'We see and understand things not as they are but as we are'Christopher Columbus, in 1440, during his voyage to America, saw three mermaids and described them as intuitions of women who emerged from the sea . Did Christopher Columbus imagine mermaids because he was interested in fantasies or did he actually see them? On the one hand I believe that we understand and see things not as they are but as we are, on the other hand I do not agree with this statement. The way we see things reflects on our personality and each of our personalities is different and some people even have similar personality. “We do not see things as they are, but as we are” is a Jewish proverb. The proverb talks about how we are busy with sensory perception. It implies how every individual has 6 senses and the sixth sense is within themselves. We understand things as we are but not as they are, we could also look at emotions from the knower's point of view when I am afraid and then I see the images pass by me, so do I see the images in my brain or are they coming from me? I am connecting this statement to two ways of knowing, sensory perception and emotion. Sensory perception, the first way of knowing, is the physical response of our senses to stimuli. There are only 5 senses and they include sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell. The sensory receptors first pick up the signals, after being simulated by the brain the information is transformed into sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell. These senses have become part of our life. Without them we would be the abnormal ones in this world. The senses surround us every day and every minute of our lives. Emotion is our second way of knowing man's direct experience of the world. Emotions are the most powerful thing in this world… which has changed the way the world and things appear. When a hotel wants to stay in business, they Photoshop photos of the room and make them look good, but the truth is, the rooms are really bad. The hotel wants people to see the room beautiful, so they stay in the hotel. Photoshop foreshadows false things, so never believe what you see. We see and understand things as we are but not as they are. In some cases this statement is true and in other cases this statement is false. We don't always see and understand things the way we would like, but we also see things the way they seem, not exactly the way we would like. The world itself is an illusion, this shows us that we don't always have to see things as they are but we could also see them as we are. It is the choice of the human mind to understand things and every mind is different; this is the nature of man.