Cynicism and Optimism and Practice

Reading Tom's post about the difficulties he's encountered recently made me think about how one might be able to plough the fields of their practice in the most effective way.

If you assume that equanimity is the end goal for anyone who is chasing SE, I wonder if it'd be efficacious to have a cynical view of life, which would bring you closer to things that you could develop equanimity with/against. Maybe this could be an effective way to proceed over a long time. Perhaps a strange way to do it, but the question here is just whether or not it would work.

Would a cultivated view of cynicism as to life with optimism as to practice be effective in a way otherwise just proceeding and maybe becoming comfortable wouldn't?

It seems like an interesting idea, but I suspect that this might be counterproductive. When I think of someone who is highly cynical, I imagine a person who habitually reacts in a negative, mistrusting, suspicious way, and who habitually attributes self-serving motives to others' actions.

On the other hand, blindly working hard to develop optimism isn't necessarily very helpful either.

When you wake up, you wake up to the world as it is, including waking up to the person you've cultivated yourself to be. Waking up to find yourself a jerk would be pretty disappointing.

One of the critical points of practicing is to see how you fabricate your reality. There's plenty of that going on already. You don't need to add more.

The good thing about simply practicing seeing what actually is coming up, is that it helps cut through any views, including the cynical self and the optimistic self.

Hmm, good question.
In some sense it seems like being disaffected with or skeptical of conditional experiences' ability to bring lasting happiness is natural.

But I'm not sure about the value of specifically cultivating a negative or cynical attitude about life. On the attitude front I would encourage openness and curiosity. In other words I think it's more effective to assume that equanimity is the path rather than the goal.

One can be realistic about the inability of conditions to provide lasting happiness and still enjoy them in a non-cynical way (relatively equanimously). One can be realistic about the inability of negative conditions to remain forever or totally determine one's experience and still be displeased with them (in a relatively equanimous way).

To answer your question directly, now that I've laid the background for my response, I would say: the best coarse is to simply be present to your experiencing and naturally deepen that-- till it's very inclusive of all the subtle ways you think you know what's going on, what it means, how to do things, etc. and the process will unfold on its own in its own time.

The problem with speculating about how to awaken is that the way things are is very close by and available yet paradoxically very far from what we think about it and so it eludes strategic 'chasing', in my experience.
ETA: cross-posted with Andy

There should really be no attitude toward practice itself. It's an unbiased experiment.

Too often people try to manipulate the experiment so it doesn't "fail", but that isn't a real experiment.

Yeah, maybe my thought that being optimistic towards practice is in reality a superfluous illusory and pointless thing to do.

As for the cynic part, I was thinking being cynical, but privately so. Not really being that much of a downer to the outside world, but just in your expectations, and then after stream entry getting back into the personal dimensions

"There should really be no attitude toward practice itself. It's an unbiased experiment.

Too often people try to manipulate the experiment so it doesn't "fail", but that isn't a real experiment. "

Word, Shargrol!

Thanks Kate

Femtosecond wrote: As for the cynic part, I was thinking being cynical, but privately so. Not really being that much of a downer to the outside world, but just in your expectations, and then after stream entry getting back into the personal dimensions

It seems like there is a better word than cynic... maybe stoic (in the balanced, healthy sense... in other words, a stoic who isn't afraid of a bit of epicurianism)?

Hmmmmm, if its evocative enough to bring in the heavy equanimity guns....

I just remembered this write up by David Chapman. Although I don't like some of the baggage associated with the word "noble", I really like the idea that it is what our attitude ultimately becomes. Not special, not ordinary, yet somehow noble. That's the feeling I get when I look at the photo (Geronimo?) in Femtosecond's avatar.

approachingaro.org/special-ordinary-noble