p9:
Explore what your "normal ideal day" would be like, do this imaginatively, generatively, "concretely immersively." That is, as best you can, experience it as if you’re actually there, in the first person, in real time, in full sensory and perspectival detail, including inner experience.
So, this includes, but is not limited to, your thoughts, feelings, everything, successes, failures, ease, challenges, rote tasks, fun tasks, texts or artifacts you’ll write/create or consult as you’re doing so, the reactions you get, how people respond..., how you feel, who will be there..., includes experiences of planning, expecting, anticipating..., remembering, thinking (content of those thoughts), beliefs, willing, doing..., how you feel in your body from first person, how you think about your body, what you want the whole world around you to be like, how the whole world works, your past accomplishments, you expectations of future success, your imminent experience of the past, present, and future.
This is not a concentration exercise. It’s ok to do it partially and imperfectly. Planning and reverie and (seeming) off-topic-ness are ok.
See if you can minimally effortfully do this, with as much allowing as possible. If anything gets stuck or jammed, let go and try something different. No forcing.
Let go as you do this. Allow what you thought you wanted to change endlessly (if it does). Also, try not to impose on what you want. What you want right now is what you want to the degree that it’s safe to want it. What you want can change to the degree that it’s safe to want it right now.
Again, experiential/sensory/qualitative, first-person concreteness is what’s key to this practice. Concreteness.
Additionally, with respect to "ideal," above, also consider "intrinsic motivation," what is "intrinsically motivating." (The use of this phrase is intended to capture a certain pre-reflective ease, excitement, interest, and drive and is not intended to be a theoretical or ontological commitment.)
Also, holism is key to this practice, at least as something to keep in mind. The experience you’re exploring is a slice of an entire life, a slice of an entire universe, moments in an entire consciousness. Holism. Unity. Wholeness. Unifiedness. Seamlessness. Simultaneity. All together, all at once.
If you find that the concreteness is "too much detail" in that you "don’t care" about certain details and would prefer thinking more abstractly, see if you can fill in that "don’t care" (non-)detail with something concrete, and then see if you can fill in that detail with something intrinsically motivating. You don’t have to keep it. You can let it go afterwards. "You have to fill your days with something."
You might find you can’t do parts of this or can’t do any of it at all. You might be blocked or cut off or cut out. This might be because you have the experience of being not allowed, or too selfish, or what you want is too childish, impossible, immoral, evil, pathetic, hurtful, dangerous, too hard, to risky, imaginary, a fantasy.
If that’s the case, just do the best you can. You might try, for each objection, to see if you can correct or handle that objection. If you cannot, just let it go for now; choose another practice and come back later, as with all the practices. Here you can also mix in practice [p2], the willing/doing practice.
Finally, all the above is the canonical, main practice. And/but, you can also try similar things with "the rest of the day," e.g. when you wake up you can concretely explore your ideal rest of the day. You can do something similar for "tomorrow" and finally "goals" and "milestones" if those sorts of things are in your felt ontology.
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Also good: "perfect institution" or being cared for perfectly by an institution or directly by a group of people or by / also a bureaucratic process
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A collaborator also suggests:
How is this day already perfect? How might you look back on this as already perfect in many years' time?
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And/or/similarly/additionally, especially for interpersonal interactions:
What are your radically concretely particular "raw" "bare" "immediate" "sensory-level" sensation-desires (not to reify any of the previous) with respect to, say, ideal interpersonal interaction and scenarios (intimacy, sex, friendship, ...) --- so, e.g. sight and sound and so on? What's desired, undesired, critically avoided, don't-care? These are shaped-and vice versa by the attendant implications, expectations, [feelings,] what-would-happen-next, nth-order consequences and effects along all dimensions, etc., of those would-be (or happened once perhaps in part and hopefully again, thin or thick slices of possibility) and so on. So let there be an interplay between the imaginatively/experientially concrete, and next, and the abstract, as you explore that imaginative sensory stuff that you want (and don't want, and etc.), that perhaps you ideally really truly want to realize, or do you, or don't you, and let the particulars fluidly flow as you explore them, let go while also letting yourself want exactly what you want as you want it and then maybe it's different in the next moment as it all imaginatively and experientially unfolds or or not, vividly or quasi-imagery, or just-known, and so on, and so on. Skip time, have little "flashbulb" moments, let yourself slip into reverie; this isn't a "rigorous" practice.