About Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)

Joseph Rael, whose name, Tsluu teh koy ay, given to him as a child at Picuris Pueblo, means “Beautiful Painted Arrow,” is widely regarded as one of the great Native American holy men of our time. He was born in 1935 on the Southern Ute reservation to a chief’s granddaughter and a Tiwa-speaking Picuris native. At about age 7, shortly before his mother’s death, he went to live in Picuris near Taos, NM, where his visionary powers were developed until, at about age 12, he began to assist the village holy man in curing practices.

He was educated both at Santa Fe Indian school and public high school before getting a BA in political science from the University of New Mexico and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For a number of years he worked in various capacities in Indian health and social services in both New Mexico and Colorado.

At age 45 he quit his social services job to devote full time to teaching and following his visions wherever they might lead. In 1983 Joseph had the vision to build a Sound Peace chamber, a kiva-like structure where people of all races might gather to chant and sing for world peace and to purify the earth and oceans. He built the first such chamber at his then-home, a trailer park in Bernalillo, NM, and shortly like-minded people began to build Sound Peace chambers in other locations.

At present, Sound Peace chambers have been built around the globe. Writes Joseph, “My vision is that through sound we will bring about peace and other important vibrations. Sound can teach us a way to create without destruction.” Meanwhile, Joseph began leading ceremonial dances, based on his visions, with participants from all races and nationalities. “When you dance you are expanding the vibrations of insight and manifestation,” he writes. “I created three dances — the long dance, the sun-moon dances and the drum dance—for these spiritual gifts.”

Joseph teaches that “Every dance, every ceremony, is both for you and for the cosmos.” In 1999, Joseph retired from active leadership of the dances he had begun, turning them over to a new generation of his students. Joseph Rael is the author of a number of books, including Being and Vibration, Way of Inspiration, Ceremonies of the Living Spirit, and House of Shattering Light, and Sound: Native Teachings and Visionary Art, He is also an artist. His paintings, like his ceremonies and teachings, are based on his visions. They have been called “portal” art, because they open a doorway into alternate dimensions of reality. As a Native American elder Joseph Rael has spoken before the United Nations and addressed a conference of military officers at the Pentagon on the role of the warrior in the modern world. More about Joseph Rael’s life can be read in his autobiography, House of Shattering Light.

Dear Peace Chamber Community,

Most of you have heard Joseph Rael, Beautiful Painted Arrow, speak about inter-dimensional and intergalactic travel. I remember Joseph telling the story of his ancestors traveling to distant galaxies in a tube of light. I also remember his story about his own inter-dimensional visit to the Mer-people who gave him the fire ceremony we do every month.

This past November Judith Brooks, Christine Booth and I travelled to New Mexico and were blessed to interview and video Joseph. Joseph had several new visions he wanted to share with our Chamber Community of how we will travel to the stars. He also spoke of the Mer-people and their underwater cities in the ocean.

Joseph drew these two visionary art pieces that help to explain his vision. We would appreciate your sharing any thoughts you have about this and other Joseph teachings in the comments below.

Joseph sends his blessings for the New Year with this teaching. Please enjoy this video of his beautiful vision of the future.

Planting Global Peace Song

Dunh wee no hey
n’oh wee nai yo
Yai how hey yo hey hey hey hey
yo hey no o o (repeat)
Duhn wee ho hey n’oh way nai yo
Yai how ay yo hey hey hey hey
Duhn wee no hey n’oh way nai yo
Yai how ay yo hey hey hey hey
Yo hey no o o
Ya way no hey
n’oh yai ho way nai ho
when i hai
when i hai
Ya way no hey
n’oh yai ho way nai yo
when i hai
when I hai

Peace Chambers

In the summer of 1983 I was sun dancing when the vision came of a man standing, looking at me. He moved toward me, then suddenly he disappeared, and where he had been I saw an oval-shaped chamber. Inside that chamber were men and women singing. It was being revealed to me that I was to build sound peace chambers where people could chant for world peace.

Somehow the Vast Self was involved in the sound chamber, not just the individual self. I already knew that what we recognized as the personal self is but an echo of the Vast Self, which is the eternal Self. Somehow I knew that the sound chamber had something to do with how the eternal Self was involving all of our lives holistically, and that sound is another form of holism that is an ingredient of our physical well-being, our planetary well-being, our environmental well-being.

When I had this vision, I spoke to the United Nations about it, because I recognized the UN as the entity for world peace. Today, we have sound peace chambers in countries all over the world, including the United States.

In another vision I was instructed to build ceremonial fires in the sound peace chambers. I built the first fire on April 7, 1984, and now ask keepers of the sound peace chambers around the world to light a fire on the seventh of every month.

It is 24 years since I had the vision to create the chambers, and 24 years is a sacred time in our tribal tradition, a time when the energy of power expands to all the different directions and to the galaxies. I am asking for the people all over the world to think about peace in their homes and their lives and their families.

You are here at this time because you are supposed to be here. As you are peaceful, you will pass this peace to your children and grandchildren, and they will grow up to BE the peace of the whole world. A-ho!

The New Vision

At the Ute Sundance in July of 2014 I had a vision. I was lying on the ground by the sweat lodge when a being came to me. In my Pueblo culture a vision can be personal, or it can be for the People. This vision was to share with the People, especially the People who are the caretakers of the Sound Chambers around the world.

The Sound Chambers were created to bless All the People so even if someone has never been inside a Sound Chamber this vision is still for them too. After all, each of us with our breath and our voice is a Sound Chamber.

In my culture everything is alive and vibrating—a vision is alive and vibrating and might be shared with the People as a dance, or as a drawing, or as a ritual, or a song. When we get a vision for a dance, we dance the way the vision teaches us, but remember, the dance and the vision are alive, and everything alive can evolve and change. We do the dance as we were taught, and then a new vision will come to the People and we will dance that new vision awake.

I want to share my vision with you, and I want to share its aliveness so you can feel and be a part of its unfolding. This new vision had its beginning in 1983. I wrote about it in Being & Vibration. To me, Being & Vibration is a living book that can mature and evolve. The vision I had at the Ute Sundance is part of the vision I had in 1983. I had the first part of the
vision in 1983. In 1984 I had the second part. When I wrote about these two visions in Being & Vibration I wrote that it was predicted that there would be a third part of the vision. This third vision would be revealed in time. Now 32 years after the first vision, the third vision has come.

Here is the vision for the Sound Chambers that I had in 1983, and the third vision that I had at the Sun Dance this year in 2014.

Prayer and ceremony have always been an important part of my life. I was taught by my father and my father’s people to pray all the time by becoming the being of movement, of speaking, of writing. I was taught that everything is sacred and alive. I was taught to honor all principal ideas by keeping a continual state of prayer with their essences, every single moment of my life.

I asked for a vision which might show me how best to serve the earth and honor all life, to honor walking on the surface of the earth at this time. Then, in the summer of 1983, I received a vision. I had this vision partly because I was trying, through prayer, to keep a connection with the reality that everything is sacred and alive. Also, I came from parenting that trained me for visions. I was told by my parents and grandparents that it was my destiny to have visions. I was taught that life is the visionary unfolding of the Great Mystery, and so, in its image, we too are visionary by nature.

My vision came during a Long Dance. The Cosmic Mother-Father being came in a flash of light, a point of illumination which lasted only two or three seconds. I cannot begin to explain this vision, it was so beautiful. I then slowed down time and went back into the vision to have another look.
In the vision I was shown people praying (directing our faith) and singing (bonding our faith with the present) together in a sacred Sound Chamber resonating with light. The chamber was an oval structure of mud (matter carrying direction) and straw (ancient knowledge), partly underground (underworld) and partly above ground (middle world). It was a house of the
sound of presentness, a structure built to reverberate sound. The melodious chanting of men (essence of expanding light) and women (essence of descending light) was a reflection of people whose spirits and voices resonated in absolute harmony to balance the present, the future, and the memory of how the cosmos is oriented, through the use of sound.

In the vision, I was given my task—to build Sound Chambers around the world. It would seem that, having had this powerful experience, I would have a fearless commitment to honor that clear knowing. What followed, though, was the testing of the commitment, a period of deep self-questioning. Called by whatever name, it was doubt, and doubt stayed with
me for some time. And then a reminder came.

This time, it was a waking experience and a woman played the role of initiator. She was probably not aware what role she was playing, but she was an instrument of the divine, nonetheless! On the insistence of this woman, I went to see a particular site, an ancient ruin near Cortez, Colorado. Here were ancient chambers similar to those I had seen in my vision. I was being reminded of my task. This experience foreshadowed what was to come.

I began looking for somewhere to build a chamber. For several months, I considered various sites, but I couldn’t find any land that seemed suitable. Then, three months after the original vision, I had another vision.

This time I was in Bernalillo, New Mexico, at my home, and was outside doing ceremony in the sweat lodge.  Suddenly, I was taken up to a realm above the clouds, maybe thirty thousand feet or so above the ground, and was faced with a Council of Elders. There were a group of twelve or so wise men draped in red blankets, sitting in a circle.

I was asked the question I had been avoiding: “Why have you not built the chambers?” I wanted to elaborate on how I had been busy searching out the right place with just the right environment, and how nothing had seemed suitable. Rather than a complicated explanation, which I knew would
be unacceptable, I simply said: “I could not find a place.”

Almost immediately, I was taken and placed next to the sweat lodge. I looked up and I saw an angelic being descending as a ring of light on a shaft of light, while I heard a voice in the background saying, “We will show you where to build it.” The ring of light descended into my garden plot right beside my house. This was where the chamber was to be built. In awe, I
watched as a second circle of light manifested inside the first. In this circle an angel appeared, holding a child in its arms. The angel placed the baby in the center of the first circle while saying these words: “Now you must raise this child!”

After I had the vision with the Angel and the child I put a clay pot I had made and fired outside and filled it with water from the Rio Grande River. The Rio Grande was special to me because it represented the celestial Milky Way. The pot with water in it reflected the lights of the starry northern New Mexico sky. The next morning, as the rising sun’s rays mingled in the water with the star light of the night I blessed the site where the Angel had appeared with the child. The site of the original Sound Chamber had been chosen, not in an isolated area or some beautifully forested mountaintop, but on a site located on a small, dry, flat strip of land in a New Mexico trailer park. Here simple houses crowd in on both sides amid the blaring of too-loud stereos, interspersed with the laughter and conversation of day-to-day life and the occasional clanging of the train as it rumbles past on the nearby railroad tracks.

Smiling over it all would be the ever-present face of the Sandia Mountains, metaphor for the Heart of God. It seemed the perfect paradox. The first Sound Chamber would be built on that ring of light where the angel appeared. And it would now be my work to raise that child of light.

The next day I dug up my garden to begin building a chamber in spite of my wife’s public contestation. In the vision the Sound Chamber was an egg-shaped oval built half in and half out of the ground. It would sit where the earth and sky meet, to unite the masculine and feminine. By so doing, it
would bring wholeness, harmony, and peace on an inner level to the individual; on a political level to all humanity, and on a cosmic level to the universe. I knew in those moments immediately following the vision that the chamber was the circle of light, and the child had been planted inside the heart that all life everywhere might manifest its goodness.

Purpose of Sound Chambers
To date many Sound Chambers have been completed around the globe, including in areas as widespread as Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Scotland, South America, and the United States; others continue to be built. Each of these chambers has its own integrity, purpose, and particular qualities. Each is the result of the committed efforts of a few individuals.

The chambers help us to access wisdom from an ancient source. They act as a mouthpiece for the higher mind to amplify the call for that which we need at this time on the earth, and they help all who walk upon her. By building
chambers on the surface of the earth, a web of light is created so that a person making sound inside a chamber sets up a continuous resonance around the earth.

All chambers have a spiritual generator. They generate twenty-four hours a day and they are going on now. They will continue to be active forever like the first chamber I built in Bernalillo. It no longer exists in the physical but was carried up to another dimension where it is still active. When people come and want to build a Sound Chamber they think they are calling it in because they love the idea. Really the chambers are the ones that call us, and then we decide to build them. The energy that the chambers are broadcasting is calling the people to come to be part of the chamber community.

We are each made from music. Every one of us was creatively inspired from our dreamtime. Our creator made us from principal ideas, or fundamental truths which inhabit and govern the cosmos. Our main purpose in life is to dialogue with the self-empowering qualities of these principal ideas that
were instilled in us, and in the physical beauty of the earth.

Working as a group, people then become a collective instrument of the resonance of beauty for a particular sound. Each Sound Chamber would become its own syllable signature because of its placement on the surface of the earth, and each chamber holds a specific purpose. That specific purpose
or principle idea would be amplified by the geological and geographical sound particular to each place.

In a chant, the vowels carry the essential meaning or fundamental truth embedded in each syllable, and the consonants propel, or give form. Like ripples across the lake, the sound waves move out into the earth from each chamber. These waves then open the earth to healing from the ancient
sacred places where wisdom has been stored for countless eons.

The visionary child placed in the circle of light in the first chamber is a symbol of the vision’s purpose. The child matured and started to teach. The chambers became active when the child reached the age of twelve. Among my own people, twelve is the age when parents must release a child to be trained by the elders and to take his or her place in the collective.

I wrote in Being & Vibration that the third part of the vision had yet to be revealed. This part of the vision would show why the child had come to be raised in the chamber, and why the angelic beings brought him to earth. This part of the vision would, I believe, show that Sound Chambers exist as a light grid beyond the beyond.”