The reality of anything is confined to the Instant, which we cannot normally seize and of which we only experience a reflection or an echo in the form of a memory.
Our mind is only a collection of reflections or echoes, preserved by memory, of the reality that we have missed. Our mind is merely a shadow which we mistake for the substance which we have never been able to see.
Perceiving the substance should be Satori. After seizing the Real, becoming Real, we realise that our mind was only a shadow - and that may be why the reaction was often a laugh. Past and Future vanish when the shaft of light falls upon the shadow, and only a Present, renewed every instant, remains, for that alone is real.
'We' are not the reality, not the substance, but its reflection. The substance is there, in Reality, hidden from us by the screen of Time. 'We' are a shifting shadow on a wall, but the substance of that shadow is in every Instant that our consciousness is not able to seize. Our 'life' on the plane of phenomena is a continuous misapprehension by which a reflection is mistaken for its image, an echo for its voice, a shadow for its substance.
We are phenomena, but we pretend to be noumena.
