An old song

Here’s an old song I found that I wrote about 20 years ago regarding my spiritual path at the time. I recorded it in one take with Lee Boardman, the lead guitarist from a band I was in back then called The Same Changes. The title is Still Sleep, and it refers to me striving to achieve the ultimate Buddhists goal of becoming awake. It has a few crackles because of it’s age and it was done in one take so be kind 🙂

It took me back to the time when I first discovered Buddhism, and how I felt about it. There can be many feelings inside us when we first set out on our paths. For one, while you’re open enough to accept that there is new information about spirituality, the universe at large, symbolic gods, rebirth and views you’d never pondered before yet make sense to you, broadening your mind and inspiring new thought, you simultaneously realise how unwise you really are.  

Once you delve deeper, opening your mind to these ancient principles and philosophies, they become so intriguing to you that you feel like you may find the answer to the meaning of life. On the other hand, you can feel a great sense of impending loss for your old way of life, and a clinging to old views and belief systems ensues due to the ego trying to fight to keep its place and control over its ingrained beliefs. we feel a sense of loss as well as a gain.

And it’s okay to hold onto and marry them all!

Spiritual sense is what we’re after. What’s truly real and what’s not can come to us in small waves, or not at all. We don’t need evidence of the divine or a letting go of one thing to adopt another to walk a spiritual path. Awareness of our duality and what that means and how it’s connected to the wave of all things can take a while, sometimes even a lifetime or more. It’s natural to fight against it at first. We just need to find what resonates and keep it, and eliminate what stifles and hinders and doesn’t resonate and rid ourselves of it. Take some parts of a doctrine or faith and marry them with others if you wish, so long as they benefit you.

I know struggling with letting go of my old belief system was extremely hard for me, both because I felt stupid for having wrong beliefs that didn’t serve me in the first place, and because of the conflicting guilt of letting go of the old catholic version of God I had, that one I used to pray to each night and now felt I had to abandon to adopt the new resonating principles I’d found in Buddhism, not realising I could keep both.

It was equally hard because I’m strong-willed and stubborn, so to let go of my old beliefs was harder for me as I wire them in stronger than others, therefore it takes a lot of habitual practice to override these wires.

It was after I turned the man in the sky into omnipotent energy instead, meaning I kept the almighty intelligent transcendent omniscient omnipresent life force creator designer of this divine matrix into beauty sacred geometric patterns and that I made peace and sense of my own “transition”. I really just gave god the image my brain saw so my knowing and belief of the mystical force out there that can support us, guide us and we can communicate with through our “thoughtlings” (thoughts and feelings together) could remain in a much more resonant way.

As a kid, when the god-fearing, ugly hell-realms I’d be going to if I went against His book of rules were driven into me, I knew deep inside that wiser place in my gut, below the fears in my heart, that this wasn’t the “real” God, and therefore told all “God gives, he doesn’t take. God helps, not punishes. God inspires not smites. God is kind, compassionate and beautiful not something that can hurt you, not something to be feared”. I knew evilness and ill will towards others should be rained in and those of us tiny splits of the big IT who perpetually commit immoral acts towards others should maybe disappear forever but it would be more like we were weeding out the bad habits and thoughts of ourselves in this realm… we would perish as an individually evil bit if we go back… but only because WE want to do so once were back in the light as WE as bits of IT don’t wish to have evil parts of ourselves. We will take that persona back to the whole, work out how it became so messed up and it will then, if noting it was fully evil when incarnated, no longer participate in the game of life, attempting to help positively expand all that is.

This is only what makes sense for me and works for me and which allows me to be the full version of me liberated and free from repression and fear. We came to be human. Why shouldn’t we be? We have intelligent brains of our own, why shouldn’t we use them? I go off what I feel is right and moral in my heart and I feel we can all do that and most of us do do that.

Whatever a philosophy or religion says, we all know what we feel in our hearts. While my heart was saying yes to Buddhism, it was simultaneously saying no to the fact that if I believed this, then I could no longer believe that so I went with that. 

Now I’ve evolved so much that I can take snippets of all religions and philosophies as well as spirituality, new age faiths and science based facts, marrying the mysticism with common sense. I take note of what resonates with me, and what corralates scientifically to that, and put them all together in a way that I “perceive” is right. I no longer feel loss; I’m gaining in knowledge.

I may have let go and said goodbye to a “man in the sky”, but I simultaneously made the essence of “God” bigger and brighter and more omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent in my life. IT (intelligent transcendence) just no longer looks like a man.

Now my spiritual songs are a little different. I should probably write one entitled Almost Awake or something. But for those of you starting out on the path, it can feel something like this song. I hope it helps on your own path.

Blessings, Rinzen x