PDF Summary:The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer

Most people lead fragmented and unhappy lives full of suffering, driven by a variety of conflicting impulses even as they yearn to be true to their real selves. But fortunately, there’s an infallible expert on the subject of who you really are: you. You’re the only one with firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be yourself.

In The Untethered Soul, spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer, founder of the Temple of the Universe meditation center and a pioneering figure in the world of medical software, teaches you how to use your direct self-knowledge as an intuitive tool for spiritual awakening. Combining powerful principles with practical techniques, he shows you how to free yourself from false identities and live an enlightened life of peace, joy, creativity, and divine love.

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You fall because you fear life and therefore resist it. You fear life because of its inherent uncertainty, so you use your mind to create a false world of static stability. But you fail to realize that with this mental ruse, you actually make the world a scary place because you define reality according to your own inner problems: What doesn’t disturb you is okay, what disturbs you isn’t okay. So you try to arrange life so that it doesn’t trigger your sense of being disturbed, and in doing this, you make life itself into a threat.

Freedom from fear is possible, and thus freedom from falling is possible. It simply means refusing to fight with life. When life inevitably hits your stored negative stuff (your Samskaras), let go of the negativity right then, because it will be harder later. You can actually learn to “fall upward” into ever more delightful levels of enlightenment. Simply surrender. Observe and allow the negative thoughts and feelings to emerge, and let your blockages and disturbances become the very fuel for your enlightenment as your act of releasing them propels you upward into clarity, peace, and joy.

Nonresistance and Unconditional Happiness

Daily life is your highest spiritual path, and your choice to enjoy this life is the greatest spiritual teacher. Life itself will liberate you if you ask the right question and give the right answer. The question is, “Do I want to be happy?” The right answer is, “Yes.”

You give this right answer by practicing total nonresistance. Anytime you notice any part of yourself growing unhappy, just drop all resistance. Refuse to close your spiritual heart, no matter what happens. Imagine, for instance, that a childhood experience instilled a fear of dogs in you. You can work with this, learning to relax and have a new and enjoyable relationship with dogs. Then, whenever someone says or does something you don’t like, you can treat this the same way you’ve treated your fear of dogs: no resistance. Good areas for practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness include your relationships and your work.

Take a vow of unconditional happiness. Choosing to be happy through practicing nonresistance and dropping unhappiness is the surest way to awakening. It’s also the only rational response to life on this little planet spinning through a vast universe. Imagine what you could achieve if you liberated the energy you’ve devoted to resistance.

Metaphors and Applications

Here’s a series of helpful metaphors to clarify the application of these principles of spiritual awakening to your life in different ways.

The Metaphor of the Lucid Dream

Your daily life is like sleepwalking. You’re essentially lost in a dream: When you focus your consciousness intensely on an object, you lose your sense of self-awareness in it. This happens not just with physical objects but with mental objects (thoughts and emotions), which are often caused by outer events. It’s like being immersed in an all-encompassing movie where your thoughts and emotions move in synchronization with your sensory experiences.

The phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where you become aware that you’re in a dream, offers a useful analogy for spiritual awakening from this state of unconsciousness. You wake up in the dream of your life by learning to turn awareness back on itself. It’s like being lost in a movie for hours and then suddenly “coming to yourself” and remembering that you’re watching a fictional melodrama on a screen. You realize that the person you’ve always thought of as yourself is really just a movie titled [Insert Your Name]. Asking the master question “Who am I?” is one way to practice this discipline of self-awareness.

The Metaphor of the Inner Thorn

For true spiritual growth, you must come to peace with pain, because you’ve built your whole life on it. Imagine your pain as a thorn. It’s embedded in your arm, right on a nerve. Should you respond by removing the thorn or by making sure that nothing touches it? If you decide on the second option, protecting your pain will consume your life: You’ll build a thorn-shaped life as your daily actions revolve around shielding the painful spot.

Fortunately, you can extract your inner thorn. Use the events and encounters of your daily life as opportunities for doing this. Pay attention to your emotions, mood, and relative sense of happiness and security. When you feel a disturbance, release the initial pain right away to avoid being trapped in the long term. Learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances because they don’t disturb the seat of your consciousness.

The very core of spiritual work is to become comfortable and free by letting pain pass through you. If you do this, you’ll learn that in addition to stored-up pain, you also have joy, beauty, love, peace, freedom, and ecstasy inside you. They’re on the other side of the pain. You have to go through it to find them.

The Metaphor of Inner Addiction

One way to describe your current relationship to your psyche is that you’re addicted to it. You mistakenly think your psyche protects you from pain, so you’ve devoted your life to meeting its constant demands. But in fact, your psyche is pain. It’s your crazy inner roommate. Realize that your psyche is very ill, as you know from your frequent feelings of mental and emotional disturbance.

The good news is that you can break the addiction: Wake up and realize that the trouble is in you, not the world. You can’t solve your inner problems by rearranging the outer world and getting better at external games, because external changes don’t address the root of your inner problem. Learn to notice when your mind is trying to “make everything okay,” and gently let go of this. Eventually, your practice of disciplined awareness will lead to a persistently centered consciousness. Once you’re free from your psyche’s demands, you can wake up and face each day like a vacation.

The Metaphor of the Inner Prison

To discover the infinite reality beyond your psyche, recognize that your psyche is like a fortress or cage that you built for yourself long ago. You’ve lived in this prison for so long that you’ve mistaken it for the whole universe. You built it from thoughts and emotions, and ultimately from your self-concept, and then you turned it into a fortress. Now, you bump up against its invisible walls whenever you bump up against anything that threatens the comfort zone of your self-concept. Ultimately, you’re an infinite being, so you hit your prison walls whenever you place any finite limit on yourself.

Most people devote their lives to constantly building, rebuilding, and maintaining their prisons. In other words, they live in constant resistance to life. This attempt to “hold everything together” through clinging is a form of suffering. The very idea that you can cling is ultimately an illusion, because life inevitably flows and changes.

People who experience real spiritual awakenings wake up to the fact that they have imprisoned themselves. Instead of viewing your walls as protecting you from infinite darkness, see them as barriers that block out a beautiful, infinite light. Recognize the moments when your mental model of the world starts to crumble through inner turmoil as blessings, not threats. Let your prison collapse. Eventually, the turmoil will stop, and you’ll rest in total, blessed stillness.

Once you’re liberated, you’ll still have a self-concept and thoughts and emotions, but they’ll be just one small part of your total being. You won’t identify with them. Your only identity will be your sense of Self. Then you’ll never have to worry about anything again. You will have aligned yourself with the forces of creation, and you’ll be at rest in the infinitude of your true Being.

Death, the Tao, and the Divine

After learning the principles of awakening and the metaphors that help you apply it, you can expand your focus to understand the implications of these things for the profound issues of death, harmonious living, and union with God as your final, deepest identity and destiny.

The Lessons of Death

You’ve already learned that unconditional enjoyment of life is the greatest spiritual teacher. As paradoxical as it may sound on the surface, you can also say that your greatest spiritual teacher is death. And you don’t have to wait until the end of your life to learn from this teacher. You can do it right now.

Death makes life precious. It changes your perspective and priorities. It makes you more bold and loving. Someone who’s truly spiritually awake doesn’t change anything about how they’ve been living when death arrives, because they’ve already been living fully in the bliss of nonresistance and unconditional happiness.

To practice the teaching of death, simply change how you do your everyday activities and how much of you is present for them. Appreciate literally everything, from walking and breathing to arguments and good food (or even bad food). When troubles occur, put them in perspective by thinking of death. For inspiration, study the words and actions of the great spiritual teachers who have fully embraced death.

The Middle Way of the Tao

The Chinese concept of the “Tao” represents the way of balance and moderation, what we can call the middle way. All the great spiritual traditions teach it under various names. When you align yourself with the middle way of the Tao and trust its gentle guidance, your life effortlessly flows along the highest path.

To understand the Tao, understand that the extreme ends of anything are like the opposite ends of a pendulum swing. In the idiom of Taoism, these extremes are the yin and the yang, representing earth and heaven, female and male, darkness and light, weakness and strength, softness and hardness, passivity and aggression. The principle of complementary opposites, and of a middle way that holds them together in balance, threads its way through all phenomena.

Most people’s lives are stressful and difficult because they ride daily pendulum swings from side to side as they allow events to disturb them. But such struggles are unnecessary. Remember what you’ve already learned about rising and falling: You can learn to rise by cooperating with the events and energies of life instead of resisting them. This is the act of aligning with the Tao. It doesn’t require effort. Instead, just let any unbalanced energy balance itself by practicing what you’ve learned about dropping resistance, unhappiness, and negativity so that you begin to “fall upward.”

When you align with the Tao and learn to rest in it, you uncover vast reservoirs of energy and efficiency. It’s like sailing a boat. Multiple forces and factors are in play, and they all come together harmoniously to make the boat glide forward.

The Return to God

The ultimate goal of spiritual awakening is to return to God. This is where the teaching of death and the current of the Tao are leading you. Understand that real knowledge of God only comes from personal experience. You can only know God accurately from the absolute, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent center of Being itself—that is, from God’s own perspective.

Fortunately, you have a direct inner connection that gives you access to God’s perspective. You use this connection by employing the lessons you’ve learned in this book. Through continued practice of these things, an experience of divine union emerges. The veils of your human mind and heart can fall away to reveal the infinite, ineffable joy beyond the finite walls of your psyche.

The results of divine union are awesome:

• You discover the realm of Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana. You understand the exalted spiritual experiences that saints have reported throughout history.
• You now feel less angry, fearful, resentful, and self-conscious. You’re less reactive because you’re less bound to your earthly self as the center of your sense of identity.
• You begin to center yourself more in your spiritual being—not through effort, but naturally and inevitably.
• You experience the ecstasy that God knows when he looks at the world.
• You walk around feeling openness, lightness, and causeless love—love for no external reason.
• You realize that in your daily, practical life you can see with God’s eyes and give with God’s hands.

The best metaphor for the way God views the world and everyone in it, including you, is the sun, which shines equally brightly on all people without discrimination or distinction. Let go once and for all of the idea of a judgmental God. As you go forward into a life of spiritual awakening, let this thought change your life: Since God exists in eternal ecstasy, when He looks at you, what does He see?