Could technology support awakening? From AI prompts to AR mirrors to VR lucid-dreams, tools might rehearse perception as interface, not fact. Yet technology remains scaffolding. The real experiment is always perception itself.

Perception is not decoration — it is the practice itself. Traditions from Vedānta to Zen teach that awakening begins with vision: from world as cause to mind as cause, from separation to interlinked selfhood. This annotation explores why perception-shifts matter most in a consciousness-first experiment.

Stoicism trains resilience; Idealism proposes that reality is mind-made. Together, they form a creative scaffold: Stoic Idealism. This annotation explores how the posture of virtue and the hypothesis of consciousness-first reality can be combined as a testable experiment, not a doctrine.