So there’s at least two of you who had resistance come up in doing this exercise, and who felt cross (‘troetzig’, in German?) with the exercise.
It may come from not being sure what to do. It may also have to do with not wanting to do it. Gaynor, it’s not so much that matter, mind, body, etc. are just subjective constructs. That’s perhaps accurate as far as it goes, but the idea here is that ‘subjective’ is also just part of a larger set of interactions (mutual pointings).
I am often reminded of a toy I saw once: a black box with a door in the top and a lever. When you pull the lever, the door opens, a hand comes out, and turns off the lever, then goes back into the box.
The self is like that: always shutting down experience in order to preserve the status quo, to “keep everything in the box.” This is Peter’s “strong wish to change nothing.”
This exercise offers a way out of the box. So it is not just that body and mind are insubstantial, it’s that they come into ‘existence’ only by mutually referring to each other.
Peter, I like your observation that the moment of insight can change everything. And that insight does not have to be in words or ideas. Something shifts. I suspect that such moments are like the transcendence of pointings: something unexpected presents itself, in such a way that we do not react.
Jack