Top Quotes: “Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament” — Michael Singer
Introduction
“The highest path is learning through your daily life to gradually let go of what is distracting your consciousness. By accepting instead of resisting, you will eventually attain a permanent seat of clarity — it’s called becoming established in the seat of Self. You will be living in the most beautiful energy you’ve ever experienced, and it will never stop. During every moment of your life, there will be a beautiful flow of energy that keeps rising within you.”
“You must admit that those moments have nothing to do with you. They belong to themselves and their relationship to all that surrounds them. You didn’t create them, and you don’t make them come and go. They are just there. The moment in front of you is just another moment in the universe that exists even when you are not looking at it. It is completely impersonal.
Nonetheless, the moment in front of you doesn’t seem impersonal; it seems very personal. That is why it can cause so much trouble. You suffer when the moment in front of you is not the way you want, and you rejoice when it matches your preferences. This is because of something you are bringing into the moment — it is not something intrinsic to the moment itself. All moments in the universe are simply moments in the universe; you are the one bringing your personal preferences into these impersonal moments and making them seem personal.”
““Why is she sitting there?” “Who’s she talking to?” “The lights are way too bright.” All of a sudden this new moment starts affecting you because you’re looking at it. The truth of the matter is, it existed exactly the same before you looked at it. One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you — you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. It’s not personal — you are making it personal. There are countless moments unfolding in the universe at any given time, and your relationship to all of them is exactly the same: you are the subject, they are the object.
Once you realize this truth intellectually, it still won’t look that way in your everyday life. To help, let’s take a field trip out to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, overlooking the beautiful Pacific Ocean. While you’re gazing out there, ask yourself whether what you see in front of you has anything to do with you. You see waves, you see spray, you may even see some whales or sea lions. That just happens to be what is unfolding in front of you at that moment. If you had come on a different day, or even a different hour, what you’d see would be quite different. But this would not bother you. It would only bother you if you came to the wharf with some personal preferences: “I want to see a whale.” “I want to see the giant waves people told me about.” With these preferences, you will have a very different experience than someone who simply came to see what the Pacific Ocean looked like that day. One person can simply enjoy the experience; the other has to struggle to make the experience match their personal preferences.”
“When light waves hit a physical object, the different atoms and molecules of that object absorb some frequencies of the light and reflect others. Objects themselves have no color; it is the light reflecting off them that has the different colors we perceive.”
Awe
“About 13.8 billion years ago there was a giant explosion called the big bang. Prior to this explosion, it is thought that all the galaxies and everything within them, all the mass and matter of the universe, fit into a space smaller than an atom.”
“As the expansion slowed down even more, another one of the fundamental forces came into play — the force of gravity. Gravity, of course, is the force that has the effect of pulling together objects that have mass. Since hydrogen atoms have mass, as the atoms were pulled closer together, the gravity became so strong that it fused two atoms into one. When two hydrogen nuclei fuse into one, a helium atom is created. This process of fusing lighter elements into heavier ones is called nuclear fusion, and it’s been going on throughout the universe for hundreds of millions of years.
It is worth noting that every single time this fusion of two atoms takes place, there is a tremendous release of atomic energy. All of a sudden, nuclear explosions began taking place throughout the universe, releasing powerful radiant energy. This is the birth of what we call the primary stars. A star is born by the fusing together of hydrogen atoms, which releases tremendous amounts of energy and leaves helium atoms as its byproduct. You can think of helium as the ash left behind by this hydrogen fusion process. Wherever the clouds of hydrogen gas were thickest after the big bang, the first primary stars started to burn. That is literally where stars come from. Every star you look at to this day was born through the hydrogen fusion process.
Though this all started 13.8 billion years ago, we have scientific evidence of it today. Stars are being born right now, and we can observe the process.”
“Meanwhile, as a star stops fusing hydrogen, the gravitational pull of the helium core will become greater and greater because there are no longer fusion explosions to offset it. The star will start to collapse into its core. Depending upon the original size of the star, its core will either drift off into space, or the increased force of the gravity on the core will become great enough to begin fusing helium into more complex elements, such as carbon. The fusion process of these more complex elements will reignite the star, even hotter than before. Depending upon the size of the star, these “death throes” can go on again and again. Cycle after cycle, more and more complex elements will become the byproduct of fusion of lighter elements, and eventually the star will begin to collapse again as it runs out of fuel. Every time this death cycle takes place, more and more elements of the periodic table are created.
How many of these cycles of death and rebirth a star will go through is dependent upon the original size of the star. The larger the star, the greater the gravitational force exerted during its collapse, and thus the greater the force available to reignite the fusion process of the more complex elements. In most stars, this process will stop when the byproduct of fusion is iron (element 26 in the periodic table). This is because iron absorbs more heat during fusion than the fusion process creates. Thus, iron will not sustain a fusion reaction. Large stars will progress until they have cores of iron surrounded by shells of the remaining elements from the previous cycles that were not fully burned. This is how the lighter elements on the periodic table (1 to 26) were created, all the elements from hydrogen to iron.
As interesting and educational as all of this is, remember that the purpose of this discussion is to see where “the outside world” comes from. As amazing as it seems, the elements that make up our world were forged in the stars. Take your body, for example. We have already explained where all the elements that make up your body come from — they are the direct byproducts of — what makes the stars shine. Almost 99 percent of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. All of these elements are lighter than iron, and thus were produced by the burning of commonplace stars. We know all of this as fact, not theory.”
“An even more fascinating topic is how the heavier elements on the periodic table are created, like gold, platinum, and silver. The heavier elements are all those with an atomic number greater than iron (26). Iron forms the dividing line because it absorbs more heat than it releases during fusion. As such, iron doesn’t emanate enough heat energy to stop a star from collapsing. Unless the original star was exceptionally large to begin with (a red super-giant), it will finally die when it gets to an iron core.
What happens during the death of a red supergiant star is one of the most amazing events in the known universe, and it provides the energy source needed to create the heavier elements. If the star is large enough before its collapse, the intensity of the collapse can actually crush the atoms in the core. Instead of fusing the iron atoms together, this tremendous force pushes their electrons into the nucleus itself…As it turns out, the enormous energy force generated during a supernova explosion is precisely what is needed to create the rest of the elements we interact with each day. What the force of gravity was unable to do during the creation of the lighter elements, the massive explosion of a supernova is able to do — fuse the heavier elements.”
“When stars explode at death, all the matter that built up in their outer shells gets blown out into interstellar space. Carbon, oxygen, silicon, gold, and silver were all floating around as clouds of elements in space, then gravity pulled them together to form the planets. This is how the planet Earth formed with its ninety-two natural elements, all of which were forged in the stars. This process has gone on for over thirteen billion years, and everything you interact with each day is composed of this “star dust,” including your body.”
“We can use the term mindfulness to mean that you are always conscious of what is really going on around you and inside you. You’re not just conscious of the appearance of things but also their true nature: where they come from, why they are the way they are, and what it took for them to manifest before you. Mindfulness is a natural, effortless process once you let go of personal distractions. Instead of thinking that the moment in front of you has to be a certain way, you start thinking that it’s pretty awesome the way it is. In fact, it’s amazing that it even exists.”
Mindfulness
“Understand, you have just made life a lose-lose situation. If anything reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to reexperience what you liked before, you lose. This is in drastic contrast to what Zen calls beginner’s mind. If you are not expecting anything in particular from a situation, and then something special happens, it can touch you really deeply.”
“Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its incessant addiction to the personal. Another way to transcend the personal mind is by using your intellectual mind to create and do things that are not personal in nature. This includes being an engineer who reasons out problems or a medical researcher who studies diseases and how to cure them. Artistry, computer science, mathematics — all of these are examples of beautiful uses of the impersonal mind. The mind is great; it’s just not supposed to be used for storing all your personal preferences and then thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored.”
“You made a collection of unpleasant thoughts in your mind, and they are going to keep coming back up. Now, in order to live in there, the analytical aspect of mind must be utilized to figure out what needs to happen outside for you to be okay. This is where preferences come from. They are simply attempts to use outside events to solve the fact that you are not doing well inside. This results in the constant practice of judging everything that’s unfolding based on your preferences.
It’s easy to see why people don’t agree with each other. Nobody else has had the experiences that came in through your eyes. What you have inside your mind is completely different from what others have inside their minds. It can’t be otherwise because the data in your mind came from the experiences you had. Nobody else had those experiences, not even close — not your spouse, your children, or your friends. Not only were your past experiences different, but you processed them differently. We can certainly force ourselves to conform to other ways of thinking in order to gain acceptance, but that just makes living inside all the more complicated. You not only have your default way of thinking resulting from your stored past impressions, but now you must suppress parts of that in order to conform to the “group” mindset. No wonder it gets messy in there!”
“Suffering is caused by the contrast between what you mentally decided vou wanted and the reality unfolding in front of you.”
“These thoughts that make up your dreams are not that different from the automatic thoughts going on in your waking mind. They are certainly much more vivid, especially in their imagery. This is because when you’re sleeping, the mind can focus completely on creating the thoughts. It is not busy being distracted by the senses or the many other layers of thoughts and emotions going on. In addition, you’re not willfully pushing the thoughts away. This is why the mind is much more creative when you fall asleep. It can create an entire, complex world in full 3D and Technicolor. Most people can’t do that when they’re awake, though obviously, their minds are perfectly capable of doing so.”
“That’s why so much of the mind’s dialogue is negative. The vast majority of energy you have stored inside is because of things you didn’t like. When subsequent events happen that stimulate these negative samskaras, the new events are automatically experienced as negative. In essence, the negativity keeps compounding.
If you really want to see how your preferences manage to make life a negative experience, go build a house and decide to paint the kitchen walls white. Do you know there are more than fifty shades of white? Just wait until you try to pick which white you want. In other words, there is only one tiny window of color choice that will align with your preferences and make you happy. All the rest will get you upset. Just look at the odds you’re up against. There are billions of things that can happen in life that don’t match your preferences, and there are only a few that do. Under these conditions, the probability that life is going to be a negative experience is extremely high. This is not because life is negative. It is because the only thing that isn’t negative to you is that which exactly matches your preferences.”
“You are always having inner feelings, but you don’t notice them until they change. Notice that you only talk about emotions when they go to the extremes. “It hurt me tremendously. I can’t believe how you hurt me.” Or, “I felt so much love. It was the most beautiful feeling I ever had.” These are examples of extremes in your emotions, and they catch your attention. You probably don’t notice it, but you have a normal state of emotional energy flowing through your heart all day. When it drops out, you notice the change and say, “My heart fell out from under me. I lost my strength.””
“When love shoots up inside of you, and you say you’re in love, what you really mean is that you feel love coming up from your heart and bathing you. You’re floating in the ocean of love, but you’re not the love you feel – you are the experiencer of the love you feel. Note that so far we haven’t considered the role of another person in this love experience. This is because what’s actually happening when you begin to feel love is your heart is opening and emanating a beautiful flow of energy. This should drive you to say, “I love love” but instead you say, “I love you.” That is your first clue into the role of another person in your experience of love. As long as the other person’s presence helps your heart open, you feel love for them. If their presence stops opening your heart, you start looking elsewhere. This is why human relationships are so difficult. We project the source of love outside, instead of realizing it is always inside.
The actual flow of love has to do with you and your heart. It has nothing to do with anybody else. It is an energy flow coming through your heart that you experience inside. Undoubtedly, certain people or circumstances can cause your heart to open or close. But the action of opening and closing is something your heart is doing, not the other person.”
“The energy is trying to come up, but it can’t because you stored these unfinished patterns from the past. It is these past impressions that determine your preferences in life. If someone manages to stimulate a negative past impression, you will not like them. If they manage to stimulate a positive past impression, it may be love at first sight. It is very dangerous to live this way — you are not in charge of your life, your past impressions are.”
“If the person in front of you is driving much slower than the speed limit, you might say inside your mind, “Wow. What an opportunity to relax. I can’t be in a rush because the person in front of me won’t let me. I guess it’s time to watch my breath, calm down, and learn to enjoy the experience.” You’re welcome to do that in everyday life. You’re not fighting with your mind or pushing away the negative thoughts. You’re simply replacing the automatically generated thoughts with willfully created ones. Don’t fight, just replace. It doesn’t matter if the negative thoughts continue in the background; just focus on the positive thoughts you are willfully creating. Over time, your willfully created thoughts will replace the automatically generated ones.”
Mantras
“The next technique is very traditional and is broadly referred to as mantra. In the most general sense, “mantra” means training your mind to repeat a simple word or phrase over and over until it gets stuck in your mind. Just like a song can get stuck in your mind, a mantra can get stuck in your mind. We all experience that our minds can work in layers. You can be paying attention to someone speaking, and there can still be thoughts going on “in the back of your mind.” Your mind is so brilliant it can multitask. It can create thoughts at multiple levels, and you can be aware of these layers simultaneously. Mantra is offering you a layer of mind that is always there — balanced, pleasant, a safe place to rest. As the mantra effortlessly goes on in the background, it gives you the choice of which layer of mind you want to focus on. When the habitual thoughts come up from your samskaras. you don’t have to fight with them or even replace them. You just shift your consciousness onto the mantra.”
“A great thing to have going in your mind is: I’m always fine, I’m always fine, I’m always fine. How nice would it be to be reminded of any of these throughout your day?
It is not difficult to instill the mantra in your mind — all it takes is repetition. You can start practicing mantra during the time you put aside each morning and evening for your spiritual practices. Even just fifteen minutes will go a long way. A good technique is to tie the mantra to your breath going in and out. Then during the day, come back to it whenever certain events occur. For example, you could say a few repetitions of the mantra before you pick up the phone and after you put it down. It just takes a moment, and you are making a major investment in becoming a more conscious, centered being. Do it whenever you get into or out of your car, as well as when you enter or leave your house or office. No one will even notice. It is just a moment’s pause that will change everything over time. Before you eat, say the mantra. If you are eating by yourself, you can have fun inwardly repeating the mantra while you chew your food. Make it a game — how many recurring events in your everyday life can you set up to remind you to practice the mantra?”
“Even if you have done this work on yourself, a fateful day will inevitably arrive. Something will happen and your emotions or thoughts will start to get upset. You’ll be on the verge of losing it, but the mantra will catch your attention just enough to give you the choice — go down or go up. You immediately shift your awareness off the mess and onto the mantra, and your life changes. The mantra does not stop you from having constructive thoughts; it just sits there as a safety net to catch you if you start to fall. When you have some time to actually rest back into the mantra, you will become filled with peace and well-being. It’s like a vacation from the personal mind. How would you like it if the moment you sat down, tension and stress melted away as you fell back into the lap of the mantra? All this is available to you — free of charge. Just be willing to make the investment in yourself. Notice that with mantra you are learning to surrender the hold that the personal mind has on you.
The final technique we will discuss for freeing yourself from yourself is generally termed witness consciousness, and it includes the powerful practice of relaxing and releasing.”
Relaxing
“If you want to experience true witness consciousness, just look in front of you. Do you see what’s there? Don’t think about it, just see it. That’s witness consciousness. It’s just seeing. You are simply witnessing what’s there. Now, turn your head and look around. Practice the immediacy of just seeing. Notice that your thoughts often have something to say about what you see. Can you simply notice these thoughts like you noticed what was outside, or do you have to do something about them? Thoughts, emotions — they come up by themselves. Good, now simply notice them.
When you reach the state where you can observe what is going on in the mind and heart, you’ll notice that you’re not always comfortable with what’s happening inside. What is more, there is the tendency to want to willfully do something about it. That’s very natural. If you want to willfully do something, here’s what you do — relax. This is certainly not the intuitive thing to do.”
“If you don’t get pulled into the thoughts and emotions, you can just relax and notice. Don’t think about it. The moment you see what’s going on — just relax. Relax your shoulders, relax your tummy, relax your buttocks, and most importantly, relax your heart. Even if the heart itself won’t relax, the area around your heart will.”
“People often ask whether the mind will keep talking once you are at peace with it. The mind is talking because you’re not okay, and it’s trying to figure out how to be okay by getting things the way you want. Once you’re okay in there, there’s much less to talk about. When you’re in the presence of someone you love, you’re not thinking about how to find love. You’re just experiencing the beauty of the love. Likewise, when you are okay in there, you will not be thinking about how to be okay. You will just be relaxing into the quiet state of peaceful well-being. This requires that you be okay with your thoughts and emotions. Relaxing in their presence is a good start to being okay with them. If you can’t willfully relax in the face of thoughts and emotions, you will have to do something about them. You will get pulled down into them and attempt to do something to fix what is bothering you. Better to simply relax and allow the samskaras the room they need to release. When you relax back into witness consciousness, you are surrendering to the reality of what’s happening.”
“Start with the small things to prove to yourself that you are capable of doing this. Working with yourself at this level is practicing letting go. Once you are able to relax and release through the relatively easy stuff, you will find you are better able to deal with the bigger situations. You are training yourself to deal with yourself.”
“The weather has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the forces that are causing it to be the way it is. If you can’t handle the weather without getting disturbed, how are you going to handle anything else? Complaining about the weather is a perfect example of something that has a one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. What do you gain by complaining about the weather? Nothing, except to get upset. “I couldn’t handle the heat today. It was terrible. I was sweating. I hated it.” Congratulations, you didn’t have a nice day, and it didn’t change the weather one bit.
Eventually, you start to work with yourself. When your mind complains about the weather, don’t fight with it. If you want, you can use positive thinking. For example, when the mind starts up with, ‘It’s hot; I’m so hot,” instead of getting into that, ask yourself, “How did it get hot? What does that mean ‘it’s hot’?” Use your mind to remind you that there’s a star ninety-three million miles away that is so hot you can actually feel its heat. That’s amazing. Use your higher mind to appreciate and respect reality instead of complaining about it. When you do this, you are willfully using your mind for something positive and constructive. You are raising yourself.
Though this practice of positive thinking is beneficial, ultimately, what you need to do is relax and release past the disturbance.”
“There is one more element you can add to this simple meditation technique we’ve been discussing. You’re not going to know right away that you stopped watching your breath. You’re going to get lost in your mind, and maybe fifteen minutes will go by. To help notice sooner, instead of just watching your breath, count your breaths. Simply count a round of inhale/exhale as one, then two, and so on. But don’t count to one hundred. Count to twenty-five and start over. That way you will see sooner that you drifted off the breath. In/out…one, in/out… two, in/out… three. Watch your breath go in and out of your abdomen. Just sit there and watch your breath while you count to twenty-five, and then go back to one. If you find that you’re at forty-three, just start over at one. Not a thought about it, just immediately start counting at one. You now have a job to do that requires you to be present. You must be conscious enough while watching your breath to know to go back to one after you reach twenty-five. This doesn’t require thought — it just requires awareness.”
“Bottom line, you let go of the personal so you can interact properly with what’s in front of you. It’s the same thing in business. You’re in a meeting, and they’re discussing a project. You have a bright idea that you want to contribute. So you put it out there, but it gets shot down. That hurts. Of course it does. You have an ego in there, and it’s going to get bothered. Now for the rest of the meeting, either you don’t contribute anything because you’re sulking, or you keep bringing up proof that what you said wasn’t so dumb. You no longer belong in that meeting. Your presence has become about you, not about the project. You can’t work like that. Your underlying motive can’t ever be about you. It has to be about serving what’s happening in front of you.”
“Calm and centered, you inwardly ask, “What’s happening inside of me? What blockage got hit that caused this shift in energy to take place?” Then, to use the situation for growth, you relax and allow the energy to push the blockage up. You don’t have to do anything except not interfere with the process. Shakti will do her job of pushing up — you have to do your job of letting go.
To remember to do this in the moment, establish the practice of recalling your intention every morning: “The purpose of my day is letting go of my blockages and evolving spiritually.” Then every evening, remember: “The purpose of my day was to let go of my blockages and evolve spiritually.” Never complain about what happened — just inwardly release the events of the day so they don’t leave samskaras. Don’t let anything remain stuck in there. Once you get good at this, you will learn to do it throughout the day. Do your best with each interaction, then let it go.”
Conclusion
“You used to make satisfying needs your priority. Most of our modern needs are psychological, not physiological. Psychological needs are actually unnatural, as they indicate that something is missing or wrong. If you are feeling whole and complete inside yourself, there are no psychological needs. Psychological needs come from your blockages. When the energy is freed, what you feel is love, joy, and enthusiasm, which are just different words for uplifting energy. In the purest sense, this upward-flowing energy is quite different from emotions. An emotion emanates out of your heart and pulls you into its vibration. Enthusiasm is something that wells up inside. It is a system-wide, spontaneous, uplifting flow of energy. It is, in fact, freed shakti.”
“The highest life you can live is when every single moment that passes before you is better off because it did. Serve the present moment with all your heart and soul. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone did that.”
