We have been doing a four-week series on the fourth week of it, and they're called

the Brahma Vaharas. And in one of the sets of the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha's asked

what is the way to Brahma, to God, to communion with God. And as response was to set out a pathway

with these four elements, really these four attitudes, or in their kind of, include a set of

practices that awaken the heart-mind. And each of these attitudes reflects a facet of the

awakened heart-mind. And they're really inseparable when we look deeply into them. So they're called

the divine abodes, which are the homes or resting places of Brahma. And they're really, when we're

awakened in each of these areas, we feel at home. We feel most who we really are.

And so we've explored already the first week we explored loving kindness, the meta-practice,

which is really our response when we're present with the goodness and beauty that's all around us

and within us. And then we explored Karuna, which is compassion, which is when we open our hearts

courageously to the truth of suffering. There's a quality or a tenderness of compassion that

arises. Then Modita, our joy, and it's also called sympathetic joy, is what arises when we open

to the ten thousand joys and sorrows, when there's that quality of profound openness to the

totality of how things are. This week we'll be exploring equanimity, and equanimity is essential

for any of those qualities of heart. There is no way to have a mature sense of loving,

of compassion or joy, unless we have this quality of presence that does not react

in this moment, but rather opens to what's here. No judgment, no resisting just openness.

So this is the final of the abode's equanimity. It's called upeka, that's the polyword.

And this presence has a quality of openness and balance in the midst of the winds of life.

So usually our mind thinks that whatever's going on we're trying to adjust it or control it or

get somewhere else. Equanimity has the wisdom of completely being here, completely right here.

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