The famous “Double-Slit Experiment” bears upon the notion of reality at the quantum level, including the wave/particle duality and subsequent intricacies and paradoxes. It demonstrates that at the most fundamental level accessible to our instruments and ideas, reality doesn't exist until we measure it. I have no idea at all what reality is, although I've been told at various times that I "need to live in the real world," "Get real," and "Be realistic." I've spent days and nights on end trying to really "be real," peeling back every layer of the onion, or what I can conceive of the onion, until my brain was exhausted. Finally, after months and months, in a single moment my mind gave up, and I let go into "something" un-yearning and whole, with an instant flash of getting without thinking, more feeling than anything else, with tingling in my arms and legs - immediate peace, ease, total calm; no words flying across my brain. I've not been the same as before since, though not in with that surrendered feeling always, of course.
Now if I retrace the thought steps that led up to that experience, I can sometimes fall into the original feeling again. I don't know why I think, feel, encounter, act, react, or experience, at any given moment - it's only tenuously a cause-effect thing with an explanation. But since even just that I can conceive of not knowing means to me that "existence" must overwhelmingly exist. It just "is." Reason gets you to the threshold of acceptance (or faith), then it can't be analyzed and reduced further. It's unknowable, unthinkable, impossible, from any frame of reference. If you just leap prior to reasoning it through on your own, though, you blindly accept in a way that can be dangerous (susceptible to following false leaders).
So getting there is taking things apart first, saying to yourself about one thing after another, "neti neti" (not that, not that), as expressed in one tradition, by applying "catuskoti" (fourfold negation), as another tradition puts the process. You have to go through the it for yourself, unless you are just born a very old and wise soul who gets it effortlessly. At any rate, I feel that after denying and reducing everything you can in the mind, what remains - absolute "it" - is completely "benign" (to such a degree that it just smiles at how silly that question even is). It "is," unconditionally (and so is infinitely solid). And I am part of it, without ever being able to say why or how; so I Am, unconditionally. This is such a comforting feeling I cannot even express it!
— Gabriel Fenteany, November 25, 2015
