Book SummaryThe Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Untethered Soul

Most people are fragmented and unhappy. They lead conflicted and painful lives, driven by a variety of competing motivations and impulses. They would love to follow the advice of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be true to themselves, but they just can’t do it, because Polonius’s advice only works if you really know the self to which you’re supposed to be true.

In this book, 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 awakening to your true identity. You’ll learn to free yourself from false identities and the suffering that goes with them, and you’ll learn to live an enlightened life of peace, joy, creativity, and divine love.

Principles of Spiritual Awakening

You and Your Inner Roommate

Currently, your life isn’t your own. It belongs instead to what you might think of as an “inner roommate.” You “hear” this voice as the endless flow and flux of your thoughts (“Did I turn off the coffee maker? I wonder what’s on TV tonight?”). Because the voice speaks to you as the voice of your own mind, you’ve mistakenly come to believe that it is you.

Your inner roommate hijacks your experience by babbling neurotically and narrating the world for you. It worries, argues with itself, feels guilty, criticizes others, wallows in self-pity, leaps manically from thought to thought, and generally acts like a crazy person.

Your inner roommate’s narration of your life is a defense mechanism. Your roommate feels intrinsically afraid of and antagonistic toward the world, so it tries to control it by giving you a mentally filtered model of the world to experience instead of the unpredictable world outside your mind.

Disidentify From Your Roommate, Its Voice, and Its Melodrama

The very act of noticing your roommate’s voice is the beginning of freedom from it. By simply noticing it, you disidentify from it and recognize that you are not it. Consider personifying your inner roommate externally. What does it say? How does it make you feel? Why would you ever want to give control of your life to this unstable person who continually dispenses neurotic advice about everything?

You can take charge temporarily by “speaking” to yourself with this mental voice. Try it now: Mentally shout “Hello!” and “hear” it in your mind. This is a useful centering technique for when you’re feeling overwhelmed by racing thoughts.

Realize that you don’t have to believe your inner roommate. Your inner voice isn’t reality. It’s merely a commotion about life, not life itself. Your true spiritual growth depends on not believing what your inner roommate says.

Who You Really Are

Having recognized your inner roommate and freed yourself from its pathological viewpoint, you can recognize who you really are. There’s a technique for this that’s more important than any book or mantra or holy pilgrimage. The technique is actually a question: “Who am I?” Asking this master question deeply and correctly will reveal your true identity.

How to Ask the Master Question

Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to the objective world. Your image in the mirror ages, but you don’t. Who is the you who remains the same as the outer world changes?

Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to your inner, subjective world. Who is it in you that loves, fears, thinks, and dreams? Who is reading these words right now?

When you ask it truly and deeply, the master question becomes, “Who is having all of these mental, emotional, and physical experiences right now?”

How to Answer the Master Question

To answer the master question, ask it correctly and let this direct your attention to the nature of all experiences. Then let go of the experiences and notice what’s left: the pure experiencer. You are the one who sees. You are the witness who is seated at the center of consciousness. From there, you look outward at your thoughts, emotions, and, through your physical senses, the external world. Look around the room or out the window. Wordlessly receive what you see. Notice how the experiencer encompasses the whole tableau effortlessly. You are the one who perceives all of these things and remains constant as they arise and pass away.

Inner Energy and Your Spiritual Heart

Now you know who you really are: You are the pure witness, the experiencer. With this established, understand that the most important thing in your actual experience of life is inner energy. This energy has laws and follows patterned behavior just like physical energy in the outer world. It behaves by surging and receding, as governed by the condition of your heart (see below). When it flows, you feel supercharged and able to take on the world. When it doesn’t, you feel drained and depressed. You can know the current state and level of your inner energy by paying attention to your relative level of vitality, enthusiasm, joy, and inspiration.

Your body contains centers or nodes, like spiritual valves, that focus and distribute this energy. Yogis call these centers chakras. Your heart chakra regulates your experience. This “spiritual heart” governs your life because it opens and closes in sync with human relationships, determining whether you can fall in love, feel inspiration, or feel enthusiasm. The only reason you don’t feel inner energy all the time is that you block it by closing your heart and mind. This blockage is your own unconscious choice, but to you it seems like it’s “just happening.”

Heart Blockages

Your spiritual heart closes because it stores up and becomes blocked by past experiences. The concept of Samskaras from the yogic tradition provides a useful handle for understanding blockages. When a blockage happens—such as when you resist the pain of a broken relationship—you...

The Untethered Soul Summary Shortform Note

We've reorganized this book’s chapter order for coherency. As a reference, here's how the summary chapters correspond to those of the book:

Part 1: Principles of Spiritual Awakening

• Chapter 1: You and Your Inner Roommate → Book Chapters 1 and 2
• Chapter 2: Who You Really Are → Book Chapter 3
• Chapter 3:...

The Untethered Soul Summary Part 1: Principles of Spiritual Awakening | Chapter 1: You and Your Inner Roommate

Most people are fragmented and unhappy. They lead conflicted lives, driven by a variety of competing motivations and impulses. They would love to follow the advice of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be true to themselves, but they just can’t do it, because Polonius’s advice only works if you really know the self to which you’re supposed to be true.

Fortunately, there’s an infallible expert on the subject of who you really are: you. You’re the only one with direct, firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be you. In this book, 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 awakening to your true identity. You’ll learn to free yourself from false identities and the suffering that goes with them, and you’ll learn how to live an enlightened life of peace, joy, creativity, and divine love.

In Part 1 (Chapters 1-5), you’ll learn the basic principles and practices of spiritual awakening. Part 2 (Chapters 6-9) presents multiple metaphoric “takes” on these principles to guide you through various...

Shortform Exercise: Meet Your Inner Roommate

Chapter 1 taught you to become aware of your “inner roommate” so that you can escape its control. This exercise will help you to apply this awareness.

Mentally “step back” and pay attention to your inner roommate’s voice. What does it talk about? What kind of personality do its words reveal? (Is your inner roommate angry? Arrogant? Self-pitying?)

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 2: Who You Really Are

Now that you’ve gotten to know your inner roommate, you can focus on getting to know someone even more important: your real self.

The Master Question and Its Implications

For attaining inner freedom, there’s a technique that’s more important than any book or mantra or holy pilgrimage. The technique is actually a question: “Who am I?” Properly used, this “master question” will reveal your true identity.

Consider: You aren’t actually your name. Wouldn’t you still be the same person if you had been given a different name? Who are you apart from your name?

You aren’t actually your biography. Wouldn’t you still be the same person if you had gone to a different school or married someone else? Who are you apart from your biography?

At base, the master question asks you to pay attention to something you might not otherwise consider: The mystery of who sees, hears, and knows when you see, hear, and know. It asks, “Who am I really, at my core?”

How to Ask the Question

Here are some right ways to ask the master question:

Ask “Who am I?” about yourself in relation to the outer world. Consider your changing physical appearance as you age, and contrast this with...

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 3: Inner Energy

In Chapter 1, you learned that the first step in spiritual awakening is to recognize your inner roommate, which then enables you to begin recognizing your real self. Now it’s time to learn about the most important thing in your actual experience of life: your inner energy. True spiritual traditions are all about inner energy and how to open yourself up to it. All the great traditions talk about this energy under different names (Chi in Chinese medicine, Shakti in yoga, Spirit in the West).

Laws of Inner Energy

Inner energy behaves by surging and receding, depending on the condition of your spiritual heart (see below). When the energy flows, you feel supercharged and able to take on the world. When it doesn’t, you feel drained and depressed. You can know its current state within you by paying attention to your relative level of vitality, joy, and inspiration. In Chapter 5, you’ll learn how the flow of your inner energy determines your level of happiness.

This energy has laws and follows patterned behavior just like physical energy in the outer world. It’s an underlying field, analogous to the field of atomic energy that underlies the physical realm. The...

Shortform Exercise: Open Your Heart

In Chapter 3, you learned about inner energy and the way your spiritual heart either blocks it or lets it flow. This exercise leads you to become more acquainted with your heart and its blockages.

What are some typical situations where you feel your inner energy flow freely? (What situations tend to make you feel inspired, joyful, confident?)

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 4: Falling and Rising

Just like your cycles of closing and opening, for most of us, life is a recurring cycle of falling and rising. We cycle repeatedly into states of unhappiness and dysfunction and then rise again to a relative state of clarity and ease. It’s a traumatic and futile way to live. But fortunately, it doesn’t have to be like this.

How You Fall

The fall into unhappiness is actually a fall into unawareness. Here’s how it happens:

• You encounter a trigger (something that activates one of your Samskaras) and get pulled down into the disturbed energy.
• From there, you see everything through the negative energy’s distorted haze. Even beautiful and enjoyable things now appear ugly and depressing. Your experience has become polluted with negativity.
• Eventually, the negativity plays itself out and subsides. You drift back upward toward relatively undisturbed awareness. The length of the cycle depends on the depth and strength of the energy blockage that caused the disturbance.

A series of cascading crises can occur if your life hits another blockage while you’re already down and you make life decisions from that negative state. Now you’re not just fallen, you’re caught...

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 5: Nonresistance and Unconditional Happiness

You can view the principles of opening and closing, and of falling and rising, as specific components and/or alternative expressions of a broader principle that rules your life and represents the path to your salvation. It’s actually a dual principle: nonresistance plus unconditional happiness.

This dual principle evokes one of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn: Life itself—not some exotic adventure or pursuit, but just your daily life—is the highest spiritual path. And your choice to enjoy your daily life is the greatest spiritual teacher. Life will liberate you if you know how to ask the right question and give the right answer. The question is, “Do I want to be happy?” The answer is an unconditional, “Yes!” You give this answer by practicing total nonresistance.

Understand Resistance

To understand nonresistance, first understand what resistance is. The thing in you that has the ability to resist life is actually the Self, your true identity. Put differently, it’s willpower, the force that you use to move your arms, legs, and thoughts. Will is the concentrated power of the Self, directed into the mental, physical, and/or emotional realms. You can misuse...

The Untethered Soul Summary Part 2: Metaphors and Applications | Chapter 6: Awake in the Dream

Part 1 of this summary taught you the basic principles of spiritual awakening. Part 2 processes these principles through a succession of metaphors to clarify their application to various parts of your life.

The Metaphor: You’re Lost in a Dream

An accurate way to characterize your regular daily experience is to say that you’re sleepwalking through life. You’re essentially lost in a dream. Your ability to get “lost” like this is a native one that you’ve had since birth. When you focus consciousness intensely on any object, you lose your sense of self-awareness in it. For example, when you really get into reading a book, you “lose” yourself in it and don’t notice the book or your surroundings. The same thing happens when you watch a movie. The same thing happens in daily life when you lose yourself in the flow of objects and events around you.

Notice especially that you don’t just lose yourself in external objects....

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 7: Your Inner Thorn

For true spiritual growth, you must come to peace with pain, because you’ve built your whole life on it. From childhood, you have unconsciously built your thoughts, actions, and beliefs around avoiding a layer of pain in your heart. Your personality, behavior patterns, way of dressing and talking—you built them all on avoiding pain. Spiritual growth requires you to embrace this pain, and more, to transcend it.

The Metaphor: You Have an Inner Thorn

For a more vivid understanding of your pain and its effects, imagine that you have a thorn embedded in your arm, right on a nerve. It’s a serious, impairing problem. Should you handle the pain by removing the thorn, or by making sure nothing touches it?

If you decide to protect the thorn, this work will consume your life. Any behavior pattern for avoiding pain will actually become a doorway for that pain to enter, because when you attempt to avoid your deep pain, you build layers of sensitivity around it.

In real life, you have just such a thorn. It’s made up of your Samskaras, those blocked energies in your heart from stored-up past impressions. This is why your days are precarious as you navigate through potential...

Shortform Exercise: Face Your Pain

In Chapter 7, you learned that any behavior pattern for avoiding stored up pain will actually become a doorway for that pain to enter your life. For example, if you’re sensitive about your weight, you’ll experience pain every time the subject of your weight comes up. This exercise will help you to identify and deal with your own pain points.

What’s one area of your life where you’re especially sensitive and liable to feel pain? (Is it shame over your appearance? Lack of self-confidence?)

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 8: Your Inner Addiction

In Chapter 1, you learned about your “neurotic inner roommate,” which is simply a colorful way of characterizing your psyche. A vivid way to describe your current relationship to this roommate is to say that you’re addicted to it. Your psyche makes constant demands, and you’ve devoted your life to meeting them.

The Metaphor: You’re Addicted to Your Psyche

You’re “addicted” to your psyche because you mistakenly think your psyche protects you from pain. But in fact, your psyche is pain. You need to realize that your psyche is very ill, as evidenced by its extreme sensitivity. When your physical body is healthy, you tend not to notice it. You only notice it when there’s a problem. The fact that you frequently notice your psyche because of mental-emotional pain—anger, embarrassment, anxiety—shows you just how unwell it is.

Your psyche’s illness comes from fear and resistance. In learning about nonresistance and unconditional happiness, you learned that your mind is unwell because you’ve given it the impossible job of creating a secure world by resisting life, by trying to make everyone and everything do what you want. You’ve set your psyche the task of conforming the...

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 9: Your Inner Prison

As you grow spiritually, you realize that it really is possible to go beyond the disturbances in your psyche, to break the magic spell that your mental world has always wielded over your consciousness. This is what we mean when we talk about “enlightenment.” To discover the reality beyond your psyche, recognize that your psyche is like a fortress or cage that you built for yourself long ago, and that you have mistaken for the whole universe.

The Metaphor: Your Psyche Is a Prison

Your Psyche as Fortress

Here’s an allegory for your life:

Imagine finding yourself in a beautiful, open, sunny field. You decide to buy it and build your dream house. You build the house of permanent materials and seal its perimeter for energy efficiency. You install a great security system. After you move in, you love your house so much that you start spending all your time inside. You lock the doors and windows, like a fortress, and luxuriate in your self-made environment.

Eventually the lights start to burn out, but you’ve become so accustomed to living inside that you don’t open the window shades because you don’t even want to see the outside anymore. In fact, you can hardly...

Shortform Exercise: Understand Your Prison

In Chapter 9, you learned about the way your psyche is an inner prison that you built for yourself, and you learned why you unconsciously love it. This exercise will help you to recognize your inner prison and begin to break free.

What are the “walls” of your personal prison built of? (Are they walls of fear? Hope? Despair? Pain? Self-obsession?) Name at least two or three specific walls that you recognize from your regular experience.

The Untethered Soul Summary Part 3: Death, the Tao, and the Divine | Chapter 10: The Lessons of Death

Part 2 of this summary supplied a variety of metaphors that you can use to better understand and apply Part 1’s principles of spiritual awakening. In this third and final part, you’ll learn to expand your focus and understand the implications of all these things for the ultimate issues of death, harmonious living, and union with God.

You learned in Chapter 5 that your choice to enjoy life unconditionally is your greatest spiritual teacher. Now realize that you can say the same thing in opposite form: Death is your greatest spiritual teacher. And you don’t have to wait until the end of your life to learn from death. You can do it right now.

What Death Teaches

Death makes life precious. It doesn’t take things away, it gives them to you. Your life is a tiny blip in an unfolding of reality that’s billions of years old. The reality of death enables you to appreciate the things in your experience of this stupendous cosmic dance that you’ve always taken for granted, the experiences you’ve never really paid attention to because you were stuck in a mental hyperworld where you pursued egocentric unrealities.

**Death...

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 11: The Middle Way of the Tao

The Tao Te Ching is one of the deepest of all spiritual texts. “Tao” can be translated as “Way.” The core teaching of the Tao Te Ching is the middle way of balance or moderation. All the great spiritual traditions teach the Tao, whether they call it that or not. When you align yourself with the Tao, your life effortlessly flows along the highest path.

Understand the Tao

Although it’s hard to capture the subtle concept of the Tao in language, you can approach it by looking at the extremes in any area of life. Consider the subject of food: Do we need food? Yes. Is it possible to eat too much? Yes. Is periodic fasting good? Yes. Is it good never to eat? No. Or consider the question of proximity in human relationships. Closeness is good, but too much closeness can lead to smothering and conflict. Some distance is good, but too much distance can lead to alienation.

The point is that the extreme ends of anything are like the opposite ends of a pendulum swing. The principle of complementary opposites, and of a middle way that holds them together in balance, runs through all phenomena. In Taoist terms, this implicit universal relationship is called the yin and the yang,...

The Untethered Soul Summary Chapter 12: 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. Books and ideas about God disagree with each other, so 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.

Your Inner Connection

Fortunately, you have a direct inner connection that gives you access to this divine perspective. You can use this connection by employing the lessons you’ve learned in this book. You can disidentify from your body and psyche and find your real identity beyond the personal self. In doing this, you can initiate a transformation in which you release your stored negativity as your spirit drifts upward, away from anxiety, unhappiness, and the other “lower vibrations” of your being toward a life of peace and happiness.

Divine Union

From continued practice of these things, an experience of divine union emerges. The veils of your human mind and heart fall away to reveal the infinite, ineffable joy beyond the finite walls of your psyche. You...

Shortform Exercise: Recognize and Create a Whole New Life

The last three chapters advised you to recognize death as the greatest spiritual teacher, to follow the “middle way” of the Tao, and to recognize the divine realities that death and the Tao ultimately reveal. This final exercise invites you to dwell further on these things. And more: It invites you to begin acting on them.

Chapter 10 stated that death makes life precious, changes your priorities, changes your perspective, makes you more loving, makes you bolder, and makes you really live. When you personally dwell on the reality of death—both yours and that of others—which of these areas do you find it most strongly affects? (Does it change your priorities or perspective? Does it make you feel bolder or more loving?) How exactly does awareness of death affect you in that part of your life, and why?