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forbidden fruit and were promptly expelled from paradise. But debates about why a benevolent God would put that disturbing tree in the garden usually ignore the possibility that it was planted for some future use: that the fruit would swell to ripeness as humanity itself matured.
    Newly created and innocent to the core, Adam and Eve simply couldn’t fathom the master plan of a fluid, multifaceted intelligence. From their pristine, undeveloped consciousness, parental cautions to stay away from that one compelling tree sounded stern and arbitrary. And so, like a couple of curious five-year-olds with no impulse control, they tasted the bitter knowledge of good and evil, resulting in the uniquely human compulsion to judge everything as either innately right or wrong, useful or useless, blessed or sinful.
    Then, of course, they looked for someone else to blame. Adam complained that the woman tempted him to disobey God. And Eve became the first human to claim that “the devil made me do it.” Waves of fear and shame followed these stunned, overstimulated little creatures out of Eden, leaving their descendants to manage the divine gift of judgment from a confused, hopelessly dualistic, dangerously limited point of view.
    Historically and across all cultures, groups of people mutually reinforce the tendency to deny wholeness in favor of the light, forgetting that God is not the sun but the one who invented day and night, sound and silence, form and formlessness, freedom and restraint, male and female, heaven and earth, and a host of other opposites as tools of the creator’s trade. Adventurous souls sometimes plunge into darkness, engaging in obsessively hedonistic, risky, or outright criminal behavior as a form of rebellion, but here again they fail to achieve balance — and usually look for a scapegoat (society, parents, divorce, drugs, oralcohol) to blame for their destructive, shortsighted ways. Only by exploring and integrating light and dark, spirit and matter, verbal and nonverbal awareness, predatory and nonpredatory power can we ever hope to reach our true potential.
    I’m not saying anything new here. Thousands of books on psychology, mythology, art, religion, and symbolism explore ways to access parts of the mind that elude logic and language yet still prove essential to mental and emotional health. What I’m excavating in this brief history of power involves a lesser-known aspect of the optimally functioning psyche, one that has been repeatedly, sometimes dramatically, brought to our attention — then promptly ignored — for at least the past twenty-five hundred years. I’m talking about the inner, redemptive relationship between predator and prey, and, more specifically, the cultivation of nonpredatory wisdom as a key to, perhaps even a mandate of, human evolution.
Natural Horsemanship
    I don’t think I would have grasped the importance of the predator/prey dynamic had I not been investigating horse-training techniques in the early 1990s. Around that time, a small group of Western cowboys were actively bucking the system, promoting empathy and respect for the horse’s perspective over traditional rough-riding, bronc-breaking practices. Through their increasingly popular books, videos, and public exhibitions, innovators like Bill and Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, Pat Parelli, and Monty Roberts came to be known as founders of the “natural horsemanship” movement, influencing a new generation of trainers on both sides of the Atlantic.
    Regardless of the individual methods these men created, a core principle they all share involves the notion that humans are predators and horses are prey animals. Difficulties arise when people unconsciously act predatory with animals designed to flee large cats and packs of wolves. The intensity of our gaze alone can be unnerving. Horses have eyes on the sides of their heads, emphasizing peripheral vision, while humans, like