The illusion IS reality

Meditation and contemplation to the deepest level of awareness, brings pure awareness still with a witness, and then that falls away to an awareness
that is unaware of the witness or the witness's awareness.
This awareness beyond awareness can be said to be absolute or ultimate. It is constant, unchanging, and both exists and doesn't exist. It is referred to as "reality."
Yet, every time we return to observing "other," it is still here and there, manifesting as a duality, appearing to change, and to come and go.
These appearances, images, impermanent in nature, continue. As manifestation, as a collective or a totality, they exist, and the totality does not fade away or reach an end point where it ceases to exist.
Can it be said that this totality must exist even without the observer, and that the act of observation this reality of existence into the appearance of what we have named an illusion?
Of course this has been recognized and taught. But such can be used to prove the errors of nihilism, or that something comes out of nothing. Can we say that the illusion itself, simply by removing the observer, and leaving it to be unobserved IS reality, and that nothing is real apart from or aside to that?
All of the contemplations about I am, Brahman, God, interdependence, all of those that point the way to reality, are really contemplations on the true nature of the illusion, which could be said to be reality itself. Even the only reality.