It’s perhaps easiest for me to put this into Buddhist terms, not because I have been writing about Buddhism per se, but because there is a wealth of information available if you look for the right thing, and more than a few people have assumed that when I use the word “tranquillity” I mean equanimity, but that isn’t the case.

In Buddhism there is an enumeration of the Four Immeasurables: Love, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity, with related practices directed to generating each of them. These are immeasurables, or virtues, within Buddhism. But I am not writing about virtues and their development, I am writing about the progression of advancements through the meditative path — any meditative path, but most directly the one using inner spontaneous sounds as the support of one’s meditative practice.

In Buddhism, there is also an enumeration of the “Seven Factors of Awakening” which are directly focused on the progression of advancements along a meditative path. They are:

Mindfulness (sati). To maintain awareness of reality (dharma).

Investigation of the nature of reality (dhamma vicaya).

Energy (viriya) or determination and effort

Joy or rapture (pīti)

Tranquillity (passaddhi) of both body and mind,

Concentration, clear awareness (samādhi)

Equanimity (upekkha). To accept reality as-it-is without craving or aversion.

Joy matures into tranquillity, and tranquillity is the necessary condition for authentic equanimity to arise. Tranquillity results from a dedicated meditation practice (shamatha). Equanimity is the way to end suffering.

In regular language use, tranquillity and equanimity are almost synonymous, but as upekkha, it ties back to the Buddha’s philosophy of middle-wayedness: not taking extreme positions, accepting things as the are, not craving things that you can’t/won’t have, etc.

But until you get your mind under control, i.e., develop tranquillity, it’s harder to do those things, and almost impossible to have them just naturally arise without any “doing” on your part.

So, I mean tranquillity.

And, finally, I don’t know if the name “Tranquillity’s Secret” has any cachet, but it certainly rolls off the tongue better than “Equinimity’s Secret” ☺️