Who Is There Among the Stars?
There is no vantage point outside of human perception from which you could compare "appearance" with "reality itself." You do not see the real world, only this what your perception allows. Immanuel Kant made this boundary explicit. Everything you experience is already shaped by your personal history, your language, and your expectations. There is no "clean" access point to the world that bypasses this internal processing.
So, if the question is, "How do I see reality exactly as it is, free of all conditioning?" the honest answer is that you don’t. Not as a final destination, and certainly not as a permanent achievement. But that does not make the project empty. It simply changes what "coming closer" to the truth can realistically mean in practice. It does not mean stripping away every filter. It means noticing the filter while it is actually functioning.
When you look at the night sky, you see stars as tiny dots. That visual reality will not change. You will not suddenly begin to perceive entire galaxies directly with the naked eye. But you can know, in the very moment of seeing, "This is how my perception reduces something vastly more complex into a simple image." That knowledge doesn’t upgrade your physical eyesight, but it fundamentally changes your relationship to what you see. The dots stop pretending to be the whole story.
You also judge people based on their usefulness. That habit will likely not disappear either; evaluation is a tool we use to navigate the world. However, you can notice, while judging, "This is a specific filter. This is just how I am currently organizing this person." That realization does not instantly make you see them "objectively," but it introduces a vital gap between your judgment and the reality of that person. That gap is the only form of "moving closer" to reality that is actually available to us. It isn’t about replacing a lie with the truth, but about weakening the confusion between the two.
Now, consider a darker claim that without illusions, life simply could not continue. There is correct but not entirely. Some level of simplification is necessary for survival. You cannot perceive every atom or every motive at once, so the mind compresses, categorizes, and reduces information. That is not optional. But the real problem isn't the simplification itself but taking that simplification as the final, absolute truth. You do not need to believe that your view of another person is the "whole truth" in order to interact with them. You only need a workable approximation. The suffering begins when that approximation hardens into an unshakable certainty.
This is where the point about religion and group perception becomes sharp. Yes, people often not able to see beauty or value outside their own framework. But that blindness isn't required for functioning, it is an overcommitment to one specific interpretation. History shows that human perception can widen, sometimes painfully and sometimes slowly.
Schopenhauer would likely agree with this darker tone claiming that the world does not reveal a comforting essence when you strip the illusions away. What often becomes clearer is conflict, limitation, and repetition. There is no hidden guarantee of meaning waiting for us behind the curtain of true reality. Unfortunately getting closer to reality does not reward you with a grand, glowing revelation. No truth will save you. It often removes your most comforting distortions.
But here is the part this view might be overlooking. The goal is not to uncover some final "great secret." There may be no such thing accessible in the way you imagine. The shift happens earlier and it is much smaller. You stop demanding that your current perception be the whole truth. That does not make the world more beautiful. It just makes your contact with the world less rigid. And this is freedom. And as freedom that can reduce certain kinds of suffering not because reality itself improves, but because you are no longer insisting that your current interpretation must hold absolutely.
