What is enlightenment? Author/mystic Ronda LaRue says it is "Re-membering Who You Really Are"...

In this candid and deeply engaging 30-minute interview, author/mentor Ronda LaRue shares her own story of "undoing" and "the dark night of soul" that led to her spiritual work, deep insights and unique mentoring approach.  A very insightful and evocative interview for those on the journey of awakening to their true Divinity and freedom of Being.

This interview was conducted at Ronda LaRue's artisan home in Ojai California , where she accepts applicants into a completey customized and totally private one-on-one retreat intensive and apprenticehip program with her called Ojai Soul Arts.  This exceptionally powerful private mentoring work is offered in a very novel and artsy verson of the vision quest for radical healing, sacred clarity, and spiritual self-Realization. 

See http://www.OjaiSoulArts.com for more information about Ronda's work, writings, private retreat & apprenticeship programs.

Ojai Soul Arts, and the work of spiritual author, Ronda LaRue, is featured this month in the prestigious Asia Spa Magazine as one of ten top retreats in the world for our individually-tailored spiritual retreats!

In this short article, Ronda LaRue, shares the secret behind why her very natural and unassuming Ojai Soul Arts has received such a dignified feature and beckons you to your own inner soul arts quest in a free demonstration of the art of soul.

STORY FEATURE FROM ASIA SPA MAGAZINE:

Soul Arts in California

"The connection between art and spirituality is well documented around the world, and can be individually developed at the Soul Arts centre in Southern California, where spiritual author, Ronda LaRue holds private spiritual retreats. Three-and-a-half-day retreats include one-on-one SoulSpeak insight sessions designed to unlock one's inner wellbeing and spiritual truths.  The on-site spa, art studio and meditation [hut] help take guests into a different world, concentrating on what lies within rather than without. Six-month and 18-month retreats are also available, designed for those who feel called to heal and work with others to empower and inspire. http://www.OjaiSoulArts.com"
- as printed in Asia Spa Magazine, Jan/Feb, 2007

Ojai Soul Arts Salon is a unique private artisan home sanctuary in Ojai California designed for private spiritual retreats and mystery school apprenticeship training programs (non-denominational, embracing world-wide sacred texts and wisdom traditions) hosted and facilitated by internationally recognized author, artist and spiritual guide, Ronda LaRue, M.S.

Ojai Soul Arts is a place that honors deep spiritual listening, playful creative arts, flamboyant visionary notions as well as the difficult challenges, transitions, and sufferings that so often come to us on the very precipice of recovering our Soul's greatest longing to live fully. Many who come to work with Ronda at her private retreat are faced with major life transitions, health crisis, and the desire (as one man diagnosed with stage four lung cancer put it): to learn what it is to fully live and love before I die.  Isn't that what we all want to learn?

As Ronda says on her  Ojai  Soul Arts web site introduction: It doesn't matter what key brings you to this doorway of remembering who you really are. It may be labeled as depression, anxiety, troubled relationships or divorce; a health crisis; a career change, addiction, or the soul longing to reveal its truth for your life.These quests are each, at their root, a spiritual journey to find the "peace that passes all understanding" through reclaiming the lost and wounded parts of self that bring you to wholeness and unique living mastery.

What Ronda has discovered and helps to facilitate in those who come to work with her, is the key to finding your own natural healing wholeness, passionate artistry, and deepest life purpose.  As Ronda puts it, we're all artists just waiting to be discovered.

In the short remainder of this article, Ronda shares with you a specific exercise she says can quickly lead you closer to discovering that unique creative genius and purpose that is YOU!

A Soul Quest Quickie:

Take just a moment, and with a willing "leap of faith", set your intention to know your deepest soul's purpose, and then ask yourself this one questions:

1) At my deepest core, or from my heart, what is the one thing I most deeply long for in my life?

If your initial answer seems a bit trite or confused ...or just plain "not there", take 7 very slow deep breaths into your body, settle your focus of attention into your lower belly, and ask your body (not your mind) this same question again...And just see what comes up! What you see, sense or, intuit.

2) Then, sometime yet today (critically  important!), find at least a few minutes more and create some kind of direct and symbolic action, or ceremony, that you feel reflects and "stands vigil" for what you have seen/felt.. In the symbolic action you create, be as imaginative and close as possible to touching the truest depth of feeling in what you answered to this question.

3) And then, for the next 2-3 weeks, just notice what starts to come up in your life, your dreams and your thoughts, feelings and observations around this "vigil" you have created...

If you do this with heart and gusto and attention, I promise, you'll be amazed!

...And if you feel so inclined, please feel free to contact me and let me know what you have discovered. Blessings to you on your sacred passage to wholeness!
 - Namaste! Ronda LaRue, http://www.OjaiSoulArts.com

c. ronda larue, 2003. All rights reserved.

What is a Mystery School

and What's it Have to do with Me and You?

By Ronda LaRue

We cannot and do not change our world unless and until we ourselves are changed by the light of our inner divinity. Are you ready to ignite your light and give it fully to the world as only you were born to do? Welcome to the Mystery School of You!...

I invite your deep inner reflection on the nature of why you are here and what it means to be wholly in relationship with the divinity of Life.

Working Definition of Mystery School
Societal Misunderstanding and Cultural Implications
Earth Survival and Evolution of the Species
The Call to Awaken

MYSTERY SCHOOL DEFINED

So, just what is a Mystery School ?  What's it have to do with me or you and our contemporary culture? And what's the Mystery behind Mystery Schools anyway?

The Mystery School is sometimes referred to as a university of the soul.  It is a study of the mysteries of the inner nature of human consciousness and living relationships. By understanding these mysteries, one comes to perceive his or her intimate relationship to all living things, and strives to live at one with that divinity. (The Mystery Schools ; Grace F. Knoche; Theosophical University Press; 1940.). 

At its very essence, a Mystery School is a form of experiential training for those seeking direct self-realization and spiritual awareness.  A Mystery School is not so much a place, really. Rather, it is a method of teaching that is based on facilitating your direct personal insight and experiential understanding of what it means to be fully alive.  A Mystery School is first and foremost a lifelong commitment to discovering and maturing in your own inner wisdom and divinity.

Put more simply? Training in the Mysteries shows you how to find, know, and follow the inner guidance and divinity that is seeded within your own nature. Students who enter an inner and outer Mystery School process, are guided in how to access their own inner knowledge through a varied array of integral mind/body/spirit practices of attunement.  I call these processes and practices of initiation, the soul arts of sacred alchemy.

Training in the language and powers of the Universal Mysteries leads you to discover how to live the life you were uniquely born to live and thus enter through the doorway of soul into your true wholeness and freedom of being.

A Mystery School is based on facilitating your ability to find and realize within yourself:

• the way of healing wholeness,
• the experience and communion of unity consciousness (God-in-us), and
• the reclaiming expression of one's unique genius and meaningful life purpose.

A Mystery School helps to shine a light on your own unique path to inner wisdom. It opens the doorway to understanding the universal principles used for:

• healing transformation
• enlightenment (and enlivenment) of being; and
• intuitive (heart-based) right action in our world through attuned relatedness.

SOCIETAL MISUNDERSTANDING & CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS

Study of life's Mysteries has always existed as a vital part of every civilization the world over. While some cultures, like early Egyptian and Greek sects who referred to their esoteric teachings as the Mysteries, others have used other words for referring to the highest order of their spiritual knowledge. Regardless of label, all societies throughout known history have had and have kept their highest order of spiritual wisdom and universal knowledge reserved for those truly called to the initiation it entails.  Hence the Mystery behind Mystery Schools.

Because only a few people within a particular culture are deeply called to this intensity of life and spiritual study, the Mystery School became the reservoir for keeping the highest order knowledge of each religious tradition safe and accessible only to those initiates called and capable of handling its vast power (energetically, mentally, emotionally ...and physically!)  Initiation into the Mysteries is powerful stuff - which is why it has most often been reserved only for those who demonstrate deeply responsible and soulful readiness.

When accessed by those not yet matured in their consciousness, the Mysteries can be quite dangerous both to the initiate and to those he or she influences.  Imagine for example (and it won't be too hard) giving the antidote for curing AIDS to someone who doesn't understand its proper application or dosage and who still harbors an immature need for power.  It's like that when the Mysteries of Life are taken up by people not grounded in spirit and still aligned to erratic egoist needs. But that is not the true intent, nor the true Mystery School . The true Mystery School is really a sacred Calling to an inner study of life's meaning and divinity (awakening to the teacher within).

Those most deeply called to understanding the Mysteries of Life are known to us as the shamans, the monks and contemplatives, the gurus and the avatars, the mystic poets and alchemists and the visionary philosophers and artists. Today we can add to this list a fraction of the truly groundbreaking artists and scientists of quantum mechanics, pure mathematics, eco-evolution, the visionary arts, sacred psychology and the study of consciousness.

Whether it be through: Sufi and Muslim mysticism, Esoteric Christianity, Jewish Kabala, Celtic druidism, American Indian Mythology, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, African or Hawaiian Shamanism, those called to understand the Mysteries of soul and spiritual knowledge are those ready to learn through an induction into reflection and Self-Realization (most often with the help of a guide).

Because the main bulk of society have not yet felt called to the intensity of such an inward study, religions have traditionally offered their congregation of followers a more rudimentary version of their knowledge in the form of religious icons and stories, group ritual and liturgy, and organized religious leadership. They saved their more deeply understood knowledge, training and initiation for those truly called to this vocation of deep inner study and direct awakening.

As a result, the Mystery School traditions have remained hidden and not something even known to exist by society at large. Because of this hidden seeming secretiveness, Mystery Schools if known at all are sometimes imagined to be something elitist - or a weird or esoteric cult. This is completely understandable.  Still, when good people brought up in a particular religious tradition shy away from the concept of a Mystery School, thinking it some new age cult or a self-indulgent spiritual path, they are sadly and most terribly misinformed, due in large part to an ignorance about just what the Mystery School really is.

Granted, there have been occasions of misuse of the powerful knowledge of the Mysteries (as there are with any organized body of people or unprepared initiate). However the true Mystery School is not a cult at all; it is the reason we are here as spiritual beings in physical form.  It is the sacred pathway to Re-membering who you really are. It is the classic journey that our mythic tales portray in their epic depictions of life's deepest meaning. It is the inevitable and evolutionary calling that inevitably ignites and informs a fundamental change of heart and Self-Realization of one's own divinity (the awakening of the teacher within).

All religions are based, at their core, on a direct realization of the Mysteries and the teachings on how to discover this within oneself that preceded becoming a religion (such as the direct realization and then the teachings of the Buddha which has become the practice of Buddhism and its many renditions; the revelation of Mohammad which has become the Muslim religion with both its liberal and radical offspring; or the unity-awareness of Jesus the Christed, which has become Christianity and its vast generations of belief from base fundamentalism to the fluid new age groups and everything in-between).

When the direct realization of the Mysteries is watered-down into an organized and authoritative religion, it becomes regressed and popularized as a belief structure rather than as an inner and direct remembering of our innate God-consciousness. ("I and my father are one" is the Christian version for highlighting this direct individual realization.)

The point here is this: Before any religion, any dogma and group organized belief structure, there were and there still are pathways to direct self-realization of the principles of Divine Wisdom and Universal Law.  These are the Mysteries: The understanding and embodied application of the principles of divine wisdom and universal law.  Religions have captured them (or tried to) and called them their own. But the Mysteries of Life are before any dogma or handed down belief. They are the I Am!  

I Am is the self-realization of the Mysteries. No one need follow the proscribes of a leader or pastor or priest to this realization. In fact one cannot. The path can be pointed toward by a lighted guide but the individual must navigate the terrain of inner seeing Self-Realization on his/her own.

The seeing/direct realization of universal law is the same the world over when the seeing evolves from the direct experience of one who is spiritually attuned and present to Grace. It is only when belief is not founded on a mature spiritual attunement and comes from an unstable ego or a practiced belief system that arguable differences and warring self-righteousness results. And here we see our current ecology!

EARTH SURVIVAL AND EVOLUTION AS A SPECIES

Here's my question to you: Have we matured as a global human consciousness to a point where the masses of humanity are getting ready to let go of the spoon-fed, watered down meal called God's will doused in separating religious belief systems?  Are we being called to give up the convenience and comfort of a patriarchal father-god so that we may start to take up our own cross of healing and direct living realization? 

I know most of us, when looking at the shocking and amazing display today of radical religious fundamentalism, would say that we are farther away from an awareness of unity-consciousness than ever.  And it sure seems so when you look at our TV advertisements and programming and the social values being reflected back to us that we continue to elect by our nightly patronage. It seems so too in the statistics of rising family disenfranchisement, increasing health crisis from polluted foodstuffs, growing economic polarity, frenetic tribal, ethnic, political and religious warfare, genocide, and growing hatred on all sides... and an earth home that is sickened and severely threatened by what we've inflicted in the name of technological achievement and civilized progress in a mere 300 years.

It surely seems that we are not ready to grow up beyond the me-first father-god adolescent stance.

It seems we're developmentally halted; unable to grow up; unwilling to take up the more mature and responsible call of spiritual adulthood and learn what it is to shed the childhood cocoon to make the transformational flight of the heart that reflects the core Mystery behind and beyond whichever "god" we espouse (and indeed fight for, like children still insecure and needy to protect "mine mine mine!") Still...

Still, I wonder...  When you look at anything that grows and changes and evolves, what happens before the next leap?  It seems that a cycle of breaking down of the old happens before and in order for something new to breakthrough.

Change is inevitable. But will the next level of new human potential be one directed from a maturing and unified (integral) conscious presence?

...Or will it be the willy-nilly adaptation of an adolescent attitude carried to its (now) ridiculous extreme?

Here's what I sense and envision: The more ridiculous our society becomes in its imbalanced values, perceptions and lifestyle, the more surreal, obvious, and distasteful the immaturity becomes.  Our values and behaviors as a species start to stand out.  We begin to see.  Our mistakes become more obvious, old ways no longer work, and we start to look for another way.  This I believe is what we are experiencing at this amazing time.  It reminds me of the lyric to a song sung by the Mamma's and the Papa's "...and the darkest hour is just before dawn."

So how does all this relate to the Mystery School and to you and to me?

I think we're just starting to make a critical mass of consciousness toward young adulthood as a human species and global culture.  And we likely have some more rebellion to experience (like the man engaged to be married who falls back one more time into adolescence with a juicy bachelor party and ends up hung over at his wedding.  Not wise. Not mature, but a critical rite of passage none the less).

I think we will begin to see more and more normal people aching to know and experience a deeper meaning of life, purpose and passion.  We already are seeing it. Look at the relatively new and exploding occupation: life coach.  I went to a entrepreneurs conference last year, and discovered to my amazement that virtually everyone of the people in that business conference had their own private life coach!  Every one was dedicated to looking into his/her own life; finding ways to improve his and her sense of joy and balanced living; inquiring into what held lasting meaning and true purpose. 

That kind of direct inner looking is a doorway into the Mysteries. It is the early "wake up call" (often an alarming one) that inspires the need to grow, to grow up, to put away childish things and begin to ask what it means to really live. This is not all that much different from the shaman, the monk, the priest, the poet who is called to seek and understand the meaning of life and the deeper calling of one's soul.

It seems to me that we are being readied for greater new levels of aliveness and relatedness.  It seems to me that personal and communal crisis often invoke the searching for a portal to a better way. In this respect our current and alarming foreign policy is a potential gift moving us toward radical change. The pendulum swings to extremes with great gusto, gradually slowing down until it comes to rest in the center of stillness.

THE CALL TO AWAKEN

We cannot and do not change the world unless and until we ourselves are changed in relationship to ourselves and to the world around us; unless and until we are opened and awakened to the primordial and timeless wisdom language of Life.  Systems don't change; the people who are part of the systems do. 

In the life work that I offer to those called to work with me at Ojai Soul Arts we start with that pendulum; we honor what is in each individual's unique life at the moment by giving it the light of conscious awareness.  We shine a light on what arises. This takes us instantly beyond the situation or problem while not denying or ignoring it. We are no longer in it when we are shining a light on it. This shining is the induction into the Mysteries... or learning to center from the soul and attune ourselves with, what I call: the musical language of Love Itself, that heralds all creative manifestation.

By giving what is in your life the light of your direct conscious presence, the pendulum very naturally gentles and slows down. This is meditation. This is seeing. This is prayer. When that which is seen is further honored by giving it a reverent acknowledgement in the form of a consciously invoked and respectful action, you automatically transform the situation into new seeded potential by the seeing given an honoring light of action/form. This is sacred ceremony. This is celebration and the nurturing of the heart of compassion. This is "chop wood, carry water". This is sacred alchemy.

When we live moment-by-moment in this simple honoring light of consciousness given over to what is, the pendulum gentles and stops and we are initiated into the Mysteries of Stillness where all potential rests. Here, spontaneous right action simply arises from stillness and informs each next movement of creation. That (and not the attachment to practices or techniques or special methods and superstitious teachings) is the true and elegant Mystery of the Mystery School . What a sacred artistry we are!

Be Still and Know...I Am.  This is our truth and realization when we come to Life and listen... A mentor or spiritual teacher is only a true guide if he/she can show you (as all the great ones that have gone before have demonstrated in their teachings) that the light of divine wisdom is inside you. You are that light just waiting to be seen.  

Are you ready to ignite your light and give it fully to the world as only you were born to do? Welcome to the Mystery School of You!...

Ronda LaRue is an emerging spiritual author/mentor living in Ojai, California, USA. http://www.rondalarue.com/

Ronda works from a novel and contemporary approach to the ancient tradition of one-on-one sacred apprenticeship for facilitating radical transformation., healing wholeness, and direct Self-Realization. Her book "Remembering Who You Really Are", is a contemporary classic on the journey to true self Realization and Wholeness. (available from Amazon.com) See more about her private retreat programs at http://www.ojaisoularts.com/ or order her book at http://www.rondalarue.com/

"There is a portal to remembering Who we really are, and it is always forever available here, now. All we need do is attune our hearing to its subtle voice, and fall into the Love Affair of Life." -- ronda

People often say to me: 'I have no artistic ability'. To which I always reply: 'Nonsense' (or worse!) 'You are at the very deepest core of your being, first and foremost, an artist. You are the brush and the canvass and the color and the hand - and that which conspires to bring these together into creative relationship and expression!

We are not who we seem. We are not what we seem. We are the living Creative Moment. We are Creation engaged in the evolving awareness of Being. Or, to put it another way: We are God's realization of Creative Potential -- arising out of nothing, and with-in us finding expression - and thus seeing.

Creativity is It! -- I mean the "It" that all we seekers are seeking (called by some God, or enlightenment, or Unity-Consciousness, or Source). Creation Itself is the Holy One. Creation isn't just something that happened once upon time with the Big Bang - an event for us to go about uncovering, explaining and "managing." ...Creation is spontaneously giving birth to Realization each and every single moment! We are here to express and delight in the blooming of Conscious Creation. We are here for the Living Relationship of This.

(SACRED RELATIONSHIP)
Creation is a verb. Creation (like all forms of art) is the expression of Aliveness drawn into being, breathed into being through the miracle of relationship. It is That which is spawning right now in a dynamic rapport between subject and object, creator and form.

When an artist is engaged in moments of true creativity, it is impossible to distinguish what is instigated by subject and what by object; impossible to say which is the "doer" and which is that "being done to." In true creating of art, a dialogue occurs; a dance takes place in which both the creator and the created are changed and swayed within the dynamic of the relationship as it unfolds. In the creative process, the lines between "I" and "It" drop away. Subject and object disappear into a pooling relationship in which potential arises from the unique dance occurring in each Moment of Now. It is an alchemy of Moment blending with Form. ...And so is the dance of Creation!

(DANCE OF CREATION)
Life is a vital and living (moment-by-moment) coming together of God and man (of the Lover and the Beloved, of Thought and Form) in order to celebrate the creating of offspring from the partnered pairing; in order to know Itself in the process and the content of Creation Itself. That's It.

In metaphysical terms, the Moment of Creation is the apparent separating of "the One into the many" in order for the One to know Itself through the Relationship of Seeing. In the Relationship of Seeing (which can only occur Now), I and Thou disappear into a synchronistic exchange. Here (as advaita author, Tony Parsons) puts it, "there is only seeing...There is only This"...

There's lots of talk these days about Unity-Consciousness, stilling the mind, killing the ego, being no-body, loving what Is - all pointers toward the paradox of Truth. Words are of course tricky and a real set up for misunderstanding. Still, let me try and say it this way: It is perfect just as it is. We are meant to feel separate. We are meant to fall into separation in order to re-unite with/in the embrace of Source. We are meant to experience the Sacred Relationship of Creative Loving between matter and circumstance, creature and God-Consciousness, subject and object, Unity and dualism. In the moment of relationship, not in the objects themselves, is the Seeing...and so is the dance of Creation!

All This that Is, is Divine Intelligence birthing Itself into expression within each eternal moment of Now. It is this paradox on which Creation rests: the One appearing as two in order to know Itself as...

(THE LOVE AFFAIR)
Life is a love affair. God is not object or subject; not Source or substrate. God is Relationship. We are that experiencing of Relationship as it is happening - right now. We are both art and artist lost (and found) within the embrace of this Creative Moment of Now.

How do we find enlightenment? ...We don't. Enlightenment is what simply Is when we see past subject-object and realize the a priori Relationship of This; when our sense of separate self-identity and its running commentary is seen through as a construction (or as temporal reality), the spiritual realization of God-in-us is simply seen.

When we see through (and let go of) our whole-hearted "buy in" to the object-oriented, security-driven perspective of "self", there is simply seen and lived, the Relationship with/in What Is. With this seeing comes the recognition that we are not merely an object-identity nor a subject-Source (not duality nor unity) but the very Movement of Creation Itself. We're not object. Neither subject. We are both and neither. We are on a playing field of Paradox. We are particle and wave - and that which the dynamic interchange is creating. We are what is arising through Relationship...

(THE ART OF REALIZED LIVING)
When we come to live our lives as a creative process of art - when we come to each Moment of Now with the open trust and daring confidence of the artist engaged in Relationship with the material of Now - we enter into spiritual realization. More precisely, we don't "enter" or "become" anything. Simply, when the Relationship is realized, What Is and always has been, is simply seen. Not seen "by someone" - just Seen.

It is Here in the seeing that the Lover and the Beloved embrace. It is Here that "enlightenment" simply Is. It is Here that the mystics' call Truth. ...It is Here that unity and duality simply fall away into everything - and nothing at all...

Here, the living is easy, natural, flowing and free. Here too, the magnificent artistry of Creation continually blooms with ever-new potential, delight and surprise...

We are the Movement of Creation Itself - not merely its object or subject, but a continual Relationship unfolding, in love...

About the author:
Ronda LaRue is an emerging spiritual author/mentor living in Ojai, California, USA. Ronda works from a novel and contemporary approach to the ancient tradition of one-on-one sacred apprenticeship for facilitating radical transformation., healing wholeness, and direct Self-Realization.

Her book "Remembering Who You Really Are" is a contemporary classic on the journey to true self Realization and Wholeness. (available from Amazon.com) See more about her private retreat programs at http://www.ojaisoularts.com/ or order her book at http://www.rondalarue.com/