[Linkpost] “Notes on equanimity from the inside” by stefan.torges

About this episode

The episode explores the author's profound experience of equanimity during a meditation retreat and its implications for understanding well-being.

This is a link post. 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…

People in this episode

Host: EA Forum Team

Topics covered

• equanimity
• axiology
• meditation
• Buddhism
• consequentialism
• epistemology

Keywords

• equanimity
• meditation
• Buddhism
• axiology
• consequentialism
• epistemology
• Lukas Gloor
• tranquilism

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Notes on equanimity from the inside

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