Earth Child of Spiritual Democracy – Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)
Now, more than ever, we need to reconnect to Spiritual Democracy.
War, violence, and aggression directed inward toward a country’s citizens and outward toward other nations and peoples – is not democracy.
In our book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I dedicate chapter 14 to the topic of Spiritual Democracy:
“Spiritual Democracy is a living connection, allowing the flow of spirituality through our lives, embracing the divinity in all creatures and the divinity of the Earth. Spiritual democracy is the way we treat others when we learn to see the divine in all things and that we, too, are part of divinity. It is a sacred way of being. Periodically, we forget that we are divine as we live in this world of matter and go through its trials and travails. We, as individuals, as well as we as people, need periodic renewal at the font of spiritual democracy. To seek renewal is to be a Seeker, yet so many “religious” people are becoming fundamentalists.” p.381
Spiritual Democracy episode 5 of Becoming a True Human podcast with Chris Smith and Dave Kopacz is now available!
Ideas for finding micro-compassion breaks for self & others during these turbulent times.
Chris Smith facilitates a discussion with Dave Kopacz on the concept of Spiritual Democracy, which is a chapter from Dave’s book with Joseph Rael: Becoming Medicine. Spiritual Democracy asks each of us, citizens and politicians alike, to ask ourselves before speaking any words or taking any actions: “Am I starting with the heart? Am I using words to divide or to invite togetherness?”
We talk about Steven Hermann’s books, Spiritual Democracy and Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul. We also discuss Parker Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy and his idea of the two ways that the heart can break: 1) it can break apart, creating shards and wounds in self and others, or 2) it can break open into greater compassion. Chris also brings up Frank Ostaseski’s Five Invitations to be present with ourselves and others in the moment, opening up into fearless receptivity and continuous discovery of our lives during these turbulent times.
We offer practices for doing the work of Spiritual Democracy, including finding space within each breath for micro-compassion for your self and for others.
“Healing is a very simple thing – all you do is stop separating things – on whatever level the separation is occuring. Whether it is you viewing your body as separate from your mind or your spirit being separate from your mind, or you viewing yourself as separate from nature.” (David Kopacz)
I agree with Marianela – that whenever we talk – we could go on for 3 days! Such an interesting and heart-warming conversation! You can watch the video of the interview here.
My painting, Creation, is a large, 30×40″ painting. The bottom of the painting somehow is cut off in the book, but below is the full painting. It has some glow in the dark paint – a phase I went through that is nice when you turn off the lights because it is like having a painting hidden within a painting.
Creation, D. Kopacz
Joseph’s painting is Sun and Dancing Moonlight on the People of Mother Earth, painted in 2006. Joseph developed a Sun Moon Dance and it is still performed by people he taught it to all over the world.
Sun and Dancing Moonlight on the People of Mother Earth, J. Rael (2006)
An excerpt from this section of the book will appear in the Fall issue of Parabola. Here is a quote from Joseph in this section:
Joseph is continually teaching me about the circular nature of reality, saying that we are “circle people,” that “what comes around goes around,” and that “everything eventually becomes its opposite.” He also points out how the difference between a linear and circular perception is based on the perspective or paradigm through which you are perceiving. “Look at how we move in a circle, but then look at it from the side and it looks like we are moving forward and backward, back and forth. It depends on your perspective of seeing.”
Joseph told me that he uses four colors always in his rainbow paintings: yellow, orange, red, and blue – I follow his convention here.
Night Eyes of Direction Finder, Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) 2006
I love this painting of Joseph’s and it starts of Part I Separation (Seeking). Seeking is the start of everything, the start of the book, the start of life – the start of what we are trying to do at this very moment in history – seeking peace and love to move through these challenging times. The painting comes right before chapter 1, “Becoming Medicine.” Joseph’s quote we start off the chapter with is below:
“The thing I should have said in my books is that everyone already has their medicine. The way you become a medicine person is you practice who you are because you are already medicine. No one gives it to you, you are already it.”
The “Introduction” to Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality is my story and path of how I came to meet and work with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). Thus, more of the paintings in this chapter are mine. The two that follow are The Hero’s Journey and the Medicine Wheel of the Heart.
The Hero’s Journey, D. Kopacz, 2014
The Hero’s Journey painting was an example of the Hero’s Journey project that we invite veterans to do at the end of the 12-week Hero’s Journey class. The project invites the veteran to bring together the personal & universal into a creative project. Some veterans have done paintings, drawings, maps of their time in the service, writing and performing a song, and even multimedia art installations. I painted this as an example for the class. It is a 36″ x 36″ square canvas, divided into the stages of the Hero’s Journey and the quoted text around the circle is made up of various quotes by Joseph Campbell that pertain to that step of the journey.
Medicine Wheel of the Heart, D. Kopacz, c. 2016-2017
This was my attempt to bring together, in a visual format, Joseph Rael’s teachings about the medicine wheel. An earlier medicine wheel was published in Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD. The Medicine Wheel brings together the four outer directions of North, South, East, West, and the four inner directions of Mind, Emotions, Physical, and Spiritual. Each direction also has a corresponding vowel sound: A (ah), E (eh), I (ee), O (oh), U (uu) – pronounced as the vowels are in Spanish. There is also a princple idea associataed with each direction: Purity, Placement, Awareness, Innocence, and in the Center – Carrying.
As I was working on Becoming Medicine, I conceptualized it as a continuation of the journey started in Walking the Medicine Wheel. In Walking the Medicine Wheel, we worked to integrate the four outer and four inner directions and ended with connecting to the “held-back place of goodness” in the heart. In Becoming Medicine, I saw us as entering deeper into the heart center. I found Joseph’s comment about human beings as “medicine bags” to be useful here and that the purpose of the book was two-fold: to find the “sacred objects” which are hidden in our own hearts bringing them back for communal healing, and to go even deeper into a state of non-duality. In Walking the Medicine Wheel, Joseph said, “I am my brother’s keeper.” Joseph wanted to teach veterans that we are all brothers and sisters and we are all related. Becoming Medicine is about going beyond the affiliation of relation into a sense of oneness, non-duality – this is the state that mystics and visionaries know and it is the place of ultimate peace. This insight, or enlightenment about our non-separateness from other living beings and the material world is an initiation into a new relationship with the land and into spiritual democracy. As with many mystical traditions, when you make your secret journey you will find that what you were seeking is already within the medicine bag of your heart.
Detail from In The Many Windows of the Dream Time of Mother Earth, J. Rael, 2005
I just came across Kosmos: Journal of Global Transformation in the past few months and we are so excited and honored to have this essay published in this journal with such a needed and important focus. You need to set up an account to view our article, but it is free of charge and Kosmos does not have any advertising in it – just pure ideas of goodness & transformation! I loved the first article I read, “What if the Virus is the Medicine: Humanity’s Next Initiation,” by Julia Hartsell & Jonathan Hadas Edwards – it seemed so resonant with the work that Joseph & I have been doing in our book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into A Living Spirituality. Then I read Martin Winiecki’s “Searching for the Anti-Virus: Covid-19 as Quantum Phenomenon,” which was also very good and features images from Jung’s Red Book along the margin of the page.
This current issue of Kosmos: Journal of Global Transformation has a beautiful essay by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “The Labyrinth and the Black Madonna: Love and Earth Magic.” Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi mystic, is a wonderful writer, whose work I discovered late in the game of writing our last book, we cite his work a few times. He has written a number of great books, including The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul and Spiritual Ecology: the Cry of the Earth. Take a look at this and some of the other great articles as well in this issue of Kosmos, In the Labyrinth: Pathways to Healing.
“We are living in disruptive times, yet there have been other times as equally disruptive. People lived through pandemics, plagues, pestilence, famines, natural disasters, slavery, genocide, oppression, and wars upon wars. How did they do it? I believe there is a secret well of resilience and wisdom within the human being—located in the heart—where we find our medicine.” (Kopacz & Rael)
Binding Sites of Coronavirus COVID-19, D. Kopacz, 2020Dream of a Bat, D. Kopacz 2020
“I am you and you are me. There’s only one being here, and even though you have a different body, I have a different body, and a different moment, but we are in this together, you know, and people don’t understand that.”
Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow)
(from Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, pg. 379)
Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) speaks on initiation and becoming medicine, joined by David Kopacz, MD at Joseph’s home in New Mexico. This video features an initiation ceremony in which Joseph tells the story of eagle-man who is initiated into becoming a true human being by the ancient one. The idea of becoming medicine is developed in the book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality by David R. Kopacz, MD & Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow).
You can watch the video through my website. We have a couple of other videos we will be releasing soon…
What a great week – Earth Day and World Book Day back to back!
The Earth gives us so much to be thankful for and her beauty is even more apparent and more easily appreciated during these times of a more inward focus. It is easier to hear the birds and working from home I look out my window often to see Stellar’s Jays, Chickadees, Juncos, and today I even saw an Audubon’s Warbler!
I’m grateful to have been able to bring forth, in these books, what is within me and to release this out into the world.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (The Gospel of Thomas, in The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels)
A Bowl Full of Ideas for Inventive Minds, Joseph Rael (BPA) 2009
Joseph and I are working on our next book together which will be a book of initiation and instruction for 10-12 year old children, drawing on Joseph’s experiences and what he thinks it is important for human beings growing up into this world to know about the world and themselves. We are calling it, A Bowl Full of Ideas for Inventive Minds. More to come…
May the books of all of the authors of the world contribute to realizing our inner spiritual humanity, our outer spiritual democracy, and helps us to remove obstacles and division to allow us all to live in peace, peace within our hearts and peace within the world.
Being Fully Human 