
The Untethered Soul
Michael Singer is a great writer, storyteller and spiritual teacher who has a profound ability to communicate complex spiritual ideas in a simple, easy-to-grasp manner. The book is packed with wisdom. In the Note, we explore Big Ideas on how we can best relate to that voice in our heads as we develop our witness perspective and create real transformation in our lives.
Big Ideas
- The Voice Inside Your headInside your head. Notice it yet?
- The WitnessWork out your Witness muscles.
- The RoommateTime to give it the boot.
- This is Your Life—Reclaim ItTime to reclaim it!
- Perspective & The Avoidance of Pain& The avoidance of pain.
- Real Transformation & Change& Change.
- Begin with Small ThingsRock it moment to moment.
- Unconditional HappinessIs the highest technique.
- Stepping-Stones of Our Spiritual JourneyOf our spiritual journey.
“As you read these pages, you will find that you know much more than you thought you did about some very deep subjects. The fact is, you already know how to find yourself; you have just gotten distracted and disoriented. Once refocused, you will realize that you not only have the ability to find yourself, you have the ability to free yourself. Whether you choose to do so or not is entirely up to you. But upon completion of your journey through these chapters, there will be no more confusion, no more lack of empowerment, and no more blaming others. You will know exactly what must be done. And should you choose to devote yourself to the ongoing journey of self-realization, you will develop a tremendous sense of respect for who you really are. It is only then that you will come to appreciate the full depth of meaning in the advice: “This above all: to thine own self be true.””
~ Michael Singer from The Untethered Soul
Michael Singer is a great writer, storyteller and spiritual teacher who has a profound ability to communicate complex spiritual ideas in a simple, easy-to-grasp manner.
The Untethered Soul is packed with goodness. As Singer poetically puts it: “The chapters of this book are nothing but mirrors for seeing your “self” from different angles.”
If you’re feelin’ it, I think you’ll love the book.
For now, let’s explore a handful of my favorite Big Ideas! Hope you dig it. :)
Right in the middle of your daily life, by untethering yourself from the bondage of your psyche, you actually have the ability to steal freedom for your soul. This freedom is so great it has been given a special name—liberation.
The Voice Inside Your head
“In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!”—that’s the voice we’re talking about.
If you’re smart, you’ll take the time to step back, examine this voice, and get to know it better.”
That’s pretty funny. And important.
My hunch is you’ve noticed that voice in your head. Yah?
As Singer tells us: “There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.”
Good stuff.
Now, let’s figure out what we can do about it!
The Witness
“Once you clearly see the disturbed part, then ask, “Who is it that sees this? Who notices this inner disturbance?” Asking this is the solution to your every problem. The very fact that you can see the disturbance means that you are not it. The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship. The subject is called “The Witness” because it is the one who sees what’s happening. The object is what you are seeing, in this case the inner disturbance. This act of maintaining objective awareness of the inner problem is always better than losing yourself in the inner situation. This is the essential difference between a spiritually minded person and a worldly person. Worldly doesn’t mean that you have money or stature. Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problems is in the world outside. You think that if you change things outside, you’ll be okay. But nobody has every truly become okay by changing things outside. There’s always the next problem. The only real solution is to take the seat of witness consciousness and completely change your frame of reference.
To obtain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them.”
There’s a LOT of goodness in that paragraph.
First, “The Witness.” This is the real you—the part of you that is unaffected by your thoughts and emotions and workings of the outer world. One of the primary themes of the book (and spirituality in general) is the fact that we need to train ourselves to, as Singer says, “objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them.”
In order to do that, we need to step into The Witness chair and make our current problems the OBJECT of our awareness—creating the subject-object relationship Singer talks about above.
We talk about this Idea a bit in the Note on Anthony de Mello’s great book, Awareness, where he tells us: “Never identify with that feeling. It has nothing to do with the ‘I.’ Don’t define your essential self in terms of that feeling. Don’t say, ‘I am depressed.’ If you want to say, ‘It is depressed,’ that’s all right. If you want to say that depression is there, that’s fine; if you want to say gloominess is there, that’s fine. But not: I am gloomy. You’re defining yourself in terms of the feeling. That’s your illusion; that’s your mistake. There is a depression there right now, but let it be, leave it alone. It will pass. Everything passes, everything. Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness. Those are swings of the pendulum. If you seek kicks or thrills, get ready for depression. Do you want your drug? Get ready for the hangover. One end of the pendulum swings over to the other.”
So, there’s a quick look at The Witness + subject-object goodness. We assume the subjective perspective of The Witness and make our challenges the object of our awareness. Powerful stuff to practice!
I also love the idea of a “worldly person” vs. a “spiritually minded person.” To be a worldly person is to think that the solutions to our problems exist “out there”—if only this person changed or that situation was different, THEN we’d be happy. Um, yah.
The spiritually minded person realizes that it’s our perspective that makes things good or bad. As Shakespeare says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
De Mello has a great way of describing this in Awareness as well. He says it’s kinda like being sick but going to the Doctor and getting medicine for our *neighbors*! :) In his words: “Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, ‘Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor!’ The patient replies, ‘Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better.’ Isn’t that absurd? But that’s what we all do. The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes. You’re suffering because you are asleep, but you’re thinking, ‘How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change. How wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed.’”
Come to know the one who watches the voice, and you will come to know one of the great mysteries of creation.
When a problem arises, don’t ask, 'What should I do about it?' Ask, 'What part of me is being disturbed by this?'
The Roommate
“Basically, you’re not alone in there. There are two distinct aspects of your inner being. The first is you, the awareness, the witness, the center of your willful intention; and the other is that which you watch. The problem is, the part that you watch never shuts up. If you could get rid of that part, even for a moment, the peace and serenity would be the nicest vacation you ever had.”
Singer tells us we’re not alone in our heads.
We have what he calls a “roommate” up there. And this isn’t any ol’ roommate. This is one CRAZY person who’s constantly narrating our lives and telling us WACKY things, jumping from subject to subject to subject ALL. DAY. LONG.
He has us play a game where we take that inner voice and project it out into a real person: a roommate who hangs out with us all day, every day.
He continues: “How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen.”
Hah.
Seriously, though.
Imagine if you had *anyone* in your life who talked to you like your inner voice incessantly talks to you. You’d boot them out of your life, right?
Well, we need to do the same thing with our inner roommate. The first step is to REALIZE that we even have this wacky roommate inside our head. Then we just need to hop into our “Witness” chair and OBSERVE the non-stop thoughts rather than get swept up by them!!
Once you’ve made this freedom the meaning of your life, there are spiritual practices that can help you. These practices are what you do with your time in order to free yourself from yourself.
This is Your Life—Reclaim It
“If you want to free yourself, you must first become conscious enough to understand your predicament. Then you must commit yourself to the inner work of freedom. You do this as though your life depended on it, because it does. As it is right now, your life is not your own; it belongs to your inner roommate, the psyche. You have to take it back. Stand firm in the seat of the witness and release the hold that the habitual mind has on you. This is your life—reclaim it.”
Amen to that.
Reminds me Joseph Campbell’s reminder (see Notes on A Joseph Campbell Companion): “Sri Ramakrishna said, ‘Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.’”
Here’s to understanding our predicament and doing the work necessary to free ourselves!!
What differentiates a conscious, centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply the focus of their awareness. It’s not a difference in the consciousness itself. All consciousness is the same. Just as all light from the sun is the same, all awareness is the same.
Perspective & The Avoidance of Pain
“To get some distance form this [pain], you first need to get some perspective. Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky. You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us if we could even see it. You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars. From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name? How can you let these meaningless things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you. At any point you could slip and say the wrong thing. At any point anything can happen. So you end up devoting your life to the avoidance of pain.”
Singer spends a chapter on pain and how we work so hard to avoid feeling it.
Powerful stuff.
One way to address our pain is to get perspective.
You do realize we’re just little creatures spinning on a tiny little piece of dirt in an unfathomably huge Universe, right?
Let’s keep that in mind the next time we’re about to get worried about what someone thinks about our hair. Or our clothes. Or our car. Or our furniture. Or any other silly little thing that really doesn’t deserve that much of our attention, eh? :)
This is the core of spiritual work. When you are comfortable with pain passing through you, you will be free.
Real Transformation & Change
“The spiritual journey is one of constant transformation. In order to grow, you must give up the struggle to remain the same, and learn to embrace change at all times…
Real transformation begins when you embrace your problems as agents for growth.”
Two Big Ideas here.
First, the goodness of change.
Reminds me of another Anthony de Mello gem: “As the great Confucius said, ‘The one who would be in constant happiness must frequently change.’ Flow. But we keep looking back, don’t we? We cling to things in the past and cling to things in the present… Do you want to enjoy a symphony? Don’t hold on to a few bars of the music. Don’t hold on to a couple of notes. Let them pass, let them flow. The whole enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass…”
Marcus Aurelius (see Notes on Meditations) puts it this way: “Time is a river, the resistless flow of all created things. One thing no sooner comes in sight than it is hurried past and another is borne along, only to be swept away in its turn.”
And second, the fact that real transformation occurs when we embrace our challenges as agents for change.
I love the way Robert Emmons puts it in Thanks!(see Notes) where he tells us: “The religious traditions encourage us to do more than react with passivity and resignation to loss and crisis; they advise us to change our perspective, so that our suffering is transformed into an opportunity for growth. Not only does the experience of tragedy give us an exceptional opportunity for growth, but some sort of suffering is also necessary for a person to achieve maximal psychological growth. In his study of self-actualizers, the paragons of mental wellness, the famed humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow noted that “the most important learning lessons… were tragedies, deaths, and trauma… which forced change in the life-outlook of the person and consequently in everything that he did.””
To go beyond, you must keep going past the limits you put on things. This requires changes at the core of your being.
Begin with Small Things
“Begin with the small things. We tend to let ourselves get bothered by the little, meaningless things that happen every day. For example, somebody beeps at you at the stoplight. As these little things happen, you will notice your energy change. The moment you feel a change, relax your shoulders and relax the area around your heart. The moment the energy moves, you simply relax and release. Play with letting go and falling behind this sense of being bothered.”
If we want to make transformative strides in our spiritual path, we need to begin with the small things. As the Buddha tells us (see Notes on The Dhammapada): “Little by little a person become evil, as a water pot is filled by drops of water… Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.”
Plus: “Make your mind pure as a silversmith blows away the impurities of silver, little by little, instant by instant.”
Yes, it’s much sexier to talk about the latest nuanced theories about spirituality. But, it’s much more effective to use every small opportunity for personal transformation. :)
So, the next time you find yourself irritated by someone or something, see if you can notice it. The moment you feel a change, take a deep breath and relax your shoulders. Relax the area around your heart and let it go.
Might not sound like a big deal, but if you can do that consistently, you’ve pretty much arrived.
As Singer advises, “If you can learn to remain centered with the smaller things, you will see that you can also remain centered with the bigger things. Over time, you will find that you can even remain centered with the really big things.”
So, let’s rock the little things, shall we?
A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode.
Unconditional Happiness
“If you decide that you’re going to be happy from now on for the rest of your life, you will not only be happy, you will be enlightened. Unconditional happiness is the highest technique there is. You don’t have to learn Sanskrit or read any scriptures. You don’t have to renounce the world. You just have to really mean it when you say that you choose to be happy. And you have to mean it regardless of what happens. This is truly a spiritual path, and it is as direct and sure a path to Awakening as could possibly exist.”
Unconditional happiness.
I love that.
As Singer says, it’s the highest technique there is—a happiness that is chosen in every moment, independent of whatever’s going on in the world.
Marci Shimoff wrote an entire book on this called Happy for No Reason (see Notes) where she tells us: “Happy for No Reason isn’t elation, euphoria, mood spikes or peak experiences that don’t last. It doesn’t mean grinning like a fool 24/7 or experiencing a superficial high. Happy for No Reason isn’t an emotion. In fact, when you are Happy for No Reason, you can have any emotion—including sadness, fear, anger, or hurt—but you still experience that underlying state of peace and well-being… When you’re Happy for No Reason, you bring happiness to your outer experiences rather than trying to extract happiness from them. You don’t need to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy. You live from happiness, rather than for happiness.”
Back to Singer. He tells us: “Billions of things could happen that you haven’t even thought of yet. The question is not whether they will happen. Things are going to happen. The real question is whether you want to be happy regardless of what happens. The purpose of your life is to enjoy and learn from your experiences. You were not put on Earth to suffer. You’re not helping anybody by being miserable. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die. During the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience. Events don’t determine whether or not you’re going to be happy. You can be happy to just be alive. You can be happy having all these things happen to you, and then be happy to die. If you can live this way, your heart will be so open and your Spirit will be so free, that you will soar up to the heavens.”
Unconditional happiness is the highest technique there is.
It is not life’s events that are causing problems or stress. It is your resistance to life’s events that is causing this experience. Since the problem is caused by using your will to resist the reality of life passing through you, the solution is obvious—stop resisting.
Stepping-Stones of Our Spiritual Journey
“You truly can reach a state in which you never have any more stress, tension or problems for the rest of your life. You just have to realize that life is giving you a gift, and that gift is the flow of events that takes place between your birth and your death. These events are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. To comfortably handle this flow of life, your heart and mind must be open and expansive enough to encompass reality. The only reason they’re not is because you resist. Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping-stones of your spiritual journey.”