When the drum began to beat, I sought out in my mind places I had known which
might provide the access I was looking for. I visualized a couple of places that had
been important to me and which I thought might work…but neither seemed right; then
there was a high cave at Pyramid Lake in Nevada, mysterious and with a grand view,
but it seemed like an awfully long tunnel I would have to travel from up there; finally
there was a majestic cave from my childhood, one of those tourist places; was it called
“Ruby Cave”? It was somewhere in the South, maybe Georgia, or North Carolina.
Anyway, it was full of stalactites and stalagmites—a REAL cave. I moved off into a
dark and narrow area and found, not the cave of my childhood fantasies with animals
and dragons and beasts of every kind, but a new kind of cave. Concentric rings of
light and dark opened up around me and seemed to carry me along them. It was not
so much a sense that I was moving through the tunnel but that it was moving along
me. At first the rings were circular, but they changed shape and became vertical
ellipses, always concentric and always moving. The alternating patterns of dark and
light were faintly reminiscent of a glow caught between the ridges of a corrugated pipe.
From time to time I became impatient that the tunnel seemed to go on and on; then I
would remind myself that, although it would be nice to experience whatever was
beyond the tunnel, it was enough that I was experiencing the tunnel. The vertical
ellipses shifted and gave way to horizontal ones which, after a time, opened up
gradually along the horizontal axis and began to break up, giving way to a gray and
dimly lit landscape—an underground sea—which I passed over for a long time,
closely watching the waves rise, gather and move away beneath me.
The tunnel which brought me to this place had been at a slightly downward angle of
perhaps fifteen degrees; but now the darkened sky over this underground sea
directed me into another tunnel which took an immediate and downward turn of ninety
degrees and I was again being carried through it, but it. Its walls were once again the
by now familiar concentric circles of light and shade, almost pulsing me through; there
was no sense of falling but of quite deliberate movement.
I was surprised to hear myself being called back, and reluctantly I allowed myself to
return, somewhat disappointed at not coming to the end of the tunnel and, at the
same time, amazed at the experience. The return itself was quick and easy. The
sense of discovery and of awe remains.
The Way of the Shaman
Michael Harner
Harper SanFrancisco
1990
