Meditations on First Philosophy messed me up bad. All of Descartes’ reasoning about the inability to determine whether experience was real made complete sense to me. But when I got to where he started to try to build back reality, I didn’t buy it. I can only believe in reality by willfully forgetting Descartes.
It’s really a solipsistic philosophy. The awkwardness of it was the fact he had a king and the church to appease in his arguments. Willfully forgetting Descartes is one way of dealing with it! (..or plotting a path out of it by reading him as a proto-existentialist)