My problem would be, why can I not just imagine food and my hunger is satisfied, that would give weight to the idea that the meal is created subjectively, instead of of having to look for the meal in the objective world.
You can't create. Mind at large can create, but not you--you have to work within the context of what it has created, which from your perspective are separate things. This is what you are calling the "objective world".
If you could simply imagine food that you could eat--subjectively create it--then you would be in control of reality, and reality would pose no existential challenges: no opportunities to engage with it and to learn. Obviously, empirically, you can't do this. You perceive yourself having to interact with "objective" reality in order to obtain food. Well, you are surely interacting, but it only
seems objective in respect of your current viewpoint. With respect to m-a-l, it's actually subjective: relative to m-a-l, there's
only subjectivity and nothing is separate from anything else.
Its awareness of reality (i.e. itself) is without differentiation. Only through alters is it able to experience awareness of awareness (i.e. a kind of differentiation); to experience the sensation of uncovering its potential for expression. Through us, it is evolving into something that in certain states is able to get a glimpse of itself--something that it itself can't do--and coming to appreciate itself.
To repeat:
we are the means whereby m-a-l can come to appreciate itself. Without us, it would still exist and be no less what it is: but with us, it can
experience (i.e. be aware of being aware of) something of what it is.
We aren't
things so much as
processes. Sandwiches, human beings, stars, molecules etc. are processes--which may interact--occurring within m-a-l. Some of those processes have the capacity to self-reflect.
All of the processes actually exist whether or not they have that capacity. You go to sleep and wake up to a world that retains many of the characteristics it had before you fell asleep: the process that is the half-eaten sandwich still remains on the plate, albeit by now possibly gone a bit mouldy. The processes that are mountains look just the same, albeit that over long periods of time, they are eroding. No process, including oneself, stays exactly the same: it changes from moment to moment, however much or little, because of interaction with other processes occurring in m-a-l.
I find that thinking in this way helps me get a different appreciation of reality and avoid thinking in terms of objectivity/subjectivity, i.e. dualism. For many purposes, e.g. communication, dualism is a useful approximation. But when we try to talk in a certain way, it confuses the issue. For instance, I could have said that
when we start to talk about things in a certain way... but realised that "things" in that sentence belongs to the dualistic mode of expression.
Unfortunately, it's very hard, maybe impossible except perhaps in allegory, to talk Idealistically. Perhaps this is why religious texts resort to the use of stories, parables and poetic modes of expression that shouldn't be taken literally.