we discover what we can not see or touch but know only by its behavior.

We exist as information flows through us and eddies around us in a universe of staggering complexity. Our ability to know and understand ourselves and the world around us depends on our molecular and structural adaptations for perceiving changes in the flow of information.

Beyond the horizons of our perceptions, events and beings exist, unknown to any single individual, that share in the formation of the web of communications within This Magic Sea.

Some perceptual horizons exist because they are too distant in space, some are too distant in time, some are horizons of size (larger or smaller than the individual can perceive). Or secreted beyond view in another of life's domains.

There are horizons of perception in change. Each of us perceives the world at a specific interval of change. Some events happen so slowly we are unable to perceive them or so quickly our eyes can not detect them. To us the tide is high, the tide is low, but unless conditions are just right we cannot see the tide ebbing and flowing. Nor can we see the gravitational interaction of Earth and Moon creating the tide.

The multitude of small intertidal creatures can never penetrate their horizon of perception to see the vista of the sea shore they inhabit. But many somehow perceive the gravitational interaction of Earth and Moon and know the tides directly, following the rhythm even when removed from the sea shore.

Science provides me with a vicarious perception, allowing me to see, in the behavior of certain ophiuroids and lamellibranchs, the turning of the tide. In understanding their behavior, I lift beyond the horizon of my own perceptions.

The horizons most difficult to breast exist where perception requires movement against a background. Constancy is invisible.

There are horizons of perception where the carrier of perception is, itself, invisible.

Sea water is invisible to the sonar pulse of a dolphin or whale. The sea water is as unnoticed to them as the air was to me when I took this photo of the sea shore at Tapana, in the Vava'u Island Group of the Kingdom of Tonga. Perhaps, to many creatures of the oceans, sea water is beyond the horizons of perception. Maybe, if they ever do think of Sea, it is a mystery of confusion in their souls. As air was to humans in the millennia before science.

The great challenge for awareness is to detect its own web of controls and reveal those invisible tensions we know of as life.

The observer weaves the flow of atoms and energy into pathways of becoming, changing their relationships using the lever of awareness with the force of desire.  We know awareness only by its revealed behavior, because the mirror of mind cannot reflect its own image. We detect the threads of awareness in the cycles of becoming, and in the threads of communications that are the fundamental control systems of life.

Each discovery is a landfall in This Magic Sea. The first glimpse of a shadowy concept beyond our horizon of understanding is an awakening that quickens and shifts the winds of survival, driving us towards our discoveries.

Curiosity is the need to learn new patterns of behavior, enrich our memories, adjust to those unseen others impacting our survival. We approach new perceptions slowly, by population evolution, or quickly by individual discovery. We are drawn closer and closer to our horizons of perception until meaning becomes clear or until, like a mirage, the perception wavers and vanishes again from our existence, lost in the stormy passage of our lives.