The Creative, Non-Anxious Mind
Whitehead's Peace and Buddhist Equanimity
“I’m looking for a counselor, a priest, a friend, whose presence is spacious and steady, shaped by a creative, non-anxious equanimity—someone with whom I can lay out the story of my life and the storm and song of my mind, without either of us being capsized. I sense something like this in Whitehead’s image of Peace and in Buddhist images of equanimity. Can they be brought together? I hope so."
Buddhist Equanimity is not stillness, says Michael Uebel in Seeds of Equanimity. It has a kind of dynamism to it, a kind of fluidity, responsive to the needs at hand. Its corollary in process thought, the sense of deep Peace described in Adventures of Ideas, is likewise not stillness. It, too, is a way of becoming, a way of flowing with the world. Equanimity and Peace alike are spacious and capacious ways of experiencing and knowing the world, steady yet open. Both entail a freedom of self-preoccupation, a release from acquisitiveness, a surpassing of boundaries, and a metaphysical intuition into the nature of things. Indeed, adds Whitehead, there is a sense of infinitude in the experience of Peace, a sense of the boundless whole within which the universe unfolds. If you are looking for analogues to Buddhist Equanimity in Whitehead's philosophy, I suggest you turn to his description of Peace as offered below.
In what follows I offer an image of how they might be brought together into what we might call Creative, Non-Anxious Equanimity. Creative, Non-Anxious Equanimity is a kind of awareness, a deep mindfulness that can underlie our minds and consciousness in daily life. It is open-minded, open-hearted, creative yet calm, enduring, wise, filled with a touch of humor, lovingly kind, sensitive to the sufferings of others, capable of seeing multiple points of view, resilient, and aware of the infinite within and beyond the finite. Its opposite is anxious reactivity, in which we feel bandied about by the circumstances of our lives, typically focused on one thing that is an object of immediate focus, with all other things in the background. By contrast, Creative, Non-Anxious Equanimity can, as it were, unfold with the flow of life, whether happy or sad, without “negatively prehending” them or retreating into a privatized, disengaged stillness. It is the kind of heart we sometimes sense in the wise Buddhist, the caring counselor, the hospital chaplain, and the loving parent. It comes by degree and is contexual, responsive to each new situation.
Thus its equanimity is like a mountain in some ways, because stable, and yet a dynamic mountain that changes with what is changing. It has the staying power, not of an inflexible tyrant, but a wise priest or loving friend, who "stays" with others, no matter what, never succuming to ego-based desires or needs to escape into more 'pleasant' circumstances. It is beyond pleasant and unpleasant. It involves an inner sense of peace, of mindful composure, of presence.
Such mindfulness has both a playful and caring dimension. There is sensitivity to the multiple perspectives in which the experienced world can be understood. In this kind of equanimity, we know that all happenings—all occasions of experience—are contingent; they are as they are and they could have been otherwise. They were not “meant to be” by an all-controlling God or “preprogrammed” by the big bang or the laws of karma. In their contingcy they are felt with a sense of compassion and care, with a knowledge that the pain is indeed painful, hurtful, and harmful to those who suffer. Thus equanimity carries within it a sense of tragedy as well as beauty. It includes trust in the power of beauty, but beauty include tragic beauty.
Amid this equanimity there is also a recognition of the role that novelty plays in life. Whatever the situations faced, there is the ongoing flow of time, with new events and new experiences emerging out of already-existing events. The experienced world is not, and perhaps never will be, “finished.” In a spirit of equanimity we accept this and embrace it. We feel the universe as, in the words of Whitehead, a “creative advance into novelty.” This means that equanimity is never finished, either. It is a way of being in the world that is always in process, always becoming. One moment of equanimity is succeeded by another moment of equanimity, not yet existent in the prior moment.
We ourselves are part of this creative advance into novelty. The world we experience includes us, and we include that world. And yet the “we” who are in the world are not substantial selves who stay the same over time. “No thinker thinks twice,” writes Whitehead, and “no experiencer experiences twice.” This means that if we focus on who we have been, and what has happened to us, and what we have seen in the past, understanding that as definitive of who we can become, we fall short of the call of equanimity in the present moment.
There will be, says Whitehead, a “surpassing of personality” and a release from the acquisitive spirit—a certain kind of letting go. This surpassing of personality is more than a release from the constrictions of the past; it is also a release from the restrictions of ego-based self-understandings in the present. We are more, much more, than our privatized ego. We are, says Whitehead, the universe itself as concrescing in the present moment.
Our very selves are inwardly composed not only of our moment-by-moment decisions and feelings, but of the world itself—including other people, other animals, hills and rivers, trees and stars—as the objective content of our subjective immediacy.
This means that the letting go is naturally expressed, not as a retreat from life in the world, but an immersion in it. But in a spirit of loving-kindness and sympathetic joy and compassion, not in a spirit of greed or hatred, animosity or defensiveness. There is no place for violence the mind of equanimity. Love? Yes. Violence? No.
This letting go into capaciousness and lovingkindness cannot be engineered. We cannot will the widened heart into existence, for that willing would itself be acquisitive. The letting go can itself happen in us, as a kind of gift, a grace. And the grace can come ever anew. As recipients of this moment-by-moment grace, we can become not less active but more active in a non-acquisitive and free way.
Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, our lives can be filled with zest, with vitality. The equanimity we enjoy can be channeled into, and complemented by, a sense of lovingkindness, playfulness and adventure, open to what each moment calls for, and open to the beckonings of the future. This openness is not “teleological” in the sense of having an already-existing plan to be foisted on the world; it is “a-teleological” in the sense of being responsive to the needs of the world. The openness takes a step back from the drivenness of the world and allows space, in the world itself, for these needs to be expressed, and then responds, creatively, to those needs.
Thus equanimity and zest go together. This, I suggest, is a Whiteheadian approach to Buddhist equanimity, nourished by Whitehead’s own understanding of Peace as articulated in Adventures of Ideas and in this case, Uebel's interview (below) on Buddhist equanimity offered below.
Readers will naturally ask: And what can I do, how can I practice, to find some taste of this equanimity in my daily life? Neither Whitehead nor Uebel give recipes. What I know is that different wisdom traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and many others—offer practices of meditation, prayer, and ritual that can enable a person to make space for such equanimity to grow in the heart, and that certain forms of community can do the same.
Advice? I suggest finding a community and a practice that feel right for you. Prayer? Meditation? Volunteering? Community Live? Counseling? Gardening? All can be practices that prepare the way for the gift of equanimity. They plant seeds for growth. The watering of those seeds comes from a place deeper than our planting. Whitehead calls it a Harmony of Harmonies. Others might call it the Dao, or the Mystery, or God, or Heaven, or the Deep Listening. It is best to find the name or names that are best for you.
- Jay McDaniel
Seeds of Equanimity
“Seeds of Equanimity deftly provides the reader with a praxis for negotiating the human journey from a disequanimous to an equanimous mind. Uebel makes it possible to traverse these way stations with a quintessentially rich menu of scholarship from Western and Eastern philosophies, an interdisciplinary mix of philosophy, literary history, and folk tales, inter alia. This book is an invitation to consider abandoning binaries of thought that disturb an equanimous mind in favour of more fluid and fertile integrations that inform equanimity. I warmly recommend this book to clinicians and interdisciplinary scholars in the human sciences.”
- Maurice Apprey, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia School of Medicine
This work is an innovative, daring introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity. Michael Uebel challenges the view that equanimity is the effect of a method aiming at states of impartial quiescence and solidity. Reanimating equanimity, Seeds allows new understandings of the concept to emerge through creative and rigorous attention to its genealogy as an idea centrally defined by flexibility, multiperspectivism, and non-teleological attitudes. Responding to the vertiginous increase in writings on mindful living, Uebel productively blends both Eastern and Western philosophies, generating a rich constellation of ideas framing equanimity as an epistemological mode and existential condition.
- Maurice Apprey, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia School of Medicine
This work is an innovative, daring introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity. Michael Uebel challenges the view that equanimity is the effect of a method aiming at states of impartial quiescence and solidity. Reanimating equanimity, Seeds allows new understandings of the concept to emerge through creative and rigorous attention to its genealogy as an idea centrally defined by flexibility, multiperspectivism, and non-teleological attitudes. Responding to the vertiginous increase in writings on mindful living, Uebel productively blends both Eastern and Western philosophies, generating a rich constellation of ideas framing equanimity as an epistemological mode and existential condition.
Review of Seeds of Equanimity
author unknown, from Goodreads
"In "Seeds of Equanimity," Michael Uebel, PhD, LCSW, offers a rigorously researched and philosophically rich exploration of equanimity that is at once historical, conceptual, and deeply humane. Rather than treating equanimity as a static or exclusively Buddhist virtue, Uebel provides an intellectual history of the term and expands it beyond its familiar spiritual contexts. He invites readers to think with and beyond Buddhism, situating equanimity within a broader philosophical, psychological, and experiential terrain.
Central to Uebel’s framework is the metaphor of seeds: the more seeds we plant, the greater the range of possibilities for what may emerge. These are not merely seeds of behavior or intention, but “seeds for knowing.” Knowledge, as Uebel presents it, is enactive—a concept drawn from philosophy and cognitive science that understands cognition as arising through the dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. Knowing, then, is not passive or representational; it is something we do, something that unfolds through engagement with the world. This framing gives equanimity a living, participatory quality rather than reducing it to emotional neutrality or detachment.
The density and precision of Uebel’s prose frequently compelled me to slow down and reread passages—less out of obscurity than out of an abundance of thought. His sentences are saturated with conceptual insight, rewarding sustained attention. One particularly striking example appears in his discussion of play, where he writes:
“Playfulness, along with the comical, offers multiple opportunities to float above, to keep moving, dancing, and pretending, not in the name of avoiding the cruelties of existence but of crafting an endurable world or of reenchanting it.”
As an improvisational comedy performer, this passage resonated deeply. Improv, as a form of play, exists entirely in the present moment and is governed by rules that temporarily suspend ordinary laws and behaviors. In this sense, it offers an equanimous way of being in the world—one that invites possibility, embraces uncertainty, and perceives the field of experience as richly animated rather than fixed or foreclosed.
Uebel’s scholarship is exceptionally thorough, reflecting immense breadth across disciplines. The book includes twenty-six full pages of references spanning philosophy, Buddhism, science and religion, psychotherapy, ancient texts, contemporary media, and personal lived experience, including therapeutic work with veterans. This depth reinforces the book’s central claim that equanimity is not a singular doctrine but a cultivated capacity emerging at the intersections of thought, practice, and lived life."
Central to Uebel’s framework is the metaphor of seeds: the more seeds we plant, the greater the range of possibilities for what may emerge. These are not merely seeds of behavior or intention, but “seeds for knowing.” Knowledge, as Uebel presents it, is enactive—a concept drawn from philosophy and cognitive science that understands cognition as arising through the dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. Knowing, then, is not passive or representational; it is something we do, something that unfolds through engagement with the world. This framing gives equanimity a living, participatory quality rather than reducing it to emotional neutrality or detachment.
The density and precision of Uebel’s prose frequently compelled me to slow down and reread passages—less out of obscurity than out of an abundance of thought. His sentences are saturated with conceptual insight, rewarding sustained attention. One particularly striking example appears in his discussion of play, where he writes:
“Playfulness, along with the comical, offers multiple opportunities to float above, to keep moving, dancing, and pretending, not in the name of avoiding the cruelties of existence but of crafting an endurable world or of reenchanting it.”
As an improvisational comedy performer, this passage resonated deeply. Improv, as a form of play, exists entirely in the present moment and is governed by rules that temporarily suspend ordinary laws and behaviors. In this sense, it offers an equanimous way of being in the world—one that invites possibility, embraces uncertainty, and perceives the field of experience as richly animated rather than fixed or foreclosed.
Uebel’s scholarship is exceptionally thorough, reflecting immense breadth across disciplines. The book includes twenty-six full pages of references spanning philosophy, Buddhism, science and religion, psychotherapy, ancient texts, contemporary media, and personal lived experience, including therapeutic work with veterans. This depth reinforces the book’s central claim that equanimity is not a singular doctrine but a cultivated capacity emerging at the intersections of thought, practice, and lived life."
Interview with Michael Uebel
on New Books Network
"Michael Uebel is a psychotherapist and researcher currently based in Austin, Texas. He is recognized as a pioneer in applying psychological insights to the historical intersections of social, personal, and imaginative phenomena. He is a Research Affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin and a psychotherapist in both the public sector and in private practice.
Uebel has taught literature and critical theory at several universities, including the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky.
Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being (Mimesis, 2025), is an innovative introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity.
Uebel challenges the popular modern view often associated with certain mindfulness practices that equanimity is a state of impartial quiescence, solidity, or inner stillness, achieved through emotional regulation.
His book reanimates the concept of equanimity by drawing on its philosophical and psychological genealogy by tracing its origins and development, framing it as a dynamic, active, and flexible existential condition."
Uebel has taught literature and critical theory at several universities, including the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky.
Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being (Mimesis, 2025), is an innovative introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity.
Uebel challenges the popular modern view often associated with certain mindfulness practices that equanimity is a state of impartial quiescence, solidity, or inner stillness, achieved through emotional regulation.
His book reanimates the concept of equanimity by drawing on its philosophical and psychological genealogy by tracing its origins and development, framing it as a dynamic, active, and flexible existential condition."
Whitehead's Description of
the Feeling of Peace in
Adventures of Ideas
excerpts
I choose the term ‘Peace’ for that Harmony of Harmonies which calms destructive turbulence and completes civilization. Thus a society is to be termed civilized whose members participate in the five qualities—Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself.
Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries.
Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbulence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details.
The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia. in other words, in the place of a quality of ‘life and motion’, there is substituted their destruction. Thus Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest,—at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. Here the real motive interests of the spirit are meant, and not the superficial play of discursive ideas. Peace is helped by such superficial width, and also promotes it. In fact it is largely for this reason that Peace is so essential for civilization. It is the barrier against narrowness.
*
We supplement the notion of the Eros by including it in the concept of an Adventure in the Universe as One. This Adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them. It is, as it were, the complement to Plato’s Receptacle, its exact opposite, yet equally required for the unity of all things. In every way, it is contrary to the Receptacle. The Receptacle is bare of all forms: the Unity of Adventure includes the Eros which is the living urge towards all possibilities, claiming the goodness of their realization. The Platonic Receptacle is void, abstract from all individual occasions: The Unity of Adventure includes among its components all individual realities, each with the importance of the personal or social fact to which it belongs. Such individual importance in the components belongs to the essence of Beauty.
In this Supreme Adventure, the Reality which the Adventure transmutes into its Unity of Appearance, requires the real occasions of the advancing world each claiming its due share of attention. This Appearance, thus enjoyed, is the final Beauty with which the Universe achieves its justification. This Beauty has always within it the renewal derived from the Advance of the Temporal World. It is the immanence of the Great Fact including this initial Eros and this final Beauty which constitutes the zest of self-forgetful transcendence belonging to Civilization at its height.
At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace: —That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of this Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
The Peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself.
Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries.
Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbulence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details.
The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia. in other words, in the place of a quality of ‘life and motion’, there is substituted their destruction. Thus Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest,—at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. Here the real motive interests of the spirit are meant, and not the superficial play of discursive ideas. Peace is helped by such superficial width, and also promotes it. In fact it is largely for this reason that Peace is so essential for civilization. It is the barrier against narrowness.
*
We supplement the notion of the Eros by including it in the concept of an Adventure in the Universe as One. This Adventure embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them. It is, as it were, the complement to Plato’s Receptacle, its exact opposite, yet equally required for the unity of all things. In every way, it is contrary to the Receptacle. The Receptacle is bare of all forms: the Unity of Adventure includes the Eros which is the living urge towards all possibilities, claiming the goodness of their realization. The Platonic Receptacle is void, abstract from all individual occasions: The Unity of Adventure includes among its components all individual realities, each with the importance of the personal or social fact to which it belongs. Such individual importance in the components belongs to the essence of Beauty.
In this Supreme Adventure, the Reality which the Adventure transmutes into its Unity of Appearance, requires the real occasions of the advancing world each claiming its due share of attention. This Appearance, thus enjoyed, is the final Beauty with which the Universe achieves its justification. This Beauty has always within it the renewal derived from the Advance of the Temporal World. It is the immanence of the Great Fact including this initial Eros and this final Beauty which constitutes the zest of self-forgetful transcendence belonging to Civilization at its height.
At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The Adventure of the Universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic Beauty. This is the secret of the union of Zest with Peace: —That the suffering attains its end in a Harmony of Harmonies. The immediate experience of this Final Fact, with its union of Youth and Tragedy, is the sense of Peace. In this way the World receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas