The Illusion of Perception: Rediscovering the Self

How questioning our narratives reveals authenticity, sovereignty, and the truth of “I am.”

Joseph Benjamin-Founder of Prophecy Band x Prophecy House

I’m not sure if I’ve written about this before. A few months ago, while driving to Colorado, I had a thought about perceived perception.

To me, this means we see something, then create an entire ideology around it. We rearrange it until it fits the narrative we believe is our life. We base our whole understanding of it on the life we’ve led. But what if, the entire time, the universe has been giving us signs to move in another direction? Instead of listening, we cling tightly to a perception the world handed us—one we so readily adopted.

What if this is what holds most people back from achieving? Hear me out—I’m not saying you shouldn’t chase your dreams. I’m not saying our lives are entirely fabricated by experiences and observations. But I am questioning the “why” behind it all.

I realized I had to face a perception I had unconsciously created for myself. I let that perception grow into a story, one I didn’t even realize I was living. Now, on the other side of it, I’m asking different questions—the right questions.

What is my “why”? Why do I do the things I do? Is this life I’ve built something I truly enjoy? If so, why do I do it?

More importantly, if this life is based on something I once saw and told myself this is how it should be, then how authentic is it, really?

The hard truth: it isn’t.

The question has never been whether I should be doing what I’ve been doing. The question is: How can I make what I do authentic to who I am and to what I want to achieve in this world?

So, I put everything on pause. I chose patience. I let myself sit back, witness, and rebuild without judgment. I gave myself permission to watch the creativity and authentic narratives within me unfold.

It’s the truth of self that unsettles me most—the heaviness of confronting who I really am. There’s an unease in realizing that my sense of “I am” might be yet another illusion. I’ve felt it before: carefully constructing an identity only to discover it was just a bridge toward the next version of myself.

I frequently question the sovereignty of my existence. The answers are slow, elusive, arriving gradually across a lifetime. Maybe our comprehension of the “I am” is always limited, bounded by what our unconscious allows us to perceive.

“All that we are, all that we need—they’re different things.” Lyrics from one of my favorite songs echo this truth back to me: the divide between perception and authentic selfhood.

And yet, here we stand—all that we are, in every fleeting, transformative moment.

Tonight, I see clearly: a perceived illusion is nothing more than an idea we’ve adopted, an image we allowed to take root. We see it, and so we want it. But without the deep inner work, we cannot know if it ever truly belonged to us.

Who are we before the world begins to mold us? Who are we before we let its perceptions dictate what we must do and how we must do it?

I find myself letting go of everything—starting again from zero. Seeking not just the truth of “I am,” but the sovereignty of my existence. The self I know and the self I once believed myself to be feel distant, blurred, distorted.

Now, I stand in the clearing—waiting, listening, uncovering.

This is where the narrative of self begins.