[Zope] Something missing in Python Methods

Greetings Yeh, yeh.. I know.. I should be using Python Scripts, or whatever... but for various reasons, I'm still using 2.1.6... What I want to know is, why can't Python Methods refer to anything not explicitly passed to them? I don't want to have to make everything that invokes the method have to know to pass it half a dozen objects. Isn't the idea of a method to be executed in the namespace of it's parent? I want my method to be able to access objects in it's own folder... What am I missing? Curtis