Thanks Vineeto for the reminders. I did have in mind that my ‘30 minutes a day’ would be in addition to ongoing in-daily-life actualism practice, but I think this is true:
It brought up the question: if the actualism method is to enjoy and appreciate being alive, why do I need to make an effort of spending time on it? Why is it not its own reward that I would just naturally spend my free time doing?
This connected with my other recent contemplations about ‘having a standoff with myself’ and the ways and which I am still trying to force myself to feel good against my will. It’s obvious my efforts still involve this to some degree, even though I thought I ‘saw through it’.
What I’m wondering is if this ‘internal split’ is always present at least in part until one is actually free?
In the same vein, a contemplation I’ve been running lately goes along these lines: If the things I felt bad about were truly just preferences, (e.g. feeling bad because the ice cream store ran out of chocolate and I had to get vanilla) then would it not be deeply obvious that feeling bad was silly? Since this is clear enough, then what separates the things that I actually do feel bad about from being preferences, and how can I see them in the same way as those ice cream flavors?
This is a good way right now to bring me face to face with conscious, heartfelt objections to treating things as preferences, which seems to be a prerequisite to unconditional happiness and harmlessness, which is helping me unsplit myself.