PDF Summary:The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer
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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?
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PDF Summary Shortform Note
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- Chapter 8: Your Inner Addiction → Book Chapter 10
- Chapter 9: Your Inner Prison → Book Chapters 12, 13, and 14
Part 3: Death, the Tao, and the Divine
- Chapter 10: The Lessons of Death → Book Chapter 17
- Chapter 11: The Middle Way of the Tao → Book Chapter 18
- Chapter 12: The Return to God → Book Chapter 19
PDF Summary Part 1: Principles of Spiritual Awakening | Chapter 1: You and Your Inner Roommate
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Your inner roommate hijacks your experience by narrating the world for you. You “hear” it as the endless flow and flux of your thoughts.
- The voice chatters randomly: “Did I turn off the coffee maker? I need to call Walter. What’s on TV tonight?”
- The voice argues with itself. “I should get married. No, I’m not ready. But I love him! But it might ruin our relationship.”
- When you walk, drive, meet people, eat, work, or just sit, your inner roommate narrates it all: “Look, a poodle! Oh, no, here comes Rita. I don’t want to talk to her. Look, a restaurant. I want a taco.”
Your inner roommate’s narration of your life is a defense mechanism. Your roommate fears and hates the world because of the world’s unpredictability, so it generates an illusion of security to provide a sense of control. It invites you to live in your head instead of the full flow of reality itself by giving you a mentally interpreted model of the world to experience. However, this illusion isn’t satisfying, and ultimately it’s pathological. Your roommate is always liable to find something wrong with any situation and decide it doesn’t want to be there. It finds fault, lack, and offense...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Who You Really Are
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Consider your ability to lose yourself as you read these very words. Your mind can become immersed in the reading, but when you stop reading, you’re still here. Who is the reader separate from the reading?
Consider the status of you in relation to your dreams. When you dream during sleep, you’re immersed in the experience, but when you wake up, you know the dream was just something that you “had.” Who is the dreamer who experiences the dream?
When you ask it truly and deeply, the question becomes, “Who is having all of these mental, emotional, and physical experiences right now?”
How to Answer the Question
Having asked the question correctly, just let go of all experiences and notice what’s left: the pure experiencer. Notice that this experiencer has a certain quality: consciousness, an intuitive sense of existing. Notice that this pure experiencer can instantaneously apprehend richly complex scenes that would require a lot of time and effort for the thinking mind. Look around the room or out the window. Wordlessly receive what you see. Notice how the experiencer encompasses perceptions effortlessly.
When you understand what the master question is really...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: Inner Energy
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Your body contains centers or nodes of this energy, like spiritual valves that open and close. Yogis call them chakras. Energy focuses, distributes, and flows through these centers.
Your Spiritual Heart
You can better understand inner energy, and how you unwittingly shut yourself off from it, by paying attention to the heart chakra or spiritual heart. This is the chakra that you’re most familiar with from daily life. Your spiritual heart is an exquisite regulator of your experience. It governs your life because it opens and closes in sync with human relationships.
- When your spiritual heart is open, you can fall in love, feel inspiration, and feel enthusiasm. When it’s closed, you can’t.
- When your spiritual heart gets hurt, you get angry.
- When you feel you’ve lost touch with your spiritual heart, you sense a desperate emptiness.
Why Your Heart Closes
The only reason why you don’t feel inner energy all the time is that you block it by closing your heart and mind. You block it because you choose to—but unconsciously. To you, it seems like the opening or closing happens on its own, outside your control.
How Blockages Happen
**Your...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Falling and Rising
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You thus end up defining 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 people, places, and things so they don’t trigger your sense of being disturbed, and in doing this you make life itself into a threat. This means the cause of literally every problem—prejudices, negative emotions, whatever—is fear.
How to Stop Falling
Freedom from fear is possible, and thus freedom from falling is possible. It simply means refusing to fight with life. Think of the whole thing as a game in which an important law is: When life hits your stored negativity (your heart blocks), let the negativity go right then, because it will be harder to do it later. The operative principles are as follows:
- First, recognize there’s something you need to release.
- Second, be aware that the “stuff” that comes up inside you is distinct from you-who-notice-it. Remember that you’re the objective witness.
- Third, let the stuff go. Let it flow through you and dissipate.
How to Fall Upward
You can actually learn to “fall upward” into ever more delightful levels of enlightenment. The whole purpose of...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Nonresistance and Unconditional Happiness
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In most situations, there’s really nothing to deal with except your own desires and fears, which make everything seem complicated. Without desires and fears, life would just happen naturally, with no problems.
Anytime you notice any part of yourself growing unhappy, drop the unhappiness like a hot coal. For help in doing this, use any number of specific spiritual practices that seem helpful, such as affirmations or meditation. Formal meditation techniques might be especially helpful, as they’ll build the muscles of your awareness that enable you to recognize when unhappiness is trying to take root in you. Just remember that all such techniques and practices are means, not ends.
Use what you’ve learned about inner energy. Refuse to close your spiritual heart, no matter what happens. Refuse the siren call to fall into unhappiness and dysfunction. Refuse to build up new Samskaras, those knots of negative energy that you generate by resisting life. Recognize when something activates one of your existing Samskaras and tempts you to identify with a limited and distorted view of things. Remember that nothing makes you close and that there’s literally nothing worth closing...
PDF Summary Part 2: Metaphors and Applications | Chapter 6: Awake in the Dream
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When you wake up spiritually, you see and experience your life in a different way. You realize that the person you’ve always thought of as yourself is, in essence, just a dream or a movie. It’s a movie titled [Insert Your Name].
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Your Inner Thorn
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If you choose a life of protecting your thorn, you’ll build a thorn-shaped life as your daily actions revolve around shielding the painful spot. Your thoughts and relationships will be about it. Your whole life will become a reflection of it. Instead of solving the problem, you’ll make it the center of your universe. For example, if you suffer from loneliness, but instead of removing that thorn, you build your life around protecting yourself from the pain, you might keep people at a distance. You might marry someone who makes you feel the least lonely, but then you’ll spend your whole marriage trying to please your spouse in order to avoid abandonment. And/or you’ll create a permanent state of emotional distance to preemptively protect yourself while making manipulative attempts to ensure the other person’s devotion. Your life will be shaped around your thorn.
The Application: You Can Remove Your Thorn
To free yourself from a life of pain, employ the principles that you’ve already learned in this book, which can take on a variety of practical forms.
Use the events and encounters of your daily life as opportunities for liberation (remember Chapter 5 on...
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PDF Summary Chapter 8: Your Inner Addiction
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Here are some specific practices for giving up your addiction:
- Notice when your mind is trying to “make everything okay.” Gently let go of this. Don’t fight your mind. That only reinforces its neurotic activity.
- Let your thinking mind quiet down by watching it from your seat of consciousness. Let thoughts just happen, even neurotic ones. When you refuse to identify with thoughts, they start to quiet down. Practice this inner observation with little things to begin with. Calmly observe your annoyance when somebody says something you don’t like. Notice the feeling, and refuse to attribute its source to the other person. Gradually expand this practice to encompass bigger things.
- Set up specific awareness practices throughout the day. For example, use the daily ritual of getting into your car as a moment to stop and center. After you sit behind the wheel, pause a moment to remind yourself that you’re the witness and that you don’t have to buy into your inner roommate’s drama. Hook awareness practices to opening doors, answering your phone, and other regular activities.
Free and Clear
Once you’re free from your psyche’s demands, you can wake up and...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: Your Inner Prison
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This allegory describes your real-life situation. Your consciousness is living inside a sealed-off area inside you. You built this inner “house” from thoughts and emotions. The walls are your psyche, the reservoir of your past experiences, beliefs, so on. You live trapped inside your self-concept, your ego—which has become your prison.
You can verify how restrictive your psyche-house is by walking toward one of its walls—say, a fear of heights caused by a fall from a ladder in your youth. Now you’re unable to approach a ladder or go up in a tall building. But if you hear about a reality that exists outside your fortress, you’re both terrified and thrilled with a strange longing.
Your Psyche as Cage
Your psyche is also like a cage. You’re an animal trapped in a cage that it built for itself. But the bars are invisible, like the buried wires that go with a dog’s shock collar. You only know you’ve hit the edge when you feel a shock.
This analogy describes your real-life state of imprisonment: Your cage consists of the invisible outer limits of your self-concept and your comfort zone. Every day, you devote enormous energy to staying in this comfort zone. Why do you...
PDF Summary Part 3: Death, the Tao, and the Divine | Chapter 10: The Lessons of Death
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Death makes you bolder. When you embrace and live from the fact that you will die, you won’t have any last wishes, because you will have taken risks and achieved your wishes in every moment.
Death makes you really live. For someone who’s truly awakened, the arrival of death doesn’t change anything about how they’ve been living, because a person has already been living fully, saying yes to life, living in the bliss of nonresistance and nonclinging.
How to Practice the Teaching
To practice the teaching of death, you don’t have to change what you do. Instead, change how you do it and how much of you is present for it. Appreciate walking, breathing, rainfalls, arguments, good food, bad food, literally everything, more intensely than you ever have before. Every moment of your life can fill you completely and touch the very depths of your being, like the experience of finally hearing your favorite classical composition played by your favorite orchestra.
Think of death any time you’re having trouble. Are you experiencing anger or jealousy? Think of what it will be like when you’re dead and gone. This will put the immediate trigger in perspective and elicit...
PDF Summary Chapter 11: The Middle Way of the Tao
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Most people’s lives are stressful and difficult because they ride daily pendulum swings from side to side as they let events disturb them. This imbalance causes not only suffering but futility, because when you spend energy trying to maintain an extreme, you go nowhere. You end up serving the extreme itself instead of following the Tao through the middle. For example, if someone smokes for years, spends enormous time and money on it, then decides to quit, they’ll feel they have to engage in a huge motion in the other direction—applying self-discipline, wearing nicotine patches, undergoing hypnotherapy—to counterbalance the energy they’ve put into smoking and direct it back toward the middle.
Align With the Tao
Such struggles are unnecessary. Remember what you’ve already learned about nonresistance, rising, and falling. You can learn to rise by cooperating with the events and energies of life instead of resisting them and letting them drag you down into unconsciousness. You can align with the Tao.
To balance any unbalanced energy, just let it balance itself. Practice what you’ve learned about dropping resistance, unhappiness, and negativity so that you begin to...
PDF Summary Chapter 12: The Return to God
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Divine Ecstasy
You now experience the ecstasy that God knows when He looks at the world. As you return to God through openness and unconditional happiness, you automatically move through the different stages of yoga. Shakti (Spirit) awakens and purifies your mind and heart, enabling you to take pleasure in God’s creation. Waves of positive energy roll through you. In learning to be joyful in all things, you experientially understand the ancient yogic name for God: Satchitananda—being-consciousness-bliss—eternal, conscious joy.
You walk around feeling openness, lightness, and causeless love—love for no external reason. You see and know all creation as a proliferation of beauty. You respect and cherish all people and things. You stop judging and differentiating. You see and experience every child, person, leaf, rock, and passing phenomenon as its own object of absolute love. You love everything unconditionally, like the love of a mother for a child who’s mentally or physically challenged. To her, the child is beautiful. She doesn’t see anything wrong with this glorious, beloved child. That’s how God sees all of creation, and how you will see it in union with God....