The Power of Soul: Living the Twelve Virtues by Robert Sardello

Author:Robert Sardello [Sardello, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623462369
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Virtue of Equanimity

What is it like to be perfectly balanced in the realm of emotions? Typically, our emotional responses are one-sided. We are either happy or sad, angry or glad, exuberant or withdrawn. When we are not bouncing between these polarities it is because emotion is hardly present at all. Equanimity does not mean absence of emotional quality. It does not mean feeling the same all the time, neither hot nor cold. Nor does equanimity mean a mixture of emotions from either side of the polarity—a little bit of anger mixed with just the right amount of love with a dash of joy thrown in for seasoning.

Equanimity also cannot be imagined as the point of balance between polarities that are established in advance. If something wonderful happens and we feel overjoyed, to find equanimity in our joy does not mean to balance this feeling with just the right amount of sadness, because we know that to let one emotion dominate would be a loss of equanimity. Such a view would require that we have within us a quantity of every emotion and that we could learn to draw upon the right one at just the moment needed to bring balance. To be able to draw up emotions in this manner would require taking a standpoint outside of our soul life, being detached observers of our own emotions, mixing them to the right proportions.

Many spiritual practices place equanimity at the top of the list of attributes necessary for spiritual development. These practices often speak of equanimity as if it is something that can be controlled through our will. It is spoken of as something that we can come to by modifying the extremes of our emotions. We do have to find equanimity, but it is not the result of alteration of other emotions. It has its own soul life independent of other emotional qualities.

It is helpful to remember an actual instance of a strong emotional experience. Suppose I am at work and I have asked someone to do a task. When this person comes back three days later and shows what was done, suppose I find that the task was done incorrectly. A flame of anger arises within me. What would make it possible to feel the force of this anger and yet not be taken over by the anger and explode at my colleague? The object of virtue here would not simply be to refrain from anger in order to keep good social relations, but to see that in this surging up of anger there resides a bit of unrefined material that can be transformed into a spiritual gift. If I can feel the anger as a force freed from using it to be hurtful to the other person, if it can become a force for exuberant engagement with the other person that helps us focus on the needed task, and if it can also be a force for the sharpening of thinking, then I am on the way to equanimity.

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