But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

Human beings possess the gift of personal freedom and liberty of the mind. We each possess the sovereignty over the body and mind to define ourselves and embrace the values that we wish to exemplify. Personal autonomy enables humans to take independent action and use reason to establish moral values. We are part of nature. Consciousness, human cognition, and awareness of our own mortality allow us to script an independent survival reality and not merely react to environmental forces.

Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.

In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person__ lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems.

There exists a universal order that we each play a distinct role in carrying out. Light always struggles to emerge from darkness. Each of us is the bearer of our own lantern. We find ourselves when we realize our place in an interconnected world. The struggle to pierce the darkness that shrouds us from realizing a state of perceptive awareness is the biggest part of both our individual story and our communal storyline.

All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story.