Equanimity and Tradition

A lot of spiritual traditions arise because of the attitudes of one person in a state of enlightenment who is speaking from his relative position (point of view), and then these statements are ‘canonized’ into a ‘way of being’ that, if followed, will lead to enlightenment. The idea of equanimity is one of these canonized precepts—equanimity is a way of describing what it feels like to be in a particular state, but practicing equanimity won’t necessarily lead to that state, any more than wearing orange robes will produce enlightenment just because someone who is enlightened wears orange. People see what they think of as high beings being indifferent to their physical surroundings, for example, and think that indifference is necessary to enlightenment and moreover use indifference, etc, as a standard to judge the spiritual ‘development’ of people (if he/she isn’t indifferent than he or she isn’t spiritually developed—this is similar to an orthodox Jew’s judging the piety of a person by how well he or she observes the 600 odd mitzvahs that are necessary to fulfill Jewish religious obligations—if the person claimed to have ‘seen God’ but hadn’t fulfilled the mitzvahs then the person obviously hadn’t seen God because only people who had observed all the mitzvahs could see God.)

True equanimity is an outgrowth of spiritual activity, not a cause of it, but in any case it isn’t always present—sometimes it arises spontaneously as an outgrowth of kundalini activity in the same way that people perform spontaneous yoga postures as a result of kundalini activity—I suspect that the spontaneous postures came first, and then people began imitating them in hopes of achieving spiritual advancement. The bottom line is that you can’t gain Pure Consciousness by practicing indifference, although some beings in pure consciousness may be indifferent—due to the fact that they’ve ‘anchored’ their attention in their upper chakras to the extent that they can’t sense anything (but of course that’s the goal of yoga, isn’t it—to move your attention permanently to the upper chakras—but my experience says this is incomplete-—I don’t think this is enlightenment, but then I don’t think the realization of Pure Consciousness is enlightenment.)

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