All perception is structured by relational data in the same way that it is made possible by the isomorphism (equal and continued forms) of organic, neuropsychological processes. For there to be visual perception, it is necessary to have an eyeball and its neurological structure. In blindness, visual perception is impossible, although it is substituted by tactile and auditory structures, for example. We perceive what is before us, and this perception depends on our neurological and psychological structures.
When we are psychologically referenced in our desires, difficulties and goals, we become impermeable to what occurs or even establish interfaces that constitute filters that capture, refract and consequently distort what occurs, creating extrapolations to what is perceived. The fixed ideas, the fears and "twisting" make what happens, what is perceived, be catapulted to other realities, other screens, thus creating additions, decreases and dislocations.
The respect or lack of respect for the other, depending on how it is configured - acceptance or discrimination of clothing, language, nationality, skin colour, and social and economic condition - is an example of this filtering. In the context of the a priori of discrimination, there is not before us a person we meet, there is before us someone who can help us in our political and social insecurities (those who appear with a profile we accept), or there is before us the burglar, the murderer (those who appear with a profile we do not accept). We don't see what happens, and we see what we wish or fear to happen because the perception of the data is carried out on the horizon of the problems: fears, anxieties and doubts, for example.
Husserl spoke of the need to bracket the data that appeared when one wanted the true meaning of what happened. This is what the "epoché" restores to us: redness, for example, instead of red. To densify is to deconstruct by constructive appositions.
In psychotherapy, questioning one's own needs and problems is a way of structuring availability and clearing self-references, which prevent the perception of what occurs as it happens. In situations of distortion, in being full of expectations or desires, innumerable referents are created that change everything to generate motivations, justifications, and explanations of what dominates as monovalent enlargement. Everything is transformed and is perceived as a sexual stimulus when the experience of sexual demands and non-acceptance of them is a constant, for example. It was not for nothing that Freud, working in the rigid and repressive universe of 19th-century Vienna, saw sexuality as the basis of all human motivation. Theorists, too, distort when they seek deterministic explanations, reducing everything to the platform of causality. To rely on "cause and effect" is a way of simplifying the scope of procedural implications.
Being in the world, in front of the other, is the encounter, and nothing exists beyond this. It is exactly in this magical moment, whether for good or ill, that things happen. Everything that happens is contextualised in the structure of this encounter and in everything that is around it. Life, art, happiness, evil, accidents, catastrophes, everything can be thus configured, understood or perceived. The filters, a prior, or prejudices only carry what is happening to other contexts and atmospheres alien to the given. To filter is to select residues in order to shelter or abandon them. It always implies determination, a previous attitude, and an invasion of what happens. Breaking the dynamics is a violation of the relational processes. The continuity of this attitude creates presuppositions responsible for non-availability. This is how voids are created, this is how automatism appears, and this is how the human being submits to what happens without integrating what is happening. In these cases, there is no experience of the present; there is only the storage of experiences that are quoted by accumulation, whether they are positive or negative residues.
To distort and filter is to become impermeable to life, and in this way, automata are generated, parts of a gear regulated by commitments and rules. These filtering, commitments and rules, while reassuring, alienate, and empty, as much as they depress. Selecting what is worth avoiding, and what causes harm, is a way of reducing your possibilities and your availability. This is how the path of bitterness, evaluation, fear, of melancholy, is built: the feeling that you have lived and have not achieved what you should, what you wanted, what you could.