Interesting topic.just been thinking along these lines, and a good time to share those thoughts.
Initially we human beings are born with a supposed blank slate, the child’s initial impressions set the stage for their reality, of their being in the world. This being is as concrete as the solidly described world in the objective world of early man, the child feels then thinks the world as a unique experience of reality, not infiltrated by the human objective of fragmenting life into descriptions of varied perception. In the beginning the world is your oyster, and you are you, with only the inherited traits of fear over loss of significant others who in turn define you.
Small children are in bondage to this fear of possible loss, which is nothing else but the fear of losing themselves, their reality. Perception of reality at this stage is identical with reality, and perception is not thought as being part of it.
This sense of uniqueness in the earliest times, can not yet conceive of a later time, when the thought some of it level off, -begins to come up, that perhaps this sense of losing the ones’ self in others, has pre-existed even before our seemingly unique and rather dramatic entrance.
This sense begins to grow to larger perimeters with the nominal idea that what we learn beyond the clean slate, is the various fragments and aspects thought to us by others.
No, the gut level , almost satorik kind of sudden realization, that all of our reality has been eclipsed innumerable times on a plane of infinite spatial-temporal extension, and that the clean slate is not really blank, but contains the germ of everything which ever existed, with the brain, an organ as a filtering system to admit but what is relevant and at hand.
As maturation progresses, the social web of reality teaches this, but usually in the sense of getting along in life, and not in the sense of realizing the connective between reality and perception, as reality AS perception.
Reality is an assumption in the beginning, in order to be in the world, a basic assumption made, has to be made, of reality as a given-as is-, a thought echoed strangely enough in modernity: it is what it is.
Perhaps modernity has to remind itself that it could imprison reality into a relatively remote place,
from which it can not recover, nor return to its home base.
This is why in most cases it is merely afforded to be a gut level feeling, or a Zen satori type of experience, to protect it unto far flung implications.
In this manner, of experience, perception changes the perspective, which changes perception, which again changes reality.
Some philosophers acute sense of this experience is well described. in Sartre’s Nausea, the author wakes up from a slumber, only to find his hand appearing as if it was a strange, detached object.
With Kafka, a metamorphosis into bugs takes place. The usual perceptual rules of perceptual organization are suspended, and create another reality.
When finally maturity arrives. and an other exit appears in. it’s ablation to Sartre’s no exit sign, the door opens and reveals to be the very door through which it first came through, it is the same door leading into the same space.
The doors of perception lead to the very same reality.