Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, Noetic Books, Oakland, CA 2007.
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Singer reminds us in his first pages, “you have a mental dialogue going on in your head that never stops. If you spend some time observing this mental voice, the first thing you will notice is that it never shuts up.” It is, “actually a shocking realization when you first notice that your mind is constantly talking to you.” If however, Singer points out, “you” are the one hearing that voice, it (the chatter in your head) is obviously not you. There is, Singer believes, “nothing more important” to inner evolution “than realizing that you are not that endless babble in your mind”, but that instead, “you are the one that hears it.”
What you are usually experiencing, Singer adds, “is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than stark, unfettered perception of what is really ‘out there’.” What we are typically receiving is “our mental model of reality, not reality itself.” We create what seems to be the ‘outside’ world inside ourselves and then, all too much of the time, “live inside our minds.” We spend our lives struggling to minimize disturbances from our perpetual “movie of the “outside world” that we want to keep from intruding upon our well-buffered internal cocoon.
The way out from this protective self-absorption, this ongoing insulation of ourselves from actual reality, according to Singer, is realization that we are hearing that constant voice talking away at us from inside our own heads. We are not the speaker. Our inner essence is the hearer, the listener. This understanding, Singer believes, is a crucial doorway to the deeper places within ourselves. It is in these inner dimensions where we can become the “witness” to our own reactions and emotions, our own narration of the mental story we are perpetually telling ourselves. Rather than being endlessly triggered by all that seems to be outside us, our focus can become our own inner state. There is no need, Singer tells us, to allow our so frequently discontented inner voice to perpetually frighten, alarm, agitate, and upset us or make our lives feel like we are living in a soap-opera. The alternative is to access places further within ourselves where the volume and intensity of that voice recedes, where we can ultimately become free from its constant blaring. In its place we can discover tranquility, inner stillness, and peace.
“What an amazing process life actually is,” Singer reminds us, “this flow of atoms through time and space…an eternal sequence of events that take form and then instantly dissolve into the next moment.” A truly spiritual being dwells in their own “seat of consciousness” without effort or intent, free of the tumult of thought waves that had pounded relentlessly against their interior shores. The seat of our consciousness is pure awareness itself. True spiritual growth can only happen, Singer informs us, when there is only one you inside. No matter how hard your mental voices work to stir you up, you have learned to maintain a healthy distance from reacting to them and to the projected melodrama of your life.
Ultimately, Singer writes, “awareness is simply aware, while everything else in the universe parades before it.” The “story” being conveyed to you by your mind, however, may not match your preconceived notions of how the world should be. You may have given your mind an impossible task by asking it to manipulate reality to fit your personal desires. We work hard to stay within our “comfort zones”, but what feels like security can also be a prison. We allow our mind voices to separate us from direct experience of the endless organic unfolding of life around us.
To dwell in that larger perspective, we have to quiet our reactivity and internal voices and also go beyond the familiar conceptual structures in which most of us live so much of the time. We have to let go of what Singer calls “false solidity.” It is through this inner work, Singer writes, that a more spiritual insight, and even experience of the presence of God, can become a reality. We begin to inhabit instead within intertwining fabrics, elaborate geometries, of light and energy that have been, beneath the level of our awareness, within us all along.
You become able to look at the endlessly diverse and transitory display unfolding of apparent “physicality” around you at arm’s length for the first time. Perceiving it all from this vantage point, from your own inner sanctuary where the walls between “inner” and “outer” have broken down, you no longer take it all so personally. You discover that this inner place from which you now watch the endless ripples across the surface of your awareness cannot readily be disturbed. Rather than relentless absorption in externalities, you develop growing awareness of what is actually occurring down within our own innermost places as these begin to open up into luminous internal oceans of our new reality.