The carrot is attached to a stick attached to the Donkey. This approach can not bring us nearer, except to continue to teach us that the approach is in itself an error.
It is not that that knowledge is bad, or that the universe is 'unknowable'. It's that knowledge is an attribute, and the 'reality' has no attributes.
Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form.
The reason 2 + 2 always is 4, is because math is a property of the mind, not of the external universe.
The reason particles behave as waves and waves as particles is that they are neither. There is no 'they' there. They are attributes of the mind.
It is not that nothing is real. It is that it's nature is created by the mind alone. In itself, reality has no attributes.
I could go on with this forever. There is no such thing as time - only circumstantial evidence. There is no such thing as distance, or space. There are no things.
You can't even say there are 'no things' because there are no things for there to be none. There is no space in which they don't exist. No time for them to span.
No things are lacking. No space is lacking. No time is lacking.
The realization that things only appear when they are observed ... this is why when you observie the bridge, it can be observed that it is made of two halves. Only then does it have 2 halves. Only when two halves make a whole, do they make the whole.
Reality is itself a tautology.
A Zen master one put it this way 'it is only, it is.'
As soon as you assign it an attribute, you have already lost it.
As soon as it appears, all you can know is that 'that' isn't it.
No change, but no stillness not changing.
Even that there is mind making all this is a lie.
In the end, if there were such a thing, at the basis of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism - the original intention of the teachings - which have been battered a million times by a million crude thoughts and men, even in their purest form - recognized these things. They recognized that all words are lies, but that to find your way out of a field of dung, you can only stack dung to mark a path out.
Christianity spoke of 'The World' as the illusion. Another realm as the more 'real' reality. I've yet to meet a Christian who knows that this other realm has no attributes.
The Buddha spoke of no arising, sustaining, perishing. Even no arising of illusion. No Buddha nature even. No Enlightenment, nothing to attain, yet no attainment lacking, no lack of Enlightenment.
The space between and amongst the reality we believe we 'know' (I believe Jesus said Heaven is already within us, around us, amongst us, I know the Buddha often spoke of '... you are already enlightened.' Hindus, if you say 'I finally realized - I am God!' will say 'you fool - you only now just understood that?' ... )
Knowledge of the world, like knowledge of how to properly hit a baseball, is not even in the same universe as hitting a baseball. That of course is merely an analogy. There is no bat with which to hit, no baseball to hit, no time in which to hit, no space for the ball to travel, never was a home run hit, ever, now, or will be in the future - no past, no present for them to occur.
In the meantime, the study of the attributes of the mind, which is what Newton and Einstein and the Quantum Physicists were actually engaged in, are great fun, entirely useful and beneficial, but in a universe that has no uses, bestows no benefits, with no one to benefit. What they do teach ultimately is that the world is unknowable by the mind.
But it is knowable. That Heaven is already amongst us. That we are already enlightened, That you are and always were God ... all this hypnosis that the objects we observe are external phenomena (or internal phenomena), it is a wonderful dream ... but it is only a dream. Physics occurs within this dream of an 'extern' and 'internal' universe.
Reality is real, as reality, but "it" has no attributes. Sometimes we make it a wave, sometimes a particle. It only appears when observed. What is ever there at all, before you looked? Between when you looked, and next looked?
Is 'there' even a 'there'? There is not 'there' for 'there' to take place.
It's a lie to say 'it's not' ... because there is no 'not there' there either.
So you have to stop thinking that 2 + 2 is 4. No 2, no plus, so no 4. No beginning, no ending, no attainment, nothing to attain.
In the meantime, I love this stuff, the reality behind it is totally amazing. I don't think I'm smarter than them, I am merely less complex. I am just firmly confident that the carrot is attached to the donkey. Reality, as we call it, is a tautology, and a tautology can never be caught up with (dangling participle.) But even the Tautology can teach us the nature of the real 'reality' which is of course defined only by it's complete lack of attributes, even as it is lacking in nothing., has no attributes not to have.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Explain how then it is that all humans see things the same. When confronted with a bridge, I see a bridge. So does the guy next to me, and the next guy and the next gal (just to not be sexist here). Why are we all perceiving the same existential dream? How are animals perceiving the world? How about inanimate objects, like rocks. What is a rock’s universe? If the rock is not actually appearing until the split second we “make” it appear in some fashion, why do we all “see” the rock in the same way? Is a rock animate or inanimate? Inquiring minds want to know. Well, mine does, at least.