The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

I thank the author for writing this book.

It is similar in theme and insights to Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" but written in a direct, declarative style, rather than Tolle's indirect Socratic dialogue style, which some readers have found difficult or confusing. 

Very much worth reading, and full of insights to help a sincere reader develop meta-awareness and put the problems and sufferings of modern life into context. 

Full chapter notes and quotes to follow: 

Chapter 1: 

"...most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it."

Your inner chatter as a narration of what happens outside in your experience, "a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there" that "allows you to buffer reality as it comes in" and allows you to control the experience of reality to some extent. 

Buffering yourself from life instead of living it. 

The way out is to notice who is doing the talking: this is the (silent) self that is aware of and can hear the talking/narrating self.  

Chapter 2: 

You're ready to grow when you finally realize that the "I" who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something. 

...you'll never be free of problems until you are free from the part within that has so many problems.

Noticing the inner dialog, the inner voice. 

You must objectively watch this voice and its reactions or you'll be lost in the energy/vibe of your problem. The problem isn't the problem itself, it is your talker/voice's reaction to it and judgment of it. 

Seeing the voice as a roommate, a neurotic roommate commenting on and judging everything. 

Chapter 3:

Who are you? Your "label" vs your inner being, your true Self who is the "experiencer" of your experience. "The one who sees" and the Self that doesn't talk. 

Chapter 4:  

Lucidity: being aware that you are aware, instead of NOT being aware that you are aware. Meaning: you are no longer completely immersed in events around you. Instead you are inwardly aware that you are the one who is experiencing both the events outside as well as observing your corresponding thoughts, emotions and egoic commentary about those things. And when you have a thought, you are aware that you are the one having the thought. 

You have the ability to focus your awareness, this is agency based. "Consciousness" has the ability to selectively focus awareness on specific things.

Seeing your experience as like a 3D TV screen. You are really sitting quietly inside (your mind) looking out at all these objects. 

Saying "hello" inside your mind as a cue to find your "seat of centered consciousness."

See the metaphor of the movie theater theater that engages all of your senses plus your emotions, synchronized to your experience, with no way of leaving the theater if you don't like the movie. You are sucked in and are no longer aware of your separateness from subjective reality.

 "Unless you're fully seated in witness consciousness, you're not back there being aware that you're the one watching all this. That is what it means to be lost." 

"What differentiates a conscious centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply the focus of their awareness... When you are a centered being your consciousness is always aware of being conscious." 

"If you really want to understand this difference you must begin by realizing that consciousness can focus on anything. That being the case, what if consciousness were to focus on itself? When that happens, instead of being aware of your thoughts, you're aware that you're aware of your thoughts. You have turned the light of consciousness back onto itself. You're always contemplating something, but this time you're contemplating the source of consciousness. That is true meditation."

"It's like you have been on the couch watching TV, but you were so totally immersed in the show that you forgot where you were. Someone shook you, and now you're back to the awareness that you're sitting on the couch watching TV. Nothing else changed. You simply stopped projecting your sense of self on to that particular object of consciousness. You woke up. That is spirituality. That is the nature of Self. That is who you are."

"You're not even a human being. You just happen to be watching one."

Chapter 5:

Inner energy, being "open" or "closed"/"blocked" to it. Chi (Chinese), or Shakti (yoga), or Spirit (Western religions).

Openness and receptivity, "forgetting how to close"

"If you make lists of how the world must be for you to open, you have a limited your openness to those conditions. Better to be open no matter what. How you learn to stay open is up to you. The ultimate trick is not to close."

"You can even affect the health of your body with your energy flow. When you start to feel the tendency of an illness coming on, you just relax and open. When you open, you bring more energy into the system, and it can heal. Energy can heal, and that's why love can heal."

"Relaxing and releasing"

Chapter 6: 

The "heart"

As an energy center, a chakra

You are the experiencer of your heart

Your heart opens or closes toward a person or a thing

Life as experiencing the moment that is passing through you, and then the next moment, and then the next. That is how an awakened being lives in the now. They are present, life is present, and the wholeness of life is passing through them.

Letting events pass through you or blocking the energy of the event and holding it inside you: either resisting negative events or clinging to positive events (play that memory again)... in both cases you are not letting the experience pass through you: "The alternative is to enjoy life instead of clinging to it or pushing it away."

You can "Resist" or "cling" but instead you should let it [the experience, a specific moment/now, etc] pass through you (smile and let it go). "Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing."

Chapter 7: 

The most primal energy flow is the survival instinct. 

This instinct has morphed in the modern era (of plenty) into a "psychological" survival instinct, defending the self psychologically. 

Defending our self-concepts, our egos. 

"Threats" to these drive the same amygdala/ACC response. 

On "hardening" or resisting things (insults, threats, threatening emotions, etc) vs "softening" to things, "opening" up to things. e.g.: surrender. Also observing/noticing things rather than judging them

Noticing an internal thought or an internal reaction and letting it pass by. "Here comes the thought and there it goes" rather than pulling you along with it. This is one definition of being "centered." 

"This technique of freeing yourself is done with the understanding that thoughts and emotions are just objects of consciousness. When you see your heart start getting anxious, you are obviously aware of this experience. But who is aware? It is the consciousness, the indwelling being, the Soul, the Self. It is the seer, the one who sees. 

"The object of consciousness comes and goes, and the consciousness watches it come and go... It stays constant and simply watches all of it." 

"Making freedom into a game": learning to stay centered with small injuries, small insults, starting with small things: Instead of being bothered by someone taking your pencil, you decide that "being free" is worth the cost of a pencil. "You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its [the minds's] melodrama."

"relax and release" 

"Because the tendency to get drawn in is constant, the willingness to let go and fall behind has to be constant." 

"Don't think you'd be free if you just didn't have these kinds of feelings. It's not true. If you can be free even though you're having these kinds of feelings, then you're really free--because there will always be something."

"If you can learn to remain centered with the smaller things, you will see that you can also remain centered with bigger things. Over time, you will find that you can even remain centered with the really big things. The types of events that would have destroyed you in the past can come and go, leaving you perfectly centered and peaceful."

Chapter 8:  

If you have a lot of fear, you won't like change. You'll try to create a world around you that is predictable, controllable, and definable. 

fear is a thing. It's just another object in the universe that you are capable of experiencing. You can release it or try and hide from it.

You have to find how things need to be in order for you to be okay.

We think we're supposed to figure out how life should be, and then make it that way. Only someone who looks deeper will question this assumption. How did we come up with a notion that life is not okay just the way it is, or that it won't be okay the way it will be? 

As long as you're watching, you're not getting lost in it.

Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting/discomfiting object (pain, hurt, fear, etc)

When you're in a state of disturbance, your tendency will be to act in order to try to fix things... the mind starts saying all kinds of things because it doesn't like this space. and it wants to get away from it anyway it can.

Chapter 9:

A thorn as metaphor: You can leave the thorn in and completely readjust your entire life around the problem, or you can deal with the problem. 

"In order to grow, you must give up the struggle to remain the same, and learn to embrace change at all times."

Building your whole life around your "thorn": loneliness, insecurity, your desire for things to stay the same, etc. 

"You are not the pain you feel, nor are you the part that periodically stresses out. None of these disturbances have anything to do with you. You are the one who notices these things, because your consciousness is separate and aware of these things, you can free yourself."  

"What you can do is notice that you noticed. ..Your way out is to just notice who's noticing.... if you pay attention you will see that [your feelings] are not you; they are just something you are feeling and experiencing. You are the indwelling being that is aware of all of this."

"Awareness does not fight; awareness releases."

Chapter 10:

"You are either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. This state of affairs is so prevalent that you don't see it, just as a fish doesn't see the water. You only notice that you're suffering when it gets worse than usual."

"Look how often you think about how you're doing, whether you like things or not, and how to rearrange the world to please yourself. You think like this because you're not okay inside, and you're constantly trying to make yourself feel better."

"You have mistreated your psyche by giving it a responsibility that is incomprehensible... You said to your mind, "I want everyone to like me. I don't want anyone to speak badly of me. I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone. I don't want anyone to hurt me. I don't want anything to happen that I don't like. And I want everything to happen that I do like.'.. can you imagine somebody trying to do that?"

"Most people try to fix their inner problems by getting better at the same external games they have always played."

Problem of the day: the thing that is bothering the psyche the most at any given moment. And then the next problem pops up and then the next one..

"Stop telling your mind that it's job is to fix your problems this job is broken the mind and disturb the entire psyche.... Your mind has very little control over this world.... you have given your mind and impossible task by asking it to manipulate the world in order to fix your personal inner problems."

"Everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything."

"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 are the consciousness that is behind the mind and is aware of the thoughts."

Thinking is something you watch the mind do. You are just in there, aware that you are aware.... you can watch the mind being neurotic and not get involved.

"You will soon see that your mind is constantly driving you crazy over nothing."

Simple awareness practices: 

1) every time you get into your car, as you're settling into the seat, just stop. take a moment to remember that you're spinning on a planet in the middle of empty space. Then remind yourself that you're not going to get involved in your own melodrama. Then before you get out of your car, do the same thing. 

2) if you really want to stay centered, you can also do this before you pick up the phone or open a door. set up trigger points in everyday life that help you remember who you are and what's going on inside.

Eventually, you will have persistently centered consciousness. This is the seat of Self.

Chapter 11:

"coming to peace with pain." 

layers over the pain (of rejection, of loss, that things will change, etc), like: avoidance, staying busy, seeing acceptance, being a certain way to gain approval/acceptance, 

"The psyche is built upon avoiding this pain, and as a result it has a fear of pain as its foundation." 

"...any behavior pattern based upon the avoidance of pain becomes a doorway to the pain itself." 

On thinking, deeply, of the fact that you are a tiny being on a tiny ball of dirt in a tremendously huge universe. Does it really matter what kind of car you drive or what clothes you wear? "How can you let these meaningless things cause pain?"

If you want to be free, simply view inner pain as a temporary shift in your energy flow.

You must look inside yourself and determine that from now on pain is not a problem. It is just a thing in the universe. It is a temporary experience.

Look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise.

To "close": to shut off or avoid or stiffen against something painful: emotional pain, insecurity, jealousy, etc. Once you "close," your mind will build an entire psychological structure around your closed energy. Your thoughts will try to rationalize why you're right, why the other person's wrong, and what you should do about it. If you buy into this, it will become a part of you.

You must learn to transcend the tendency to avoid the pain.

Wise beings do not want to remain a slave to the fear of pain. They permit the world to be what it is instead of being afraid of it... If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away let it pass through you like the wind.

When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting and closing. Relax and release... But you will not want to do this. You will feel tremendous resistance to doing this, and that's what makes it so powerful.

If you don't want the pain, why do you close around it and keep it? Do you actually think that if you resist, it will go away?

This is the core of spiritual work. When you are comfortable with pain passing through you, you will be free. This world will never be able to bother you again because the worst the world can do is hit the pain stored within you. if you do not care, if you are no longer afraid of yourself, you are free. You will then be able to walk through this world more vibrant and alive than ever before.

Chapter 12:

Getting quieter inside, as you become less overwhelmed by the constant chatter, thoughts, emotions of your ego.

"The more you sit in the seat of witness consciousness, the more you realize that since you are completely independent of what you were watching, there must be a way to break free of the magical hold that the psyche has on your awareness."

"The only thing most people know for sure about enlightenment is that they are not there."

When you get defensive, you are really defending your walls.

Instead of focusing on enlightenment, focus instead on the walls of your own making that are blocking the light. you don't have to participate in supporting, defending, repairing these walls.

Chapter 13:

Having a finite model containing your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs, in place of the infinite universe.

"You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn't fit is wrong, bad, or unfair."

Instead, you have to go beyond your model.

"In order to truly go beyond your model, you must first understand why you built it... have you ever built your whole world on a model of life predicated on another person's behavior or the permanence of a relationship? If so, have you ever had that foundation pulled out from under you? somebody leaves you. Somebody dies. Something goes wrong. Something shakes your model to the core when this happens, your entire view of who you believe you are, including your relationship to everyone and everything around you, begins to fall apart. you panic and do everything you can to hold it together. You beg, fight, and struggle to try to keep your world from collapsing... What you experience when this happens is one of the most important learning experiences of your life."

"See what happens to you when you don't do the things that make you comfortable. What you'll see is why you're doing them."

"So there are two ways you can live: you can devote your life to staying in your comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom. in other words, you can devote your whole life to the process of making sure everything fits within your limited model or you can devote your life to freeing yourself from the limits of your model."

Loving your cage, the cage of your psyche. You know the limits of your cage when the psyche starts to resist. Kind of like a dog with an electric fence. 

"Throughout each day, you frequently hit the edges of your cage when you hit these edges, you either pull back or try to force things to change so that you can remain comfortable. You actually use the brilliance of your mind to stay inside your cage. day and night you plot and plan how to stay within your comfort zone."

The dog has to be ready, willing, and able to withstand the discomfort to escape the electric fence. "Your cage is just like this. When you approach the edges you feel insecurity, jealousy, fear, or self-consciousness. You pull back, and if you are like most people, you stop trying. Spirituality begins when you decide that you'll never stop trying. Spirituality is the commitment to go beyond, no matter what it takes."

Chapter 14:

Everything keeps changing in our psyche--moods, desires, likes, dislikes, enthusiasm, lethargy. It's a full-time task just to maintain the discipline necessary to create even the semblance of control and order in there.

The very responsibility of having to hold it all together is itself a form of suffering. But what exactly are you trying to hold onto? the only things in there are your thoughts, emotions, and movements of energy, none of which are solid. The Buddhists have a term for this: "clinging."in the end, clinging is what the psyche is all about.

Who clings? (!!!) "You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts. You are not your emotions; you feel your emotions. You are not your body semicolon you look at it in the mirror and experience this world through its eyes and ears. You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things."

Clinging to our expectations of other people's behavior, their behavior must meet our psyche's predictions or expectations, or we are disturbed.

"You will be aware that there is no solidity and you will become comfortable with that...you neither have control, nor crave it... You are perfectly comfortable just being aware of it. Here comes this moment, then the next moment, and then the next."

"You do not have to cling to your experiences in the name of building yourself."

Clinging to your conceptual models of reality, of yourself: "What it means to live spiritually is to not participate in this struggle. It means that the events that happen in the moment belong to the moment. They don't belong to you. They have nothing to do with you. You must stop defining yourself in relationship to them, and just let them come and go."

"You must learn to be comfortable with psychological disturbance."

Chapter 15:

In the end there's a simple underlying question: do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? 

Most people don't dare give themselves this choice because they think it's not under their control. the problem is that we have a deep-seated set of preferences that gets in the way of our being happy. You want to qualify being happy, make it contingent on specific life situations that you require: that your wife doesn't leave you, do you have certain sums of money, etc. 

"Billions of things could happen that you haven't even thought of yet. the question is not whether they will happen. Things are going to happen. The real question is whether you want to be happy regardless of what happens. The purpose of your life is to enjoy and learn from your experiences...the fact remains that you were born and you were going to die period during the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience."

"This path leads you to absolute transcendence because any part of your being that would add a condition to your commitment to happiness has got to go." 

On staying open, not closing.

"Unconditional happiness is a very high path and a very high technique because it solves everything."

"Do you think God likes to be around people that are happy or people that are miserable? It's not hard to tell."

Chapter 16:

"This path of using life to evolve spiritually is truly the highest path... In this state, you are just witnessing and experiencing the events of life taking place. If you choose to live this way, you will see that life can be lived in a state of peace." 

"will" and "willpower" as forces. The power to affect things, make things happen or not happen. The problem is we assert it in opposition to the flow of life (cf The Path of Least Resistance).

If something happens that we don't like, we resist it. But it doesn't change the situation: in fact we cannot even argue that we're resisting the situation (it doesn't change it!), we are resisting the experience of the event passing through us. 

"Eventually you'll see that this resistance is a tremendous waste of energy."

"Using your will to resist that which has already happened or that which hasn't happened yet." Anything you do to resist causes more disturbance, not less. 

"...the solution is quite obvious--stop resisting."

If you want to understand stress, begin by realizing that you carry around with you your own set of preconceived notions of how things should be.

You have to carefully watch the mental voice that tells you to resist something. It literally commands you: "I don't like what he said. Fix it." It gives you advice and tells you to confront the World by resisting things. Why do you listen to it?

"You will be surprised to find that in most situations there's nothing to deal with except for your own fears and desires. If you don't have fear or desire about an event, there's really nothing to deal with. You simply allow life to unfold and interact with it in a natural and rational manner... When the events of this world make it through you, you have reached a deep spiritual state."

In contrast, everybody else is attempting to deal with the world around them while struggling with their own reactions and personal preferences. When a person is dealing their own fears, anxieties, and desires how much energy is left for dealing with what's actually happening?

"So, as your path, you take on the work of using life to let go of your resistance."

The way to work with resistance is by relaxing. The act of relaxing through your personal resistance changes your relationship with everything. Your soul has now learned how to let disturbing energies pass through. It keeps your heart open when it is trying to close.

"You just have to realize that life is giving you a gift, and that gift is the flow of events that takes place between your birth and your death. These events are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the steppingstones of your spiritual journey."

Chapter 17: Contemplating Death

"It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death."

"You have to be willing to look at what it would be like if death was staring you in the face. then you have to come to peace within yourself so that it doesn't make any difference whether it is or not."

A Yogi living as if there were a sword suspended above his head by a spiderweb. he lived his life with the awareness that he was that close to death. You are that close to death.

Cf "A Year to Live"

Why not assume this week is your last week? Versus the part of us that is so busy trying to make sure the *next* thing goes right that we can't just be here and now and live life. "Look how precious life becomes when you imagine you only have a week left to live... It is scarcity that makes things precious."

"It is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life."

"Feel grateful to death for giving you another day, another experience, and for creating the scarcity that makes life so precious. If you do this, your life will no longer be yours to waste; it will be yours to appreciate."

Chapter 18: 

The Dao, the Way. Extremes vs the middle way. Where the pendulum has come to rest, to balance quietly.

Approaching the Dao through simple almost rhetorical questions: eating versus gorging versus fasting versus starving, for example. Also relationship extremes, temperature extremes.

Keeping the pendulum more or less in the middle and avoiding extremes. There is no energy pushing in either direction, it has come to balance concerning food, relationships, sex, money, doing, not-doing, and everything else.

The Tao as a dynamic equilibrium, efficient, not wasteful of energy. You waste tremendous energy at the extremes.

"When you move in the Dao, you are always present. Life becomes absolutely simple in the Dao, it's easy to see what's happening in life -- it's unfolding right in front of you. But if you have all kinds of reactions going on inside because you're involved in the extremes, life seems confusing. That's because you're confused, not because life's confusing."

Sailing as metaphor for the dynamic equilibrium of the middle Way. 

In the Dao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Dao is going; you can only be there with it. 

Metaphor of walking with a cane, tapping from side to side to see where you *shouldn't* walk, finding the extremes to avoid them.

"The extremes create their opposites; the wise avoid them."

Chapter 19:

Identifying with your connection to the divine rather than with the psyche or the body.

"You don't feel as much anger, fear, or self-consciousness. You don't feel resentment toward people. You don't close or get tight as often. Things still happen that you don't want to happen, but they don't seem to touch you as much. They can't reach back to where you are because you've drifted behind the part of you that reacts to things."

"What does it feel like to identify more with Spirit than with form? You used to walk around feeling anxiety and tension; now you walk around feeling love. you just feel love for no reason. Your backdrop is love. Your backdrop is openness, beauty, and appreciation."

You drift further and further back and get higher and higher.

Losing your sense of "I".. losing your sense of separateness. A drop of water falls into the ocean. The individual consciousness falls into the universal oneness. The Atman (Soul) falls into the Paramatman (Supreme Soul). Eg: "I and my father are one" John 10:30.

"The process of judging has simply stopped. There is just appreciating and honoring. To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging it."