In the scientific community it is standard practice to stand upon the pedestal of the known to get a peek at the yet unexposed lovely curves of the yet unexposed real. And it is these successive peeks at naked reality taken from successive pedestals of established fact that have given us duct tape and automobiles. Science does not concern itself with the unknowable but rather uses the known as a tool to plot the form of the yet unexplored knowable. If something is real its existence cannot forever go unnoticed if we know how to look and have the necessary tools of examination. If we are curious about what is real, we must search about us from a known position and find what further step can be made, and so move from the known to the knowable: rather like a blind man with his stick tapping his way down an unfamiliar street. And like the blind man if we scorn the petty little red-tipped stick of what we truly and actually and honestly know, and boldly launch into the unknown leading with our imagination, tragedy of some sort is all but inevitable.
One of my favorites from the annals of ancient Zen is the statement “one should never speak of that about which no accurate pronouncement can be made.” This has an obscure but prescient relationship to a statement of my own invention concerning the all too human inclination to "pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey." A great deal of precious Reality is cast aside as humanity builds shrines to house the envelopes in which it came. We will never see the sunrise by looking west. The word “God” is not a dirty word, but our imaginings insulate us from facts. The ultimate nature of the fabric of existence is wholly mysterious and wholly present. It is not made more sacred or more responsive to our supplications, and in fact is distanced from the core of our personal being, when we paint a face upon it.
