Episode Details

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 from suffering through neutral to [...]

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Outline:

(01:05) Equanimity and axiology

(03:10) Equanimity and consequentialism

(04:44) Equanimity and epistemology

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First published:
May 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EsZbFsATZfSSym3Wt/notes-on-equanimity-from-the-inside

Linkpost URL:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MNFEhMHpEsgqxjBa2/notes-on-equanimity-from-the-inside

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.