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Learn how to untether your soul from the turbulent waves of life and flow peacefully with the cosmic stream.
In this book the author reflects, ‘I’m not getting up until I’ve reached enlightenment.' Having wandered away from his campsite among the tropical greenery and sky-blue lakes of Ocala National Park, he sat down and nestled his legs into a lotus pose to meditate. Anxious inner voices pulled him away from his task, perhaps with worries about the war in Vietnam or how to fix his struggling first marriage or all he had to do for his graduate studies at the University of Florida. Silencing this legion of voices through Zen meditation and breathing, he slowly became aware of a cosmic energy flowing in and out with his every breath. He ceased to do, think, or feel and simply started to be. He sat in silence for hours, long past when his friends at the campsite had begun to worry about where he’d gone.
After this and other dramatic experiences during the early 1970s, Michael ‘Mickey’ A. Singer left his academic career in economics and founded the Temple of the Universe Meditation Centre in Florida in 1975. He subsequently began publishing numerous spiritual texts and helped launch the Medical Manager Corporation, which was later sold in a $5 billion acquisition. He retired in 2005 in order to focus solely on his writing, and has published multiple bestsellers, including The Untethered Soul in 2007.
You are not your inner voice: that voice which whispers worries at 2am, gets distracted by every passing thought at work, or makes you question everything you say in every conversation. That voice is often beyond our control and pursues what we do not inherently wish to pursue. We are not that voice but rather the one who hears the voice – it is not us but something happening to us. Likewise, we are not our emotional reactions (which are often beyond our control) but the ones who witness these reactions. Our thoughts, feelings, and inner voices are like a noisy roommate with whom we share a living space. We can either get caught up in their drama, habits, and bad decisions or we can step back and watch with detached amusement.
As such, we should simply observe life and allow it to unfold instead of trying to repress, fight, or prevent its cycles. Observing allows these experiences, emotions, and energies to wash over and pass through us, whereas trying to avoid or protect ourselves from them inadvertently blocks those energies and prevents them (and us) from evolving and moving on. If we, for instance, fight our grief or swallow it, that negative energy gets clogged in our emotional heart centre, causing the spiritual equivalent of a blocked valve, with equally devastating results.
True happiness comes not from avoiding pain or bettering your external circumstances, which is often futile, but from changing your inner outlook to identify with your true, liberated, unharmed, unbothered, unencumbered, spiritual Self. This ‘watching’ Self cannot be hedged in by suffering, thoughts, feelings, or material walls, and hence remains limitless. The ‘watching’ Self has incredible potential, waiting to be released from our false selves. These false selves will inevitably disappear at death anyway, so why should we allow them to restrict us while we still live?
Singer proposes that our thoughts, feelings, successes, and failures are all false identities we’ve latched onto to give ourselves a sense of stability — like mistaking an island of floating garbage for land. He is offering to show us how to step back and become ‘untethered’ from these identities, letting go of the need to control reality while also becoming more authentically ourselves.
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