Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

The arrogant will find justifications for their arrogance everywhere they look.

The insecure will find justifications for their insecurity everywhere they look.

The happy lovers with inner peace will find beauty to love everywhere they look.

The miserable will find justifications for their misery everywhere they look.

And of course the racists and nationalists will find justifications for their racism or patriotic nationalism everywhere they look.

What you consciously see in the VR-like waking dream that is the seemingly outer world, which your brain hallucinates from inside a dark quiet skull, is at least almost entirely a mere reflection of what's already within.


Example: View Example of Projection on Twitter

[LuckyR]

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

The arrogant will find justifications for their arrogance everywhere they look.

The insecure will find justifications for their insecurity everywhere they look.

The happy lovers with inner peace will find beauty to love everywhere they look.

The miserable will find justifications for their misery everywhere they look.

And of course the racists and nationalists will find justifications for their racism or patriotic nationalism everywhere they look.

What you consciously see in the VR-like waking dream that is the seemingly outer world, which your brain hallucinates from inside a dark quiet skull, is at least almost entirely a mere reflection of what's already within.


Example: View Example of Projection on Twitter

The direction of your commentary is accurate, though the extent is exaggerated. If folks only perceived what they want to perceive there would be no upsetting visions, we would be perpetually happy with what we see.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

[...]

The miserable will find justifications for their misery everywhere they look.

The direction of your commentary is accurate, though the extent is exaggerated. If folks only perceived what they want to perceive there would be no upsetting visions, we would be perpetually happy with what we see.

I agree that the extent is not necessarily 100%, meaning perception is not entirely a matter of projection, but rather mostly a matter of projection.

Though, curiously enough, my reasoning may be opposite to yours even though the conclusion is coherent, meaning we ultimately agree.

In other words, instead of upsetting visions being the evidence of some degree of non-projected perception of an actual external reality, I would say it's the especially enlightening experiences/sensations/visions, meaning the ones that hint at or push us towards some kind of deep or spiritual enlightenment, nirvana, or inner peace.

Since it's easiest to see the moon and stars at night, it would stand to reason that books like Man's Search for Meaning and The Gulag Archipelago might be good examples of books that could describe natural (meaning non-supernatural) revelation. One was written by a German concentration camp prisoner under Hitler's government, and one was written by a Soviet gulag prisoner under Stalin's government. Luckily, those who have gone through some of the darkest human experiences may be able to help the rest of us benefit from the beautiful happy light they saw during their own figurative dark night of the soul without having to completely repeat every dark detail of their repeatable enlightening experience of natural revelation.

[Tegularius]

The two are complementary. One without the other doesn't exist. Even unconsciously we ceaselessly correct our perceptions based on what or how we perceive internally or externally. Together they're a major conduit in our overall Weltanschauung. All communication in that regard is a matter of projection which feeds back to perception which in turn re-modulates its projections. It's a two lane highway carrying the full freight of good and evil within the human psyche. Empathy most of all depends on the perception/projection synthesis to cause one to forget oneself on behalf of another, human or animal.

[Angelo Cannata]

What makes you think that it is almost entirely rather than entirely?

[Pattern-chaser]

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

[...]

The direction of your commentary is accurate, though the extent is exaggerated. If folks only perceived what they want to perceive there would be no upsetting visions, we would be perpetually happy with what we see.

This is a typographical oversight. This idea, with which we all seem to agree, is normally stated as "people see what they expect to see". So it's not what we want, but what we expect, and I think this explains your doubt?

[Pattern-chaser]

What makes you think that it is almost entirely rather than entirely?

The part that is not "projection" is based on sensory data. The rest is made up, during the process of perception ... but it's made up to fit in with the small amount of actual data that (we think) reaches us from a real world that is external to us. So, mostly, but not entirely, projection.

[QuestionAll+Nothing]

I also agree perception is the projection. What I would like to propose or incline is that we are seeing time in reverse unknowingly. Just like-How the eye works. The images we see are made up of light reflected from the objects we look at. ... Because the front part of the eye is curved, it bends the light, creating an upside down image on the retina. The brain eventually turns the image the right way up. This intern is the same with time, hints the word (human) not needed to be changed Human means comes from the ground (Etmology) of the word Human). Russel Walter everything is a vortex. If Newton stay long enough to watch the apple fall and stay untill the apple decayed into ground and rose into the atmosphere. So if you were to watch your lives in reverse and you would be made instantly from the ground. This why things like deja vu take place because the mind Is overlapping at times. Yet your mind will always keep you on track to death. Yet truly time in reverse is the correct way to view of the projection. If you were born and then die, reverse the death and you will go back in to you mothers womb. This is why baptism takes place in cultures. This is to remind them, one your mind cannot remember when you were born, two your mind doesn’t know it’s watching time in reverse. Baptism is giving you the wisdom to know the spirit had made you instantly from the ground.

Jesus Teaches Nicodemus

3 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.[a]”

4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You[c] must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”[d]

[Angelo Cannata]

How can we be sure that even what we consider “sensory data” aren’t just the result of projection? In other words, our entire existence can be considered a dream, because we can’t find anything able to escape with certainty from this hypothesis. Obviously, even our idea that everything might be a dream can be a dream itself, so that we actually don’t even know what we are talking about, we don’t have any idea how things really are, do we?

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

What makes you think that it is almost entirely rather than entirely?

I don't think that. Instead, I'm mostly agnostic about that.

A more accurate way to phrase my view would be this: Perception is at least almost entirely a matter of projection.

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

[...]

The direction of your commentary is accurate, though the extent is exaggerated. If folks only perceived what they want to perceive there would be no upsetting visions, we would be perpetually happy with what we see.

This is a typographical oversight. This idea, with which we all seem to agree, is normally stated as "people see what they expect to see". So it's not what we want, but what we expect, and I think this explains your doubt?

I would suggest we consider the following three statements all of which may be true:

1. People see what they expect to see.

2. People see what they choose to see.

3. People see what they want to see.


The first may be the most agreeable, most common, and/or most parsimonious way to express the general idea. Nonetheless, very roughly speaking, it seems to me that #2 follows from #1, and #3 follows from #2. So I am inclined to believe all three statements are true, roughly and generally speaking.

In practice, what this means to me, is that there are likely a lot of discontent people running around who are not truly searching for contentment but for excuses for their discontentment, which could make it very easy to accidentally get wrapped up into someone else's self-chosen abusive relationship reality. In other words, they want scapegoats and such. It might be a toxic romantic relationship one could easily quit, it might be a toxic relationship with alcohol one could theoretically choose to stop drinking, it might be an obsessive engagement in resentment (e.g. spending great amounts of time and energy obsessively resenting something one cannot change for being the way it, such as resentfully refusing to accept past, the weather, or some unforgiven person from the past, figuratively crying over spilled milk so to speak). We can easily become an enabler or scapegoat for someone else, letting our best intentions pave their road into ever-deeper hell.

More bluntly, I imagine it is what the original Buddha had in mind when he wrote that nobody can save another; nobody can purify another. Whether someone else sees love-worthy heaven or hate-worthy hell is at least almost entirely a matter of their own dreamy projection and not something we control. At best, we can each only aim to take control of our own projection as much as possible, and even that is likely much easier said than done. Every human is on the addiction spectrum, but yet many may futilely try to push others up a ladder that they themselves haven't climbed: a ladder to the opposite of addiction.

The urge to imposingly try to clean one's neighbor's backyard first may itself be yet another example of searching for scapegoats and excuses for why one's own backyard is metaphorically unclean, or at least searching for a distraction. Some would choose to futilely fight to do what they can't instead of doing what they can.

Granted, my own view above is tainted by my firm unshakable belief that everything is exactly inexorably the way it should be, so much so that the word 'should', like the word try, has no real meaning, that everything that is meant to be necessarily will be, that unchangeable reality is worthy of unconditional love not resentment, that there is no evil and no problem of evil, that this world is inexorably a love-worthy heaven, inexorably perfect, eternally so.


***

I also agree perception is the projection. What I would like to propose or incline is that we are seeing time in reverse unknowingly.

It's an interesting idea worth considering, but I prefer the view that time is not fundamentally real, which to me is also much more parsimonious.

I believe in the conscious present, in some sense or another, but that appears to be eternal, in that consciously it appears to always only ever be the present, and scientifically speaking that present appears to not be a point in 1D time but rather a mysterious small 4D blob in 4D timeless spacetime.


***

our entire existence can be considered a dream, because we can’t find anything able to escape with certainty from this hypothesis. Obviously, even our idea that everything might be a dream can be a dream itself, so that we actually don’t even know what we are talking about, we don’t have any idea how things really are, do we?

In one way, we know for certain the world we see with its objects and Newtonian time and space is an illusion, at best a VR-like waking dream created by a 'our brain' whatever that is. Whatever you picture when I say 'brain' is not real, but rather it is a dream object, a part of your avatar. It's like being in a sleeping dream and looking in the mirror and seeing a unicorn body with a unicorn and thinking that's you and that's what's dreaming the dream. No, it's part of the dream too. Here is a Ted Talk that I really like and have watched multiple times by neuroscientist Anil Seth (Ph.D from the University of Sussex) about the subject: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

Donald D. Hoffman (Ph.D from M.I.T.) is another scientist doing rigorous scientific work in this area. I highly recommend looking into his work. Here is a interview of him that I personally watched and enjoyed: Donald Hoffman on Reality, Consciousness, and Conscious Agents | Closer To Truth Chats.

With all that said, the resolution to your worry might be to realize that if observable reality is all a dream then that means the dream is reality, at least part of reality, the part that you can know and that can actually matter to you. There may in some way be other aspects of reality, but those are like Russell's Teapot or the proverbial tree that fell in a forest without anyone around to see it ever in any way.

If you are the dreamer, in some ways that therefore indicates you have some kind of undeniable god-like power to some degree or another over your dream. If everything you are seeing is your artistic creation, then it's not unreal; rather, it's real and your creation.

Another simpler way of saying that is maybe as follows: Even a dream is real insofar as it is consciously dreamt.

We don't necessarily need to create a potential false dichotomy between creative dream and reality, but instead we can realize the dream is real in and of itself, arguably inherently more real than the possible external reality could ever be if it even exists because that so-called external reality is at most only as real as Russell's Teapot or the proverbial tree that fell in a forest without anyone around to see it ever in any way.

[LuckyR]

Perception is almost entirely a matter of projection.

Generally speaking, each person sees what they want to see.

[...]

The direction of your commentary is accurate, though the extent is exaggerated. If folks only perceived what they want to perceive there would be no upsetting visions, we would be perpetually happy with what we see.

This is a typographical oversight. This idea, with which we all seem to agree, is normally stated as "people see what they expect to see". So it's not what we want, but what we expect, and I think this explains your doubt?

I would suggest we consider the following three statements all of which may be true:

1. People see what they expect to see.

2. People see what they choose to see.

3. People see what they want to see.


The first may be the most agreeable, most common, and/or most parsimonious way to express the general idea. Nonetheless, very roughly speaking, it seems to me that #2 follows from #1, and #3 follows from #2. So I am inclined to believe all three statements are true, roughly and generally speaking.

In practice, what this means to me, is that there are likely a lot of discontent people running around who are not truly searching for contentment but for excuses for their discontentment, which could make it very easy to accidentally get wrapped up into someone else's self-chosen abusive relationship reality. In other words, they want scapegoats and such. It might be a toxic romantic relationship one could easily quit, it might be a toxic relationship with alcohol one could theoretically choose to stop drinking, it might be an obsessive engagement in resentment (e.g. spending great amounts of time and energy obsessively resenting something one cannot change for being the way it, such as resentfully refusing to accept past, the weather, or some unforgiven person from the past, figuratively crying over spilled milk so to speak). We can easily become an enabler or scapegoat for someone else, letting our best intentions pave their road into ever-deeper hell.

More bluntly, I imagine it is what the original Buddha had in mind when he wrote that nobody can save another; nobody can purify another. Whether someone else sees love-worthy heaven or hate-worthy hell is at least almost entirely a matter of their own dreamy projection and not something we control. At best, we can each only aim to take control of our own projection as much as possible, and even that is likely much easier said than done. Every human is on the addiction spectrum, but yet many may futilely try to push others up a ladder that they themselves haven't climbed: a ladder to the opposite of addiction.

The urge to imposingly try to clean one's neighbor's backyard first may itself be yet another example of searching for scapegoats and excuses for why one's own backyard is metaphorically unclean, or at least searching for a distraction. Some would choose to futilely fight to do what they can't instead of doing what they can.

Granted, my own view above is tainted by my firm unshakable belief that everything is exactly inexorably the way it should be, so much so that the word 'should', like the word try, has no real meaning, that everything that is meant to be necessarily will be, that unchangeable reality is worthy of unconditional love not resentment, that there is no evil and no problem of evil, that this world is inexorably a love-worthy heaven, inexorably perfect, eternally so.

After some thought I would put it thusly : people see what is, but process what they see with all of the biases inherent in their experience and natural tendencies.

[Angelo Cannata]

I can't see how we can think about real things, be they objects or dreams, how we can think about "what is", considering that whatever we think about is conditioned by our brain. Even this conditioning is not an evidence of its existence, like Decartes thought, because any conclusion about any level of existence can't escape its being conditioned by our brain. We can't say that something exists just because we think so. Even the very idea of existence, being, reality, can't escape the suspect of being just a construction made by our brain. So, how can we assume anything about reality, existence, being? It seems to me that we can't assume these things as if they were clear and simple. We don't know what we are talking about, do we?

[chewybrian]

I would suggest we consider the following three statements all of which may be true:

1. People see what they expect to see.

2. People see what they choose to see.

3. People see what they want to see.


The first may be the most agreeable, most common, and/or most parsimonious way to express the general idea. Nonetheless, very roughly speaking, it seems to me that #2 follows from #1, and #3 follows from #2. So I am inclined to believe all three statements are true, roughly and generally speaking.

In practice, what this means to me, is that there are likely a lot of discontent people running around who are not truly searching for contentment but for excuses for their discontentment, which could make it very easy to accidentally get wrapped up into someone else's self-chosen abusive relationship reality. In other words, they want scapegoats and such. It might be a toxic romantic relationship one could easily quit, it might be a toxic relationship with alcohol one could theoretically choose to stop drinking, it might be an obsessive engagement in resentment (e.g. spending great amounts of time and energy obsessively resenting something one cannot change for being the way it, such as resentfully refusing to accept past, the weather, or some unforgiven person from the past, figuratively crying over spilled milk so to speak). We can easily become an enabler or scapegoat for someone else, letting our best intentions pave their road into ever-deeper hell.

I see Stoic philosophy in what you say, whether or not I chose to see it. I certainly would like to see it in the world, though I seldom do.

I do believe that opinion determines reality. So, #1 works for me. I don't think many of us consciously choose our opinions, though we certainly can.

If I am depressed, is it because I choose to be depressed, because I want to be depressed? I don't think so. I think people fail to realize the control they can have over their emotions and their opinions. They suffer from the illusion of objectivity, and think they perceive facts when all they see is their own opinions. They allow events to distress them that should have no control over them or impact upon them, because they have not been shown how to really view the world objectively (at least, to get closer to objectivity). As you approach real objectivity, all events become neutral. What matters is your own virtue or evil, no matter what happens outside your own intentions and efforts. Once you take all this in, only then does happiness become a choice.

[Pattern-chaser]

I would suggest we consider the following three statements all of which may be true:

1. People see what they expect to see.

2. People see what they choose to see.

3. People see what they want to see.

In my view, #2 and #3 are the same thing, near enough. The difference is that #1 is actually a property of our perception process, while #2 and #3 are more like properties of human beings. We could, perhaps, train ourselves not to see as #2 and #3 describe, but #1 is simply part of an unconscious process over which we have no (conscious) control.

[Sculptor1]

By and large when it comes to basic perception people see what is pretty much there for everyone else to see. Not withstanding the obvious flaws in not seeing the "thing-in-itself", and a few rare instances where colour relationships can give discrepant results.
Witness statements, however, tend to demonstrate, deep flaws in the memory usually due to conceptual reconstructions of events.

When it comes to conceptions of the world, as desribed above by such terms as opitimists and pessimistes, then there is a much bigger case for the thrust of the thread.
But " perception " as such NO.