It's a lot of dots to think about. It has often seemed impossible to connect all the dots into a sensible and coherent picture. Yet, if I start with the assumption that there is nothing fundamentally new under the sun, then it all is not so complex or complicated as it might otherwise appear. Take a couple of examples from common experience. There are normally three primary colors detectable by the trichromatic human eye. There are more or less than that detectable by some other species, but I am not some other species. Similarly, there are primary musical-scale notes within various intervals or pitch-classes. While both color and musical-scale notes have their immutable fundamental properties in human perception, there are virtually infinite gradations, tonal variations, hues, rythms, and combinations available from which apparent newness can be created--but all such newness is a synthesis or rearrangement of the fundamental properties. Likewise, I propose that there is nothing fundamentally new under the sun regarding the Great Ideas which have shaped the consciousness of humans, apart from the additive factual discoveries of science. The individual cognitive and social constructs that have played out over the past thousands of years are rearrangements, syntheses, and syncretisms that are all rooted in fundamental ideas. The fundamentals have been conceived and written already, in some form or another. They sit in bookshelves world-wide--more unread than read, unfortunately. How the fundamentals are known and understood contributes greatly to any sensible and coherent synthesis which would purport to cover the phenomena of "everything"--as a shared context of human relations-- to the most satisfactory degree at any given time.

Most of us are pushed--from a safe, warm, secure, and omni-satisfying environment--through a birth canal the size of a garden hose. A few of us came out of the same environment through the flayed opening of our mother's abdomen. In either case, the change of scenery is dramatic and traumatic. If we were born with language, our cries and screams would likely translate into something like, "Put me back in there!" So, every human that has ever been born has the shared Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (called "life") from birth, and in some sense, thereafter has the urge to "get back in there." Failing that re-entry, four to ten months after we are born we each begin to individuate or differentiate from the symbiotic unit, discover there is an "I" and a "thou" (in fact, many, many "thous"), and repeatedly try to negotiate and navigate thru the rest of our lives with some potency of identity in a veritable sea of other people trying to do the same thing. These are two of the most fundamental first-imprints of shared human experience. Thus, more and more, these are the first fundamental truths I try to remember about myself, everyone, and every issue I come into contact with--the dual passions of returning to undifferentiated comfort and gaining or maintaining differentiated potency. Just those two simple and primary truths explain, in a wide swath, a preponderance of individual behavior and social interaction without multiplying explanatory entities beyond necessity.

When confronted with political, religious, cultural, relationship, or personal issues...this is the starting point from which I construct my understanding. It works.