“From the top of a hill you can see far into the distance, but often it is hard to see the hill that you are standing on. You look about you, but the trees block your view. Step aside from the trail a dozen yards away you would vanish from the eye. There is very little that you understand about your present situation.
“The knowledge that you possess, as great as it seems, is relatively small. The problem is, you lack perspective. You have nothing to compare your experience to. You have become beings separate and alone. The problem, put simply, is that you don’t have any friends.
“The trees would welcome you into their families if you wished. The geese would show you the way. The very flowers and grasses would be your brothers if even once you lay among them and called that place your home. But, with few exceptions, you do none of these things, choosing instead, sadly, to relate only to others of your kind.
“This makes you blind to the greater part of the world. That which you call human culture is the tiniest slice of life. You are like the man who gathered food from a great circle around his home until nothing else remained alive. He gathered the food within his house and lived by eating it for a time. But finally there was no food left and the land around his house would yield nothing further in terms of life. And so he lay at the center of a wasteland of his own making and there was forced to die. But none of this is necessary.
“Even now, you persist in seeing yourself as all-powerful, exceptional, and alone. You are therefore without friends other than your kind. If you asked them, even now the animals would show you the way. If you followed them, the trees and grasses would take you home. The homes you now live in are fortresses. But an army is coming that will tear down every wall.”