Storytelling is ultimately the only way that we know besides song, dance, painting, and music to share with our tribesmen what it means to be human, express the indefinable feelings that unite humankind.

The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people’s stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind’s ability to exercise free will. Without a character’s ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human.

The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.

The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.

The perennial lot of human beings and human societies is animosities, antagonisms, and acrimonies. Power, venality, bitterness, and cynicism result in unavoidable conflict, cleavages, schisms, and disharmonies in human affairs. Erosion of standards and values creates disaffection, disillusionment, dissidence, and social instability.

The manifest destiny of every civilization is the individual and collective development of human potential.

Many aspects of the human condition are beautiful and many others are vile. Betrayal and personal agony represent a maddening part of being human. A person can maintain personal dignity by exercising restraint, remaining true to their conscience, and preserving under difficult conditions.

Jacques Mondo, in his 1970book “Chance and Necessity,” summarized the challenge of humanity in these trying times. 'The universe is not pregnant with life or the biosphere with man... The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor his duty. The kingdom above or darkness below; it is for him to choose.

There is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems. We resonate with animals especially those animals that breathe, hear, see, sense, taste and emote similar to us. We hold an especially strong affinity with warm-blooded mammals because we all spring from the same primordial mist as anatomically evidenced by the vestigial tailbone of humans and vestigial leg bones of whales.