The next two paintings from Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality are both by Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow). These two take us into the central chapter of the book, Chapter 0: “Na-Yo Ti-Ay We-Ah (We Don’t Exist).”

Na-yo ti-ay we-ah is a complicated concept. Joseph says it means “I don’t exist.” He teaches that most of the time we don’t exist because we are trying to persist in some kind of state. The times where we really exist are when we are entering into the new and the spontaneous – when non-ordinary reality is perfusing ordinary reality. The first place he explained this to me was when we first met and we were sitting in the rental car prior to Joseph directing me to drive around to different places on the land where key events happened for him. We were talking and then he said – “There, did you see that? We were just sitting here, but then all of a sudden we both started to get really animated – that was the place where we were existing.”

The first painting is titled “Planet Earth (Our Mother),” yet it has a lot of words on it, including Wa-Ma-Chi, the Tiwa word for God. The other text on the painting reads, “Planets of outer space – to our ancient relatives who have always lived there. We ask for your help – a passage way up. Offering to the Sky and All Our Relations. Earth children. Children of Mother Earth. Help!”

I’d like to include a section of dialogue with Joseph that led to him telling me about sending the above painting.

I asked Joseph what the Tiwa word for “zero” is. “Y-we-ah” he said, “the flesh does not exist.” And then he said:

“Ok, hold it right there. We are not going to go to the East or the West, we are not going to go to the North of the South. We are not going to go up or down. Write this down, I’m going to say it to you in Spanish. La vida no mas un sueño es. In English that means, ‘Life is but a dream.’ This life is not real. This life is a dream. We have talked ourselves into believing we are our ordinary reality bodies. We use these ordinary bodies to complain, to get in the car, to go around. In this life we are addictable. Use that word, I know I am making things up—we are addictable, we are addicted to this life of ordinary reality. We think we are going from 1 to 10, but we are already at ten (tehn-ku-teh). We were at number eight 10,000 years ago, but we are stuck because we are very addictable, we are stuck hanging on to life, we are hung up on the physical. Enticing as life is, it is a dream. Now, 99% of people are going to disagree with this. They are supposed to disagree because they decided to go with teamwork. All these generations have been stuck because we are very addicted to the idea of being solid, physical ideas—this leads to the idea of property and property leads to conflict. So now we have property problems between the Indians and the United States.

“The point for me—I’m being told, ‘Look you dummy, you are going around in circles, 10,000 years and you are still going around in circles.’ Every now and then, I see ancestors looking down from above—I climb and climb and climb all the way up there. They tell me, look, your ancestors got hooked on the physical. That is why they are still here but they are not supposed to be, they were supposed to have moved on. The trees stayed here with us because they love us. Plants stayed and that is where we got our language from. The mermen were planted in the ocean and now they are stuck here with us, too. It is like that man in the Bible who was stuck inside a whale—that’s us! We got addicted to the sunrise and the sunset, to seeing rainbows, then we got stuck in going to school, going to college, learning things so that we could get rich. We got stuck getting rich, traveling all over the place.

“We better start getting the message, La vida no mas un sueño es. It is dream, dream, dream! We have invested in our landedness, we get money and we buy land. We get a little money and then we buy property and we are stuck with ownership.

“This is what the Story Teller was telling us in the Picuris Children’s stories. I heard these when I was eight or nine years old. [He speaks for a while in Tiwa]. ‘Look up at the stars, they are like little bits of sand. That is where our ancestors are living. We are down here and we are supposed to be up there.’ Then they put you in a square sand box and you play with the sand. Look at people’s attraction to the ocean. They’ll travel across the world to put their feet in the sand and the ocean. They are trying to realize that they are the grains of sand and the grains of sand are the stars and that we do not belong here.

“It’s raining right now—finally I’m saying something worthwhile. This is more rain than I have seen in ten years. They’re saying, ‘Dang, David, you finally got it—you and that crazy Joseph Rael!’

“I was driving this morning and I saw a giant cloud and there was a rainbow up front on the left and then it went over and it was on the right, too. I was driving through it. The last time I saw that was driving back from Madison when I was in graduate school. It was around a place on the border of New Mexico and Texas called Texico. I drove through that rainbow and I thought, ‘It’s time to call David!’

“There’s something going on here that I’m not even going to try to explain.”

I totally resonate with this last statement and momentarily wonder if I can just say that in the book: “There’s something going on here that I’m not even going to try to explain!” But then Joseph continues and he tells me I do need to explain some things.

“We’re supposed to be here, you and I, for some dastardly reason. We need to put something in the book about what all this flooding in the world is about according to the mystic. Schools should be teaching this to kids. We need to understand that in non-ordinary reality we can leave these ordinary bodies behind. We can go out into outer space, to the moon, to other planets.

“We need to start with the premise that everything becomes its opposite. You are a scholar, you can explain this. We started with Pangea, the Indians came across the land bridge, across the straits. You need to orient people to where they come from and then tell them the statistics of what will happen with the flooding and rising oceans on the coasts. You have to look at where there is a lot of land and sooner or later that will turn into its opposite, a lot of water.

“I’m going to send you an art piece. In it I am asking for the people from outer space to come give us some technology. They can do it in our dreams, maybe the dream of a young scientist who will then get that idea to make something.” (Becoming Medicine, 308-310)