What is confusion actually? If I ask a layperson what is his or her philosophy (***ism) or religious faith, he or she may then give some coarse-level description of their belief or inclination, but they can hardly connect and relate their viewpoints to well established philosophical schools of thought or major religious factions. This is an example of relative confusion and the critical part is most laypeople never noticed their relatively confused state, worse, they all think they're smart and fine just being an average person... As I've hinted before, when people talk in terms of more clear language there'll be much less misunderstandings between minds. While at the same time like Heisenberg's QM uncertainty principle, this level of clarity unfortunately dispels vividness and concreteness experienced by most laypeople. So under my metaphoric nominalism point of view all human understandings including math are visualizations of metaphors of the same family yet to different clarity degrees. Before GR and QM, Newton's gravity is believed to be universal and true and easy to communicate. My view is it is a rational metaphor applicable in certain context (low speed macro phenomena). Now inside atoms it's invalidated, so it's no longer a validated theory in the realm of modern quantum physics. But I'll not reject Newtons laws simply because it's no longer true at the deeper micro level. The key is not to reject rational metaphors in their applicable context. Within the realm of human communication, there's only mind reading of metaphors between minds, no absolute literal claims can hold forever.

If you read Zen's (Chan) inheritance stories of the past thousands of years from Mahākāśyapa to Bodhidharma, you'll be amazed once a Grand Master found a true disciple who grew to understand the master in every major issue, then the master would happily morph into a pile of esoteric fire, and this disciple would be granted the next Grand Master. Zen masters never used Sutra or any other textbooks to teach disciples, since they fully understood the numerous confusions & limitations of literal languages as a double-edged sword, they only show their deeds to validate or invalidate any thoughts or questions of their doubtful students, much like a modern experimentalist or intuitionistic constructivist. So to change another person's mind for good merely via linguistic means is possible but extremely hard, like to find a needle in an ocean. True inheritance is not biological, it's to find a person having exactly same mindset as yours about every major point. Ancient grand masters in some realms could do that, modern day professors/teachers hardly can.

I'll argue we need more and more Zen-like metaphysics to help with any difficult contemporary issue. As nowadays human mind possibly already runs out of elementary metaphors to represent the quantum world inside the atoms, thus we need more meditation to close our mundane pair of physical eyes in order to use the 3rd intellectual all-seeing eye to focus on more precise and advanced model structures so that we may get a slim chance, luck, and flashy spark to directly see, feel, and describe the hidden nature, it's like studying the dead while still living. In effect, metaphysics and sciences are like the famous Ying (hidden, subjective and hard to measure)/Yang (obvious, objective and easily measurable) pair of Taoism or like the Kabbalistic godhead in Jewish mysticism, they're both manifested in common JTB knowledges as metaphors of different clarity in human mind. Furthermore since metaphysics and sciences are both of the same metaphor family, at this level of analogy both suddenly morph into one unity which you can call it Monad Entelechy by combining Aristotle and Leibniz esoteric private terminologies. And in this sense Taoism can be understood as non-dualism which is usually misclassified by its famous icon.

Every educated person will agree there exists a necessary mathematical concept called "2" after seeing two seemingly identical things. The critical insight in this simple-yet-seemingly-philosophically-deep problem is that all human concepts are relative, meaning the concept "exists" itself is relative to a certain layer of our mind. "2" is certainly more abstract than "pain" which our body can feel impressively while a number, not so much due to our biological design. While certain math “genius” may feel "2" more impressively than "pain", and that's why this person can surely outperforms you in solving Math number theory problems in the long run as a persistent game, unless somehow later you acquired more intuition after huge effort and struggle. The most hard part is when most people say something "exists" they implicitly assume there's an absolute background reference frame in which there's an objective yes or no binary definitive statement can be made. And most of them will be satisfied spending all their life arguing about this type of "wonderous" existence and that kind of "pitiful" nonsense, essentially much like machine, they'll keep their focus on these outward worldly existences to try to "prove" or "disprove" from their experiences as a vanity show to others. While for those rare illuminated and awakened people, inward retrospect and self-reflection is much more important than those outside existence or not. They fully understand when indulging in outward existence discussion the endgame is just to find a place for inward sentiment to attach to, and they never lack any wealth to find such a place to know themselves much deeper and clearer. Neither outward realism nor nominalism is all the truth, they're just a starting part of it to stimulate and invoke your inward "intellect memory sea", which in some religious factions such as the ancient Yogachara school is called “the Eight Consciousnesses”. It's beyond common outward/inward perceptions, ego and comprehensions, similar to western world's subconsciousness notion. So the whole truth remains extremely hidden and mystically elusive in this vast sea of pictorial metaphors, no two persons will share exactly same images to the same clarity degree, not even nowadays super AI/GPT3 can sort out completely. Thus to understand and progress oneself accordingly is the ultimate goal and the only important truth for oneself.

This world perceived by human mind is nothing but metaphors, that's why we can have several different models and theories about the same phenomena, such as the Newtonian Force Laws, Lagrangian/Hamiltonian Path Integral Minimum Action Principle, and Maxwell/Einstein Field Theory in classical physics and then applied further into QM, so far all these above 3 distinct models (metaphors) are not proved wrong and taught in every physics department around the globe. In the meantime, unfortunately (fortunately?) our mind is spontaneously constantly forming-destroying-reforming numerous metaphors in the form of free will for the untrained, most of these created images, processes and analogies are in more or less confused state. For example, if you've never been visiting a place and people around you are talking extensively about it, still in your mind you'll form some vague images from what you heard. Most of these misconceptions are like "avidya" in Buddhism's nothing-but-metaphoric teachings, huge huge and thick darkness in the form of ignorant confusions is covering human mind and all its derived senses like the five encircling mountains.

In the final analysis, people naturally care about joking or serious, good or bad, like or dislike, etc, these make sense in mundane life, but do not make sense in the transcendental context here. Once you ever ascend to a higher level suddenly you'll realize some previous concepts dissolved as if those happened in a previous life, and in this sense you achieved re-born. Ancient eastern Zen-like teachings also told us that personal feelings are not absolute but like those quantifiable states of phase space, once you master the art of internal-cognitive state-space coordinate transformations, your sentiment can be possibly changed. For example, after a personal tragedy many people may feel hopeless, weak, super-unlucky, unfair suffering, hateful, complaintful, while a different shining person may show confidence, will, caution and joy after internally metaphorizing and transforming his or her internal coordinates differently than a lay person can even imagine...