I’ll comment here on David’s and Peter’s reports on their experience with this exercise.
Peter finds himself deeply relaxed as he is caught up in the ‘glow’ of a rose and then embedded with other objects; as he releases distance. He finds himself wondering how we maintain distance from objects. And it seems to me true that the whole ‘idea’ of distance is problematic, at least when we speak of vision. Distance is a practical distinction; it has consequences (as car mirrors tells us, in the written message, “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” But near and far is not quite the same as distant, is it. To be distant from something, we must also be in contact with it, and what happens to distance then?
David works with the glow of a candle, and turns the exercise in an unexpected direction: object as self and flow as “derived identity;” perhaps what Rinpoche calls elsewhere self-image. But I think this may take you away from the aim of the exercise, which has more to do with that sense of distance. But the experience of fixing and letting go, of merging: all this seems related to what the exercise offers. And you are right to cite DTS on the tendency of the self to control. Distance is a kind of control.
Jack