Growing up in Oregon, where there are many volcanoes, my family would often go spelunking in the lava tubes left over from past eruptions. These caves formed where the outside of a river of lava cooled, letting the inside of the lava flow further downhill, leaving a hollow husk of the river's rock shape to climb in. Caves always invoke a kind of supernatural sense of awe for me. The sensory deprivation of the darkness gives a sense of humility we feel when we take ourselves out of societal context, bringing about a sense of ascending out of our ordinary self-awareness. When I travel abroad, I enjoy exploring caves and seeing the lore that has sprung up about them.
In Bali, Indonesia
are a series of caves that one can explore at
the basin of rivers flowing down the sides of the volcanic island.
However, the caves of Bali are man-made. Many centuries prior,
people used tools to carve out the caves at the base of the river into a
series of sheltered rooms. When the monsoon rains came, all the caves
would be submerged, only to be navigable again the following year.
The islands of Indonesia used to be home to a different species of hominid prior to Homo Sapiens' arrival. Homo Floresiensis were a smaller hominid who also resided in caves like the Denisovans of Siberia. Homo Floresiensis is suspected to have evolved differently from Homo Sapiens and Denisovans, to be smaller in stature because of the constrained natural resources of the Indonesian archipelago. Many other species of animal discovered there were also diminished in stature in contrast to their respective ancestors on the Asian continent. When I climbed into the cave shelters on Bali, which likely were carved many thousands of years later than Floresiensis, I pondered the significance of caves as protective and spiritual sanctuaries for our Hominid species through the millennia. Echoes of these other hominids live on in our DNA as some of them cohabitated and inter-bred with Homo Sapiens as the latter spread around the globe.
In Sri Lanka, caves served as monastic retreats for monks and mystics as Buddhism swept through the region, encouraging a spiritual path of asceticism and meditation away from society's hubs of bustle and industry. The giant mesa of Sigiriya was one such retreat with ornate frescoes painted on the inside of the caves from a period of time that a local king sought to fashion the mesa into a paradisiacal castle fortress. The inside of the cave is a representation of the ideas of beauty of the time, the way a camera obscura projects the outside world through a pinhole lens or mirror into a dark chamber, now frozen in time for next era's visitors to witness.
In Thailand, the lineage of Rama kings had summer retreats near the caves under the country's mountainous southern coast. A few hours hike from the beaches you can visit a vast underground cavern replete with an underground temple pavilion and many images of the pre-enlightenment Siddhartha. He sits as if frozen in time in the gesture of pointing at the ground, where he resolved to stay until he crossed the precipice of Nirvana. (Siddhartha was one of many Buddhas in the broader tradition. But in the Thai tradition, this particular Buddha is important to the culture because he represented the path of independent transcendence for all beings, an ideal for everyday community to pursue in emulation.) Outside the national palace of Bangkok, there is a small pavilion that looks exactly like the pavilion Rama V had built in Phraya Nakhon cave.
Perhaps the king would use that pavilion outside his window as a mental reminder of the symbolic connection to the cave where the monks would meditate for the transcendence of Samsara for all of civilization. Venturing to the north through Laos, there are hundreds of caves to explore where local citizens create temples of reclining Buddhas deep in the karst mountains to revere the monastic traditions that spread through the country as Buddhism spread north from India to China.
In Jordan, the Nabatean people used caves as tombs and fashioned
majestic facades in the style of architecture they'd seen elsewhere by chiseling and polishing limestone like a sculptor. Allegedly, once their
city of caves became a place for mystics and pilgrims to visit, they
came up with an economic scheme to require all visitors to exchange
their gold coin for lesser value coins they would mint locally, leading
Petra to become a very wealthy city offering its citizens relative
prosperity based on the city they'd constructed out of sand with deft artifice of the chisel. While the caves started out as a form of palace-like grandeur, the interiors just provide shelter from the elements and are unadorned. Walking into them is a transformative journey from outward splendor to a sense of inner awe. You experience the awe of natural places with the human artifice dropped. To this day the Bedouin people there welcome tourists to explore the
caves with concessions and hiking provisions provided at tents set up to
give you respite from the sun while you enjoy tea and refreshment. In Egypt, caves were tombs for royalty which provided a path to eternal life. Excavated only recently, these caves portray amazing mystical traditions and understanding of the cycle of life, death and rebirth enacted through the worship of human representatives of archaic gods. Many of the gods of Egypt are depicted as animal and as chimeric human forms. The mortals who were revered as leaders of the society may have been seen as temporal representations and sporadic embodiments of the deities in ephemeral time. Spirits of the underworld would gift life to humans through the the Ankh symbol. When the kings and queens of Egypt died, they were entombed in ornately decorated caves that remain well preserved to this day near Luxor and Aswan.
In Mexico, caves are considered the domain of the rain god Chaac. The many cenotes (limestone caves) of the Yucatan peninsula formed in part due to their being on the edge of an impact crater of the Chicxulub meteor, which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Maya priests would create altars at the bottoms of the caves in supplication to Chaac to bring rains for the sustenance of the maize crops. These fresh water cenotes served the flatland jungle areas of Yucatan with fresh drinking water that sustained the inland population until the civilization's collapse in 900 AD, after which the Maya transitioned to building their cultural hubs on the coast of Yucatan rather than the jungles.
Not all caves can be visited by avid tourists like myself. Because of the significance of certain caves to our cultural lore, archeologists and artists are making them discoverable via facsimile copies so that we can all share our fascination with this part of our history and culture. One such archeological effort was captured in the Werner Herzog film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. In this movie, he filmed the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in France with a group of anthropologists as his guide. The cavern is covered with Paleolithic art depicting animals and an image of a human hand outlined as if it were a signature by the artist. Herzog and the anthropologists reveal the story of our human ancestors' intentions in decorating this cave and speculate on the daily life and potential spiritual aspects of the people who had made the cave paintings. What was so unique about this film beyond the site itself was that Herzog filmed it in 3D, allowing the viewer to get a sense of depth that is usually not depicted in cinema. Looking into the dark recesses of the cave as they entered feels a bit like the suspense of going into a cave in the first person experience.
(Chauvet Cave Drawings. Source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1426/)
Seeing pictures and movies about caves can convey a lot of cultural context. But stepping into them is an altogether different experience that is hard to simulate through media. One of my most touching experiences I remember was a trip to Okinawa, where my grandfather had served in the military during WWII. He had told our family stories of the horrors of past wars he'd had to endure. I rented a car to drive to the sites I'd heard about from my grandfather's stories. One of the most touching experiences was visiting the Himeyuri Peace Memorial. This was the site of a cave where a group of young students had been conscripted into serving as a makeshift hospital for wounded soldiers. When the military advanced here, they were instructed to throw tear-gas into the cave to get any civilians to surrender. The children were too afraid to come out of the cave and suffocated there. The people of Okinawa built the museum on the site to commemorate the lives of the students who perished there and to chronicle the suffering of all people during the war, with a hope to see the end of wars globally.
Particularly touching for me was a dark room where each student was introduced by name with a placard of what was known about their lives. I saw the faces of youth and read the chronicles of their last days trying to save the lives of as many wounded people as they could. I came to understand the sense of fear they must have had when they crawled into the cave, never to come out. The final exhibit was a physical reconstruction of the cave that memorial visitors could go into to see what the mouth of the cave they stared up at must have looked like. This facsimile cave where I stood, looking out at the green trees in the sun conveyed something that reading and hearing stories never could.
(Himeyuri Peace Museum Cave. Source: https://jinotourblog.weebly.com/himeyuri-peace-museum)
So why all this talk of international travel, human heritage, history and venturing into caves you may wonder? I see it as metaphorically similar to the concept of emerging VR technology. In this new context, we put on a visor to give an ornate expression of something elsewhere (or elsewhen) by temporarily silencing the environment immediately around us. One of my earliest experiences of VR's potential was a tour of an Egyptian tomb for Nefertari. The simulated experience stitches together thousands of scaled images to give the viewer a sense of being present in the physical tomb in Luxor, Egypt. While being in a place physically has a visceral impact that is hard to describe, being able to represent an historic location through media gives the opportunity to have a glimpse of the same space such that many more people, who may not have the opportunity to travel, can experience it.
Now that LIDAR scanning has emerged as an accessible mainstream technology, we are able to create more of these realistic captures of caves and world monuments in ways that people anywhere can experience. A decade ago, I was able to experience the Keck Caves archeology project which seeks to capture underground archeological digs using LIDAR scanning with precise depth measurement which can be rendered as a point-cloud of map data to track physical attributes of a site during an excavation. Once the site is scanned, it can be studied by an unlimited number of later archaeologists in digital renderings without having any impact on the physical site itself by donning a set of glasses that reconstruct the parallax effect for depth perception. I was able to put on some early prototypes of VR 3D glasses then which allowed me to see depth perspective of the caves by rendering different images to my right and left eyes.
I was delighted to discover that archeologists are already publishing VR renderings of historical sites for the general consumer to experience the Egyptian tombs without having to fly around the world. When I planned my recent visit to Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia, I donned my VR headset to fly over the landscape in the Google Earth (former Keyhole acquisition) with pictures of the layout of the historic site. It's very exciting to see artists and game developers embracing 3D medium as a new means for artistic expression. But as a traveler, I want to see more world heritage sites. I tremendously admire the work of Zamani Project and Cyark to preserve more of our historical landmarks for future generations to discover via new media interfaces.
When I introduced my mother into the experience of VR, she made an astute observation. She didn't want to see synthetic renderings of artistic spaces. She wanted to use the lenses to see the astronomical photographs from the James Web Space Telescope, to see the edges of our universe in greater detail like a planetarium would show. Being able to fly to the edges of the observable cosmos based on the data we have on the structure of our tiny 13.8 billion year old spacetime bubble is not an incomprehensible challenge for the educators and developers to bring about in the coming decade. We have only just learned to see that far. Now making that vision accessible to all is within our technical grasp.
While the artistic opportunities of expression of VR are profound alone, it also allows us to see tremendous breadth of human history and culture by capturing the physical world for educational and tourist exploration. While it may strike some people as odd to wear glasses or head-mounted displays, the vision we can obtain by going into the dark helps us to see further than we otherwise might.
