1.1. Beings perceive their environment by constructing an internal model from those pieces of data that their senses are able to gather. No being can see past this. 1.2. Born expecting their world to make sense, children see only foundations around them. They build on these regardless, imagining viability to be that which seems to them to work. 1.3. Children learn as best they can; their understanding of the information on which they depend to do so developed as well as limited by their experience.

2.1. Our world is a model we construct in our minds from those elements of it that we have the ability to recognize because they have proved to be significant. 2.2. reality is like the floor of a cave in the darkness, felt as the head of a walking stick pressing against the palm of our hand. Even though our experience of it can only ever be a perception it is nonetheless real. 2.3. reality never is, and can never be, quite as we perceive it; it is simply what to us makes sense.

3.1. beings survive by interacting not just with inanimate entities but with other beings. Elementary societies formed in the primordial environment as they found advantage in these social connections. 3.2. Over generations, simple relationships became increasingly complex, and various forms of interdependence evolved into multi-cellular, modular, and symbiotic beings. 3.3. From communication, languages developed, continuing and reflecting the preconceptions that beings inherit, and framing their perception —right or wrong, good or bad, mad or not.

4.1. culture frames our experience of the world; it is a meta-language, circumscribing both our understanding of language and of culture. 4.2. As we develop, the cultures of our 'family', 'community', 'region', and 'state', which surround us in our ontogeny, nest inside us like Russian dolls, building a unique personal culture. 4.3. Each of us expresses our personal culture constantly and unavoidably, non-verbally even more than verbally; it is what gives meaning to who we are and to what we do.

5.1. Imprinting our environment with constructions and artifacts, cultures also pattern our perception. 5.2. Through the paradigm culture provides, we are able to anticipate and interpret the responses we receive from the world around us. By balancing their candor with their kindness we are able to find and maintain our place its society. 5.3. In a foreign culture, when uprooted, categories evaporate that to us seemed certain. Discovering our perception is not absolute and universal, we become dumb, 'home-sick' for the authentic connection we feel in the well-established constructs of familiar company.

6.1. We learn about reality from the stream of data that it stimulates in our senses. 6.2. Inside the womb, as sensory data is filtered and translated into functional information, our unique personal culture begins to develop from that of our mother. 6.3. culture trains our development like a trellis trains a vine. Moment by moment our experience blindly meshes in layers, crystallizing around a genetic algorithm. 6.4. We incorporate understanding, privation, and error equally and impartially into ourselves, absorbing the world that we come to know.

7.1. Communicating effectively is vital to successfully integrate with our surrounding society and obtain its protection and support. First we cry; and then we suckle. 7.2. Infants are instinctively aware that being shunned can be a death sentence. Children relentlessly demand conversation. Any fear that they may have is readily overwhelmed by their drive to communicate. 7.3. Patterns of expression, imprinted on us during early ontogeny, frame the conversations through which we negotiate meaning and develop into who we are. Interposed between us they establish our interpersonal relationships in later life.

8.1. Every being's survival depends upon it making sense of both its internal and external environments. 8.2. The conversation between a being's internal and external worlds determines its biological and psychological well-being. 8.3. If the soul is ineffable and the psyche is understood as a meta-biological construct, then our fluency is a reflection of the impact of our experience, and of any interventions that are made in our lives.