware of anything you are doing, that implies that there are two entities involved: one who is doing something, and one who is aware of or observing you do it. If you are talking to yourself, you probably think you are doing the talking. That seems reasonable enough, but who is listening to you talk to yourself? Who is aware that you are observing the process of an internal dialogue? Who is this second party who is aware that you are aware?

The answer is your true self. The one who is talking
is your ego or personality. The one who is quietly aware
is who you really are: the Observer. The more closely you become aligned with the quiet Observer, the less you judge. Your internal dialogue begins to shut down, and you become more detached about the various external stimuli that come at you all day long. You begin to actually view your internal dialogue with an unbiased (and sometimes amused) perspective.

I have had times when my ego is going on and on about something someone said to me that “it” considered “irritating,” and yet I remain very separate and unaffected. I feel as if I am invisible in a room, watching someone complain about something that is completely unimportant to me. This feeling also extends into experiences of personal stress, such as job deadlines or financial pressures. I have witnessed my ego rambling on about how I can’t finish a job on time. When I am aligned with my true self, the Observer, I find myself aware of the stress that my ego is experiencing, but also unaffected by it. I think, “That’s just my ego fretting that it will experience disapproval if I disappoint my client by taking longer than originally anticipated.”

When you are aligned with your true self, you are immune to other people’s behaviors. When you feel that someone is acting inappropriately toward you, that feeling comes from a judgment of the ego. From the perspective of the Observer, you find yourself just watching
that
person’s ego rant and rave while you listen quietly and unaffected.
When you decide to engage your practicing mind in
any activity, you are evoking this alignment with the Observer. The
ego is
subjective
. It judges everything, including itself, and it is never content with where it is, what it has, or what it has accomplished. The Observer is
objective
, and it is here in the present moment. It does not judge anything as good or bad. It just sees the circumstance or action as “being.” In other words, the circumstance “just is.” Thus the Observer is always experiencing tranquility and equanimity.

Whether you are going for a job interview, trying to develop more patience with a difficult person or situation, or learning an art form, alignment with the Observer is tantamount to success and freedom from stress. This alignment assures an objective, no-expectations point of view. This contradicts the ego-driven mentality that one must “be the best,” and the thoughts that “nobody cares who comes in second,” and “I want it all.”

Is there anybody out there who isn’t tired of running as fast as they can to grab a mythical brass ring that we all know in our hearts doesn’t exist? When a friend or family member falls short of something they considered an important goal, we console them with a detached wisdom that we don’t apply to ourselves. Alignment with the Observer brings this detached wisdom to bear on ourselves; it brings us nonjudgment and hence equanimity.

How do we become aligned with the Observer? How do we free ourselves from the confines of our ego? Though there are certainly a number of ways to accomplish this, the most effective method for spontaneously and effortlessly creating this alignment is meditation. Through
meditation, awareness arises on its own over time. As you practice
meditation, you become more aware of the silent Observer within you. Through your effort, you realize that meditation is a process of quieting the mind and your attachment to the external world by going deeply within yourself.

Meditation is not a religion. It has, however, been a part of virtually all major religions. Throughout time, most major religions have had a history of contemplative processes that deepen the individual’s awareness of the God Force, or whatever you choose to call it. There is nothing scary about meditation, either. In fact, if you choose to pursue it, you will find it to be the part of your day that you most look forward to because of the calming sense and clarity it brings into your life.