The Untethered Soul ~ Michael A. Singer

These books just seem to find me 😊.

Actually, this was supposed to be an early April 2025 read for me. I took it with me to my trek to Everest Base Camp – the title was so symbolic in many ways particularly for where I was heading and why. Frankly as I look back, it makes me laugh – I truly believed that I would be able to read a bit every day and night through THAT journey. Well, I only ever opened the book on the flight to Kathmandu.

But what seemed like a sign was that the book actually begins with the below lines. This quote has been on my books and other places for a while now – over a year even.

“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

This book is not for everybody. Even though it contemplates possibly the ultimate and only question that has forever been fundamental for all of mankind. “Who am I”?

Not for everybody to go that deep. But if you are at that kind of stage in your life, then read on and I am sure that this book will be a permanent addition to your library.

Michael Alan Singer is an American author. While working on his doctorate in economics, he had a deep inner awakening (1971) and he went into seclusion to focus on yoga and meditation. This book is a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Simply put – this book focuses on explaining the fact that your mind is not you. It also tells you why this is true and therefore zeroes in on the question – who are you really? Here the book goes into how to experience consciousness and what is it really. If you can internalize the lessons of this book – that would be a HUGE deal. From my perspective it was. Your entire frame of reference will change.

And the good news is – you don’t need anything else to learn this – except “your own intuitive experience of what it is like to be you”. 

“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… 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”.

THE VOICE INSIDE YOUR HEAD

..is not you!

“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.”

Singer gives so many examples that show how this voice in your head operates. The situations that trigger this voice and how it absorbs everything that is happening around you. He calls the ‘mind’ your roommate – and asks you to observe it and quite frankly, you will see how neurotic and annoying it can be! Never stopping with the endless commentary on everything, constantly creating activity in your energy field – basically it is like a very very naughty toddler who constantly needs to be told to ‘be quiet!’.

“..there’s a buildup of energy inside that needs to be released. If you watch objectively, you will see that when there’s a buildup of nervous, fearful, or desire based energies inside, the voice becomes extremely active………What you’ll see, if you study this carefully, is that the narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like back-seat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in control…..…But nobody has ever truly become okay by changing things outside. There’s always the next problem…”

So when this ‘roommate’ is quiet – if even only for a few seconds – you will see how amazing you feel. That’s what meditation is supposed to do for you.

Many of us aren’t quite at that level yet where we can in fact get our mind to be quiet. But the one thing that has worked for me – and I know it will work for you – is to continuously watch your thoughts and observe that voice. Don’t stop it, don’t judge it, just observe. And just remind yourself that you are not that voice. You are just observing it.

“The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything.”

Results ?

This practice is helping create a distance between the events in my life and me – slowly but surely, I see that things that would have usually brought strong reactions – don’t really seem to affect me that deeply anymore. And this is not the usual ‘I’m aging so I care less and less’ type of thing. I genuinely find a certain kind of space between me and at least some of the events occurring around me – as if I’m over here and the events are happening over there and I am just watching them. I suppose you can go quite far with that practice.

“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… To be aware that you are watching the voice talk is to stand on the threshold of a fantastic inner journey.”

WHO ARE YOU?

So, who are you then?

“Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), a great teacher in the yogic tradition, used to say that to attain inner freedom one must continuously and sincerely ask the question “Who am I” ?”

The author explores the idea of consciousness. What is it really and how to experience it?

Singer gives another great example to help the reader grasp the idea – when you watch a movie, you get totally absorbed in it. You forget about the couch you are sitting on and everything else in that room. Similarly you can walk into a room and take in everything all at once and spot exactly the person you might be looking for.

Have you ever been taught how to focus on something, say in school ? You just intuitively know how to do it, don’t you? How is that?

“Consciousness is a dynamic field of awareness that has the ability to either narrowly focus or broadly expand.”

Real meditation is to focus the consciousness on itself. To just realize itself. But for that, first it must disassociate from everything that it is not.

“The key is to be quiet. It’s not that your mind has to be quiet. You be quiet. You, the one inside watching the neurotic mind, just relax. You will then naturally fall behind the mind because you have always been there. You are not the thinking mind; you are aware of the thinking mind.”

This consciousness is you – loving, quiet and immensely expansive. And the mind is just a tool that is designed to help you survive – i.e. its underlying emotion is fear.  You’ve created an entire identity based on this tool.

Your mind is built for survival and hence it is constantly anticipating what can hurt or disturb you – and it conjures up everything it can to avoid pain. It is never in the present. Try to experiment with this – and no matter what the situation you will find this to be true. It will shock you how the mind functions and how you can actually completely avoid its melodrama.

“You must be willing to see that this need to protect yourself is where the entire personality comes from…..What it means to live spiritually is to not participate in this struggle…..once you reach this state, you will never have to worry about anything ever again.”

THE PATH OF UNCONDITIONAL HAPPINESS

So for those who want to ask, ‘so what’? Well, I’d ask the question, ‘do you want to be happy?’.

“To begin with, you have to realize that you really have one choice in this life, and its not about your career, whom you want to marry, or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy?

Unconditional happiness is the highest technique there is.”

And to master that technique, you will have to do all that Singer outlines in this book. Get completely used to the idea that you are not your mind. And get closer and closer to the consciousness that is you. Don’t be afraid to delve into this – it should be your only aim.

“…once you decide you want to be unconditionally happy, something inevitably will happen that challenges you. This test of your commitment is exactly what stimulates spiritual growth..”

When you are driving to go somewhere and you see a tree in the middle of the road, you don’t spend a significant amount of energy on fretting about why the tree is in the middle – you go around it and the moment the tree is behind you – you forget about it. It doesn’t leave an impression on your thoughts. Some of us may pause and admire instead the beauty of the tree and natures defiance of continuing to grow through concrete. But ALL of us would move past and on. That’s just what you need with everything else in life.

Observe, open yourself up to any experience and don’t resist. And most of all, stop engaging with your mind.

“When you do this, a natural transformation begins to take place within you. Over time, as you observe this transformation, you will see what its like to be coming toward God. You actually begin to know what it feels like to be moving in the direction of Spirit. The changes you see within you are reflective of the force you’re approaching….”

With a lot of gratitude and love.

Ruta