Course Two: Nature 83
ally followed water pathways. Whether along a coast-
line, or along rivers, early settlements are always found
near water. It is not difficult to envision early homi-
nids (proto-humans), and later true humans, walking,
wading, and swimming along coastlines and rivers,
thus populating the globe. If they were swimmers and
divers, it would only serve to drive them on, in the
search for food as populations rose and the climate
changed (Phillip V. Tobias, “Water and Human Evo-
lution”).Quest: Return to the Sea
If you live anywhere near the ocean, learn to ex-
perience its magick and mystery. Go beachcombing
and tidepooling, and see what you can find for your
collection (but never take anything alive from a tide
pool!). Become a good sea swimmer, and learn
bodysurfing (and even boogie boarding, if you’re in
the right place). Get yourself a good set of ocean fins,
a mask, and snorkel, and explore the undersea world
(always with a partner!). If the water is cold in your
area, get a wet suit. And for the most complete expe-
rience of the ocean, take SCUBA lessons, get certi-
fied, and go diving with a group and a professional
dive-master.
SCUBA diving is, to me, the ultimate experience,
connecting us at once with our entire 500-million-
year heritage as creatures of the sea, and also giving
us a taste of the weightlessness of outer space, wherein
lies our ultimate destiny. There is simply nothing in
all the world comparable to the feeling of floating—
indeed, flying—in perfectly balanced buoyancy far
beneath the waves, the surging sea around us at one
with the pulsing ocean within our bodies. I even sus-
pect that our love of roller coaster rides, and our uni-
versal dreams of flying, reflect our deep memories of
weightless life in the sea, and our intuitive reaching
towards the heavens.Lesson 3: Night
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colors from our sight.
Red is black and yellow, white.
But we decide which one is right...
And which is an illusion.
—Moody Blues, On the Threshold of a DreamFor 150 million years, dragons ruled the Earth.
During all those long aeons, while dinosaurs grew to
as much as 100 feet long, weighing up to 100 tons,
the biggest mammals were no larger than a house cat.
If we think the reassembled skeletons of those pre-
historic monsters seem huge to us now, imagine how
much more gigantic they would have seemed to our
tiny ancestors! Dragons completely dominated the
lands, the seas, and the air. Sea dragons grew to the
size of modern whales, and flying dragons were as
big as small airplanes. They occupied every environ-
mental niche—except three. No dinosaurs burrowed
into the Earth; no dinosaurs climbed trees; and very,
very few dinosaurs hunted at night.The dragons were not great, sluggish, stupid cold-
blooded lizards, as people have assumed for so long.
They were active, warm-blooded (and often feathered)
members of a class all their own—Archosauria—of
which birds are the only surviving members. And like
modern birds, dragon eyes were primarily designed
for day vision, with full-color receptors (called cones).
Only towards the end of their reign, with the rise of
the raptors, did some of them develop the huge eyes
full of ultra-sensitive black-and-white receptors called
rods, such as we find today in owls and nighthawks.
Raptors—by far the most intelligent of all dragons—
were the first and only ones to be able to hunt at night,
like cats and owls do today. What did they hunt? Like
owls and cats, they hunted nocturnal mammals.
The only way mammals had managed to survive
at all during those 150 millions years of dragon do-
minion was by occupying those three tiny niches.
Some burrowed in the ground, and others came to
live in trees. The little rat-like burrowers came out
only at night, when the dragons slept. In order to be
able to see in the dark, those mammals gave up the
cones in their eyes entirely and filled their retinas with- Nature.p65 83 1/14/2004, 3:33 PM