Notes on equanimity from the inside

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 axiologyThe 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 pleasure, and the goal is to maximize the positive side. For tranquilism, the implication is that states of deep contentment without pleasure can be just as valuable as states of intense bliss. Pleasure matters only instrumentally, insofar as it indicates less craving, or displaces it.In light of my own experience, there is a lot that tranquilism seems to get right:Craving seems like a large part of what makes some experiences “bad” or turns pain into suffering. Equanimity wasn’t just a feeling alongside other feelings. It changed the entire field of experience, and how other feelings showed up in it: It was somehow okay that there was pain in my back. Joy arose and passed without me getting involved in it.The equanimous state didn't seem to fit the standard pleasure/suffering axis. By