Hi Andreas,
I, too, took a moment to back up and re-read some of your observations. This is a very useful reflection to me:
Thinking more about it I find that I usually neglect the 'silent present moment awareness' part which is focused on the present moment but without the thoughts and interpretations. I guess that state almost automatically gets rid of the tendency to try to make anything out of this other than it is. And I think that part of my meditation may need some more attention and cultivation. This may be the reason why I experience the Jhanas only lightly, as DW has put it. Very inspiring, thank you!
So sometimes people feel that they are living their whole life in a sort of equanimous benignity, an equanimity yet that doesn't feel satisfactory to them or feels incomplete to them but which makes them excellent, stable, helpful community members. I've seen people who report this who are also very effective neighbors and colleagues over the long-haul -- waaaaay more than I (I candidly buddy up with them as friend-mentors); they are kind, hard-working, even-keel, generally neighbors-friends-family we'd all love to have or that we do have.
And when these equanimous helpful people report struggling with meditation and, yes, pervasive and disatisfactory "equanimity" it can be surprising. To me, this is the heart of the subtle aspect of "Conceit" noted in the fetter model of meditative training: mind trying to place itself in life-meaning relative to itself -- which is exactly right understanding for any being that's alive today having evolved with survial instincts packaged for one, this one, me.
So a person who's been in equanimity for a while or is drawn to it for a while, they too may grow very frustrated-- they are fully aware of non-permanence, including the impermanence of 'self' and the non-centricity of all of us (just by virtue of you not being at the center of my world, I can see that I am also not really the center of my world but for sensations, sensations craving/aversion and biological drive to live)-- so such people don't really have arrogance, but a hard-to-shake conceit of "I am". And it is true, they are. I am. You are. To me, this area very much requires quiet mental sinking and sitting in meditative stabilization with sincere attention and it requires very pure sati in daily life-- like, routine walks just have attention in the senses.
Anyway, I am a newbie myself and I always trust people's own personal instincts more than my blah-blah-blah, even if people choose a very hard route for themselves, some times that just the best thing they can do-- run out their oats, their impulses. So also, sometimes people in long sustained equanimity look for "highs", something to break up the calm, something to cause insight. But I think here Ramana Mahasi could be trusted: Silence. If one can well stay with mental silence/willing stillness/ willingness to observe equanimity itself and to be an equanimous observer (even with its dissatisfactory aspect, resulting from lack of complete understanding and preventing suffusive, sustained, pure equanimity (which can be known in temporaroly in the so-called fourth jhana)) that's where there is the understanding: right in where the mind is going anyway. It is the same for any mental state: if a person is craven, they must sit with the craven mind and see it carefully, arising and passing; if a person is nearly saintly equanimous, yet still bothered, eventually there's just sitting with "equanimous, benevolent, bothered".
Make any sense?
Anyway, I have a lot of daily life improvement/stabilization/ development/effort to get back to : )