Joseph Rael - Being and Vibration

Contents

Introduction

S ome meetings are Divine Appointments. Such, I believe, was the case with my meeting with Beautiful Painted Arrow (Joseph Rael) some ten years ago. Joseph had come to Virginia Beach to teach a weekend seminar. I remember taking a solitary walk down a path in the woods and stopping dead-still when Joseph approached coming from the opposite direction. We looked intently at each other. It was a sacred moment. There were no words spoken, yet there was a great deal communicated. Inside him was deep peace. One thing I knew, this man is a keeper of the ancient wisdom. Here is the soul of a mystic, one who has merged with the heart of God.

It took five years for our paths to cross again. I had just returned from India, culminating a seventeen-year exploration in Eastern thought, with a sense that it was now time to immerse myself in the mysticism of my own land. As if on cue, Joseph reappeared in my life. With little need for re-introductions, we began teaching seminars and retreat programs together. Joseph impacts those around him on a multitude of levels. Whenever I am in his presence, there is the sense of automatically being shifted up an octave to a higher level of awareness, so I found myself learning from him, often without any conscious effort on my part.

This has become my greatest adventure, one which has catapulted me into experiences which heretofore I would have considered miraculous. Now I view them as a natural part of what happens when one is moved to a higher octave of vibration.

Any confusion over seemingly conflicting forms from various traditions soon faded. I quickly grew to honor the Native American tradition in which Joseph is rooted and to understand both the value of form and the paradox of not getting stuck in the form, (as Joseph often says) for ultimately all form must be transcended. Though Joseph is Native American, his vision is not limited to one tradition or one philosophy. It comes from a resonating vibration which lifts us to a level of consciousness beyond form, a place where we discover our own myth-making ability.

Writing a book with Joseph has been an adventure of another kind, a profound myth-making process. The time we spent working on the book together could be defined as extended time, a vibration where there is no rush and the seemingly impossible becomes possible.

My task was to pull delicate threads together and weave those threads into an exquisite tapestry. Sometimes I had very little information about one of the stories and would need to persist to get the necessary details. At times, my questions would surprise Joseph, for the extraordinary is so much a part of his ordinary. My one desire was that I would become so transparent that what would be given in this text would be pure Joseph. I wanted others to experience what I had in working on this book, a sense of falling in love with life and being induced into a higher level of consciousness.

It has been said, Without a vision, a people perish. Within the last decade there has been a reemergence of myths, a retelling of the great stories. Myths hold the power to rekindle vision, for they speak the language of the soul. Through the work of Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Robert Bly, Jean Bolen and countless others, we have been awakened to the possibilities of the heroic journey, the quest, and the rites of passage, tasks, and initiations along the way. Myths give us the map to that journey, showing us how to separate from the familiar, how to resolve differences and meet challenges, and then to return as a more integrated self. Myths inextricably link us to the mystery of the cosmos and to the natural world around us. Ultimately, they connect us more deeply to ourselves.

The gift of Joseph Rael is to help us cross the threshold from the place where we tell the myth and move to the place where we become the myth.

Joseph speaks from the place of the myth-maker. His vision, personal stories, and teaching re-enchant life. They come from a place of innocence and purity, from the transcendent realm, where a thin veil separates the seen from the unseen world. As we hear his stories, our chords of memory are stirred and we are inspired to the Greater Self. We, too, slip into those places where God hides, where all becomes the silence, and then listen within while that Presence speaks.

The call that Joseph presents is not to try and emulate his life but to enter our own lives more courageously, more passionately, more genuinely. We are inspired to trust the truth of our own visions and of our own discoveries and to dare to live that truth. The challenge, then, is to be the creative myth-maker that we are, to consciously choose our myth, lest it be chosen for us by the collective mind. We are empowered to live the symbolic life, to experience all life as the metaphor of the mind of God.

Mary Elizabeth Marlow

Virginia Beach, 1993

Life is the road of Goodness.

Life is connected to time

as crystallized meanings.

Life purifies itself with heart connection

so it can ascend beyond the heavens as radiating innocence.

Chapter One

Born into Vibration

Bonding with the Land

When one grows up in the ancient teaching that everything is metaphor and is a resonating energy of the Great Spirit, then all life is sacred.

The Picuris pueblo where I grew up was a living being with a psyche of individuals made up into a group that I began to know as my fathers people. The village was architecturally designed so it would continually give sustenance to the people who lived there. Because we were there we lived our moments inside resonance. The village was not just a physical place, it was a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual place as well.

The design of the architecture was made from ancestral memory and of moments not yet born and the opportunity to explore potential. There was purpose in both the design of the houses and the layout of the village. The women were the descending light principle, therefore they were in charge of the household. And yet the houses were square, the shape symbolic of the masculine. The men, on the other hand, went into kivas for their spiritual training, and the kivas were round, the shape symbolic of the feminine. Even as a boy of six or seven, already the round structure of my femininity was expanding the potential in my masculinity because alchemically I was growing into my opposite, that I might learn balance of male and female. What was being taught was that one first accepts the energy that he / she is born into and then learns its opposite, so that one can become integrated and balanced.

As children we were taught that we existed as pressure point activators for the sacred sites within the village. Every twenty feet or so were consecrated points on the ground which carried special blessings. These shrines were buried in the ground and were only visible to the inner eye. As we walked through the village, we pushed them into aliveness with our bodies pressure on them. Because we lived as energy, we began to understand that everything in each designated location was the resonating vibration of the play of principal ideas. The holy shrines were placed there because the vibrational essence of those holy sites would enhance the psyche of community and of each individual within community. The vibration would bond us to a love relationship, a knowing that life was in love with us, that we held the living life within our lives. This knowing kept me loyal to my beloved landscape.