There’s the -aspect- of the real that is available to relatively objective inquiry and testing, and there is another aspect that is only revealed or developed through becoming it, through intimacy, through immersion. Thus there are many features of our experience which are absolutely real but will never be tested for, or even attended rationally. Unfortunately, we do not understand this, and often dismiss what is not immediately accessible to various forms of testing. Reality is not like our heuristic methods, and they change our experience of reality in ways we would not admit could we detect them. We become like features of function and character that our heuristics familiarize us with.

It turns out that ‘reality’ doesn’t exist in exactly the way we imagine it. It -emerges- in concert with our own emergence, intention, awareness, relation and behavior. That is to say that, to some degree, at least for human beings, being human means being called into being by existence, and, in turn, calling existence into being. And testing is a mode of calling which will only produce results appropriate to the roles implied by that framework. One cannot eliminate this fact, no matter how carefully it is attempted. How can you test what does not exist except when you are not testing?

There’s another problem that testing avoids, which is that some aspects of reality require we become them to detect them. To understand swimming, one must swim, rather than talk or test. Bluntly, testing posits roles for both reality and those involved that change how everything is called into being, dynamically, and the effects of this cannot be buried or hidden, because we are nested in what we are testing and testing with. The subject or administrator of some kind of test is an exceptionally narrow role. When we ignore this and take the results as the real, we have traded awareness for a cartoon of mastery, and it is a trade with devastating consequences in every possible domain.”

— an anonymous informant