There seems to be two perceptions.
The Perceptions with choices and the perception of no choices or the perceptions of freedom or the perceptions of limited and no choice.
And depending upon which land you occupy you will have a life that reflects that.
I lived in both places. The first being the dark narrow hole of perception that I was frozen in, where I had to do what others wanted of me, where my life was led by the wishes of others, I had no free will of my own.
We can call it a victim hole, and its perception is very one way, or co-dependent, where the quality of my life depended upon another.
The perception in that land was very limited and the quality of life was at the mercy of another’s good will.
It was from that darkness I fell out of onto the land of wide open expanse and freedom, where my strings to others were untied, where I was able to walk freely and express myself freely, where the victim chains that held me in place fell free.
It was equal to walking out of Plato’s cave or the story in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, about the frog who climbed out of the well to see the ocean.
It is like your constraints and perceptions shatter into a million fragments, where you now have access to an unlimited choice.
There is no common ground between the two worlds.
I feel that I lived in a place where my boxes of choices were not available to me.
It seems incredible to me now that I didn’t have access to my own box of choices that I waited for someone to tell me what to do.
Imagine the difference of perceptions to having access to your own choices or not.
Living, as a prisoner in your own life is pure hell, its living in a dark well and not knowing what freedom exists outside.
So while I agree perceptions are a choice, it is way hard to phantom that inside the well.
If you disagree that perceptions are a choice perhaps you best look around where you are living and see who holds your box of choices.
You will either find the freedom of the ocean or the confines of a well.