TOK. In this essay I will use two ways of knowing to discuss the claim We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.

        People perceive things or situations in different ways. Taking a literary source for example, in the novel The Kite Runner, there is an instance when the protagonist, Amir, witnesses the rape of his servant/friend, Hassan. Instead of seeing this as an appalling act that victimizes Hassan and inflicts great pain on him, he sees it as something that is hurtful to himself. Amir feels that he is the victim, but in actual fact his neglect to aid makes him as guilty as the doer. Amir saw the rape of Hassan through HIS mind, not for what is really was and consequently, it caused him to victimize himself. In contrast to this, someone in Amir’s position might have intervened and helped out by using force against the perpetrator. From this exemplar we can deduce that people react to situations the way their mind interprets and analyses it— it’s how they look at it, how they perceive it.
        Another illustration of this comes from a true story-- a man sat at the metro station in Washington DC playing the famous six Bach pieces for 45 minutes on his violin. It was calculated that over two thousand people crossed him while he played, most of them on their way to work. Most of the people just walked by lost in their own thoughts. Some hurried by as they were late for work. One man stopped by to listen for a while, but soon looked at his watch and hurried along. The musician earned his first dollar when a woman through money into his hat without stopping to hear the man play his violin. The man received the most attention when a three year old boy stopped to hear him play, but was soon nudged along by his mother as she was in a hurry. Despite her nudging him forward, he turned his head back around the whole time to hear the musician play his song. This action was repeated by several other children, but in all the cases, their parents forced them to move on. After those 45 minutes silence took over, and the man walked away. There was no applause, and nor was there any recognition. In those 45 minutes, only six individuals halted and stayed to listen for a while and approximately 20 dropped money into his hat while maintaining their normal pace. He collected $32. No one knew this, but the musician was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world, playing a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. This was a social experiment conducted by the Washington Post in order to study perceptions, tastes and priorities of people and to see whether we perceive beauty and whether we appreciate beauty and the talent of an unknown. One of the conclusions we can conjecture from this experiment is that we humans do not even have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best violinists in the world playing the best music ever written. Consequently, how much more are we losing out on? How much more are we not registering? Why you might ask? It’s because we think of ourselves before anything else. We make everything revolve around us, and hence see things the way we wish to see them—we see and understand the things not as they are, but as we are.

        In addition to sense perception, reason too acts as a catalyst and plays a chief role by helping us understand and perceive things. Reason has its place in the everyday experience of individuals. There are reasons behind us perceiving things the way we are, rather than what they really are: family and bringing up of the individual, the previous experiences the individual was confronted by and the culture to which the individual belongs to.
        The way an individual is brought up by their family is a major influence on his/her perceptions of the world. Each family brings their children up in different ways, and thus each family has different values, morals and ethics that it teaches its brood. Taking my own family as an example, one of the most important values they have ingrained into me as individual is the belief in equality. They have taught me to respect all peoples irrespective of caste, creed, sex or religion, which I personally believe to be an integral component of my personality. However, there are people brought up in families that may not emphasize enough on a value such as this one. Consequently, these people may discriminate others not realizing the wrong they are doing or the pain they inflict.
                 Past experiences of an individual are a reason behind people perceiving the world the way they do—for instance, a superstitious person. A superstition is an irrational belief that something unrelated to an event influences its outcome. Superstitious people believe that certain things, routines or rituals bring them good luck or help avoid bad luck-- Michael Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships. All six times, he wore his "lucky" college gym shorts underneath his Bulls uniform as he believed that it brought him luck like when he was playing college ball. In addition, TV talk show host Star Jones claimed that she never put her purse on the floor as it brought her bad luck.
                Besides past experiences and the way an individual is brought up, culture influences the way we ‘see reality’. In Indian cultures, people believe that books are a sacred source of knowledge and that they symbolize God. Consequently, if a person from the Indian culture drops a book down on the floor, he/she immediately picks it up and asks for forgiveness by touching the book in a sacred way. On the other hand, people from other cultures, such as the American culture, do not hold the same opinion of a book symbolizing God. They do not give as much importance to the book as the Indians do; Americans consider it as a source of knowledge and nothing more. Since cultural traditions have taught Indians to believe this, they ‘see and understand’ a book in a different way than the Americans do, i.e. they see it as a symbol of God rather than just a source of knowledge.

                We humans have been created in such a way that we ‘see and understand’ reality the way our mind wants us to perceive it. The mind can choose what it wants to see, rather than see what actually exists, just the way a man in the desert sees a mirage. Our minds create illusions based on what we want to see or perceive. Going back to the fundamental basics of TOK, our senses do sometimes deceive, and consequently we make everything revolve around ourselves. Our cultures, past experiences and the ways in which we are brought up define us as individuals and make us who we are. It is because if this that we see and understand things not as they are but as WE are.