Top Quotes: “The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself” — Michael Singer

Introduction

“There’s nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you’re not the voice of the mind — you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you’ll try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of ‘trying to find myself.’ They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.

If you watch it objectively, you’ll come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it. It’s like sitting down at night and deciding whether you want the sun to come up in the morning. The bottom line is, the sun will come up and the sun will go down. Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening.

In fact, your thoughts have far less impact on this world than you’d like to think. If you’re willing to be objective and watch all your thoughts, you’ll see that the vast majority of them have no relevance. They have no effect on anything or anybody, except you. They’re simply making you feel better or worse about what’s going on now, what’s gone on in the past, or what might go on in the future. If you spend your time hoping that it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you’re wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain. You’ll someday come to see that there’s no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there’s no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually you’ll see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.

Now this raises a serious question. If so much of what the voice says is meaningless and unnecessary, then why does it even exist? The secret to answering this question lies in understanding why it says what it says when it says it. For example, in some cases the mental voice talks for the same reason that a tea kettle whistles. That is, there’s a buildup of energy inside that needs to be released. If you watch objectively, you’ll see that when there’s a buildup of nervous, fearful, or desire-based energies inside, the voice becomes extremely active. This is easy to see when you’re angry with someone and you feel like telling them off. Just watch how many times the inner voice tells them off before you even see them. When energy builds up inside, you want to do something about it. That voice talks because you’re not okay inside, and talking releases energy.

You’ll notice, however, that even when you’re not particularly bothered by something, it still talks. When you’re walking down the street, it says things like,

‘Look at that dog! It’s a lab. Hey, there’s another dog in that car. He looks a lot like my first dog. Whoa, there’s an old Oldsmobile. It’s got AK plates. You don’t see many of those down here!’

It’s actually narrating the world for you. But why do you need that? You already see what’s happening outside; how does it help to repeat it to yourself through the mental voice? You should examine this very closely. With a simple glance, you instantly take in the tremendous detail of whatever you’re looking at. If you see a tree, you effortlessly see the branches, the leaves, and the flowering buds. Why then do you have to verbalize what you’ve already seen?

What you’ll see, if you study this carefully, is that the narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like backseat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in your control. You actually feel like you have some relationship with them. A tree is no longer just a tree in the world that has nothing to do with you; it’s a tree that you saw, labeled, and judged. By verbalizing it mentally, you brought that initial direct experience of the world into the realm of your thoughts. There it becomes integrated with your other thoughts, such as those making up your value system and historical experiences.

Take a moment to examine the difference between your experience of the outside world and your interactions with the mental world. When you’re just thinking, you’re free to create whatever thoughts you want in your mind, and these thoughts are expressed through the voice. You’re very accustomed to settling into the playground of the mind and creating and accommodating thoughts. This inner world is an alternate environment that’s under your control. The outside world, however, marches to its own laws. When the voice narrates the outside world to you, those thoughts are now side by side, in parity, with all your other thoughts. All these thoughts intermix and actually influence the experience of the world around you. What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what’s really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. For example, there are myriad things that you see at any given moment, yet you only narrate a few of them. The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter to you. With this subtle form of preprocessing, you manage to control the experience of reality so that it all fits together in your mind. Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.

You have to watch this very carefully because you do it all the time. You’re walking outside in the winter, you start to shiver, and the voice says, ‘It’s cold!’ Now how did that help you? You already knew it was cold. You’re the one who’s experiencing the cold. Why is it telling you this? You re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind whereas you can’t control the world. That’s why you mentally talk about it. If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. When your body experiences cold, there may be nothing you can do to affect the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, ‘It’s cold!’ you can say, ‘We’re almost home, just a few more minutes.’ Now you feel better. In the thought world there’s always something you can do to control the experience.

Basically, you re-create the outside world inside yourself and then you live in your mind. What if you decided not to do this? If you decide not to narrate and, instead, just consciously observe the world, you’ll feel more open and exposed. This is because you really don’t know what will happen next, and your mind is accustomed to helping you. It does this by processing your current experiences in a way that makes them fit with your views of the past and visions of the future. All of this helps to create a semblance of control. If your mind doesn’t do this, you simply become too uncomfortable. Reality is just too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind.

You’ll come to see that the mind talks all the time because you gave it a job to do. You use it as a protection mechanism, a form of defense. Ultimately, it makes you feel more secure. As long as that’s what you want, you’ll be forced to constantly use your mind to buffer yourself from life, instead of living it. This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you, and it will be here long after you leave. In the name of attempting to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together.

True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that’s not okay and needs protection. This is done by constantly remembering that you’re the one inside that notices the voice talking. That is the way out. The one inside who’s aware that you’re always talking to yourself about yourself is always silent. It’s a doorway to the depths of your being.”

Transforming Thought Patterns

“Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself. You’re ready to grow when you finally realize that the ‘I’ who’s always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something. Honestly, when was the last time you really had nothing bothering you? Before you had your current problem, there was a different problem. And if you’re wise, you’ll realize that after this one’s gone, there’ll be another one.

The bottom line is, you’ll never be free of problems until you’re free from the part within that has so many problems. When a problem is disturbing you, don’t ask, ‘What should I do about it?’ Ask, ‘What part of my being is being disturbed by this?’ If you ask, ‘What should I do about it?’ you’ve already fallen into believing that there really is a problem outside that must be dealt with. If you want to achieve peace in the face of your problems, you must understand why you perceive a particular situation as a problem. If you’re feeling jealousy, instead of trying to see how you can protect yourself, ask, ‘What part of me is jealous?’ That will cause you to look inside and see that there’s a part of you that’s having a problem with jealousy.”

“To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them. No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of a problem. Everyone knows you can’t deal well with a situation if you’re getting anxious, scared, or angry about it. The first problem you have to deal with is your own reaction. You won’t be able to solve anything outside until you own how the situation affects you inside. Problems are generally not what they appear to be. When you get clear enough, you’ll realize that the real problem is that there’s something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything. The first step is to deal with that part of you. This involves a change from ‘outer solution consciousness’ to ‘inner solution consciousness.’ You have to break the habit of thinking that the solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality. Once you do that, you’ll be clear enough to deal with what’s left.

There really is a way to let go of the part of you that sees everything as a problem. It may seem impossible, but it’s not. There’s a part of your being that can actually abstract from your own melodrama. You can watch yourself be jealous or angry. You don’t have to think about it or analyze it; you can just be aware of it.”

“The way to catch on to what your inner roommate is really like is to personify it externally. Make believe that your roommate, the psycho, has a body of its own. You do this by taking the entire personality that you hear talking to you inside and imagine it as a person talking to you on the outside. Just imagine that another person is now saying everything that your inner voice would say. Now spend a day with that person.”

“Will you dare to do this experiment? Don’t try to make the person stop talking. Just try to get to know what you live with inside by externalizing the voice. Give it a body and put it out there in the world just like everybody else. Let it be a person who says on the outside exactly what the voice of your mind says inside. Now make that person your best friend. After all, how many friends do you spend all of your time with and pay absolute attention to every word they say?

How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen.”

“How many times has that voice been wrong about what was going on or what will be going on? Maybe it’s worth noticing whom you’re going to for advice.”

“When you’re an aware being, you no longer become completely immersed in the events around you. Instead, you remain inwardly aware that you’re the one who’s experiencing both the events and the corresponding thoughts and emotions. When a thought is created in this state of awareness, instead of getting lost in it, you remain aware that you’re the one who’s thinking the thought. You’re lucid.”

“To achieve this state, simply allow the experiences of life to come in and pass through your being. If old energies come back up because you were unable to process them before, let go of them now. When that blue Mustang drives by and you feel fear or jealousy, just smile. Be happy that this Samskara, which has been stored down there for all this time, has the opportunity to make it through you. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh, or do anything you want. Just don’t push it back down. Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life.”

“Just decide that no matter what the mind says, you aren’t getting involved. You don’t fight the mind. In fact, you don’t even try to change it. You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its melodrama.”

“You can notice that you notice and just watch how experiencing loneliness affects you. Does your posture change? Do you breathe slower or faster? What goes on when loneliness is given the space it needs to pass through you? Be an explorer. Witness it, and then it will go. If you don’t get absorbed in it, the experience will soon pass and something else will come up. Just enjoy all of it. If you can do this, you’ll be free, and a world of pure energy will open up within you.”

“If we take a snapshot of our inner problems, we’ll see that each person has what we’ll call the ‘problem of the day.’ This is the thing that’s bothering them the most at any given moment. When the current problem isn’t bothering them, then the next one pops up, and when that one isn’t bothering them, the next one pops up. This is what your thoughts are about. Your thoughts tend to focus on what’s bothering you today. Your thoughts are about the problem, why it’s bothering you, and what you can do about it. If you don’t do something about this, it will go on for the rest of your life.”

“Use these little things that happen in daily life to free yourself. In the above example, you simply choose not to get involved in the psyche. Does that mean that you stop your mind from going around in circles trying to figure out what’s going on? No. It simply means that you’re ready, willing, and able to watch your mind create its little melodrama. Watch all of its noise about how hurt you are, and how could anybody do that. Watch the mind try to figure out what to do about it. Just marvel at the fact that all of this is going on inside simply because someone didn’t say hello to you. It’s truly unbelievable. Just watch the mind talk, and keep relaxing and releasing. Fall behind the noise.

Just keep doing this with all those little things that come up each day. It’s a very private thing you do inside yourself. You will soon see that your mind is constantly driving you crazy over nothing. If you don’t want to be like that, then stop putting energy into your psyche. That’s all there is to it. If you follow this path, the only action you ever take is to relax and release. When you start to see this stuff going on inside, you just relax your shoulders, relax your heart, and fall back behind it. Do not touch it. Do not get involved in it. And do not try to stop it. Simply be aware that you’re seeing it. That’s how you get out. You just let it go.”

“You must look inside yourself and determine that from now on pain isn’t a problem. It’s just a thing in the universe. Somebody can say something to you that can cause your heart to react and catch fire, but then it passes. It’s a temporary experience. Most people can hardly imagine what it would be like to be at peace with inner disturbance. But if you don’t learn to be comfortable with it, you’ll devote your life to avoiding it. If you feel insecurity, it’s just a feeling. If you feel embarrassed, it’s just a feeling It’s just a part of creation. If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise. It’s a thing in the universe that is passing through your system. Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don’t be afraid of it. It cannot touch you unless you touch it.

Let’s explore this by first looking at a basic human tendency. When something painful touches your body, you tend to pull away instinctively. You even do this with unpleasant smells and tastes. The fact is, your psyche does the same thing. If something disturbing touches it, its tendency is to withdraw, to pull back, and to protect itself. It does this with insecurity, jealousy, and any of the other vibrations we’ve been discussing. In essence, you ‘close,’ which is simply an attempt to put a shield around your inner energy. You can feel the effects of this as the sensation of contracting within your heart. Somebody says something displeasing, and you feel some disturbance in your heart. Then your mind starts talking: ‘I don’t have to put up with this. I’ll just walk away and never talk to them again. They’ll be sorry.’ Your heart is attempting to pull back from what it’s experiencing and protect itself so that it doesn’t have to experience that feeling again. You do this because you can’t handle the pain you’re feeling. As long as you can’t handle the pain, you’ll react by closing in order to protect yourself. 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 want to be free, you have to learn to stop fighting these human feelings.

When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the eye of your consciousness. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting and closing. Relax and release. Relax your heart until you’re actually face-to-face with the exact place where it hurts. Stay open and receptive so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax and go even deeper. This is very deep growth and transformation. But you won’t want to do this. You’ll feel tremendous resistance to doing this, and that’s what makes it so powerful. As you relax and feel the resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to defend itself. Keep relaxing. Relax your shoulders and relax your heart. Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you. It’s just energy. Just see it as energy and let it go.”

“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.”

“You have to mean it when you say that you’ll be happy for the rest of your life. Every time a part of you begins to get unhappy, let it go. Work with it. Use affirmations, or do whatever you need to do to stay open. If you’re committed, nothing can stop you. No matter what happens, you can choose to enjoy the experience. If they starve you and put you in solitary confinement, just have fun being like Gandhi. No matter what happens, just enjoy the life that comes to you.”

“The key is to learn to keep your mind disciplined enough so that it doesn’t trick you into thinking that this time it’s worth closing. If you slip, get back up. The minute you slip, the minute you open your mouth, the minute you start to close and defend yourself, get back up. Just pick yourself up and affirm inwardly that you don’t want to close, no matter what happens. Affirm that all you want is to be at peace and to appreciate life. You don’t want your happiness to be conditional upon the behavior of other people. It’s bad enough that your happiness is conditional upon your own behavior. When you start making it conditional upon other people’s behavior, you’re in serious trouble.

Things are going to happen to you, and you’re going to feel the tendency to close. But you have the choice to either go with it or let it go. Your mind will tell you that it’s not reasonable to stay open when these things happen. But you have limited time left in your life, and what’s really not reasonable is not to enjoy life.

If you have trouble remembering that, then meditate. Meditation strengthens your center of consciousness so that you’re always aware enough to not allow your heart to close. You remain open by simply letting go and releasing the tendency to close. You just relax your heart when it starts to tighten. You don’t have to be outwardly glowing all the time; you’re just joyful inside. Instead of complaining, you’re just having fun with the different situations that unfold.”

“There’s no reason to get stressed out. There’s no reason for blowing up or shutting down. If you don’t let this energy build up inside you, but instead allow each moment of each day to pass through you, then you can be as fresh every moment as you would be on a stress-free vacation. It’s not life’s events that are causing problems or stress. It’s your resistance to life’s events that’s causing this experience. Since the problem is caused by using your will to resist the reality of life passing through you, the solution is quite obvious — stop resisting. If you’re going to resist something, at least have some rational basis for resisting. Otherwise, you’re irrationally wasting precious energy.

“The alternative is to use life to let go of these impressions and the stress they create. In order to do this you have to become very conscious. 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? Let your spiritual path become the willingness to let whatever happens make it through you, rather than carrying it into the next moment. That doesn’t mean you don’t deal with what happens. You’re welcome to deal with it, but first let the energy make it through you. If you don’t, you’ll not actually be dealing with the current event, you’ll be dealing with your own blocked energies from the past. You’ll not be coming from a place of clarity, but from a place of inner resistance and tension.

To avoid this, begin dealing with each situation with acceptance. Acceptance means that events can make it through you without resistance. If an event takes place and is able to make it through your psyche, you’ll be left face-to-face with the actual situation as it truly exists. Since you’re dealing with the actual event, rather than stored energies stimulated by the event, you won’t assert reactive energy from your past. You’ll find that you’re able to deal with daily situations much better. It’s actually possible to never have another problem for the rest of your life. This is because events aren’t problems; they’re just events. Your resistance to them is what causes the problem. But, again, don’t think that because you accept reality it means you don’t deal with things. You do deal with them. You just deal with them as events that are taking place on planet Earth, and not as personal problems.

You’ll be surprised to find that in most situations there’s nothing to deal with except for your own fears and desires. Fear and desire make everything seem so complicated. 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 next thing happens, you’re fully present in that moment and simply enjoying the experience of life. There are no problems.”

“Stop and think about what you’re capable of achieving. Up to now, your capacities have been constrained by constant inner struggles. Imagine what would happen if your awareness was free to focus only on the events actually taking place. You would have no noise going on inside. If you lived like this, you could do anything. Your capabilities would be exponential compared to what you’ve ever experienced. If you could bring this level of awareness and clarity to everything you do, your life would change.

So, as your path, you take on the work of using life to let go of your resistance. Relationships are a great way to work with yourself. Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you. If you’re not trying to make people fit into your preconceived notions of what you like and dislike, you’ll find that relationships really aren’t that difficult. If you’re not so busy judging and resisting people based upon what’s blocked inside of you, you’ll find that they’re much easier to get along with — and so are you. Letting go of yourself is the simplest way to get closer to others.”

“You come to realize that other people aren’t afraid, and they make it through life. Since you’ve been afraid your whole life, you suffered while others didn’t. That suffering had no meaning. So you decide to work with your fear and relax when you see a dog. The way to work with resistance is by relaxing. That act of relaxing through your personal resistance not only changes your relationship with dogs, it changes your relationship with everything. Your soul has now learned how to let disturbing energies pass through. The next time somebody says or does something you don’t like, you automatically treat it the same as you did the fear of dogs. This process of relaxing through resistance is beneficial to everything in your life. This is because it directly addresses how to keep your heart open when it’s trying to close.”

Balance

“From science we know that if you pull a pendulum 30 degrees to the right, it will swing back until it’s 30 degrees to the left. You don’t need Lao-tzu to tell you this. All the laws are the same — inner laws and outer laws. The same principles drive everything in this world. If you pull a pendulum out one way, it will swing back just that far the other way. If you’ve been starving for days, and somebody puts food in front of you, you won’t be polite while you’re eating. You’ll shove the food into your mouth like an animal. The degree to which you’ll act like an animal is the exact degree to which you were starved enough to bring up your animal instincts.

So where is the Tao? The Tao is in the middle. It’s the place where there’s no energy pushing in either direction. The pendulum has been permitted to come to balance concerning food, relationships, sex, money, doing, not-doing, and everything else. Everything has its yin and yang. The Way is the place in which these forces balance quietly. And indeed, unless you go out of the Way, they’ll tend to stay in peaceful harmony. If you want to understand the Tao, you must take a closer look at what lies between the two extremes. This is because neither extreme can last. How long can a pendulum stay at one of its outermost portions? It can only remain there for a moment. How long can a pendulum stay at rest? It can remain there forever because there are no forces moving it out of balance.”

“This principle holds true in every aspect of life. If you’re in balance, you eat when it’s time to eat, in a way that maintains the health of your body. To do otherwise is to waste energy dealing with the effects of eating too little, eating too much, or eating the wrong foods. It’s much more efficient to deal with the body in a balanced manner than to be burdened with the effects of the extreme.

Basically, you waste tremendous energy at the extremes. The more extreme it is, the more it becomes a full-time project. For example, the relationship in which you insist upon being together all the time would be a full-time job. The only way you could have another job is if you both did the same work at the same desk. At the other extreme, if you had no relationship and you were lonely and depressed all the time, you couldn’t accomplish much. So again, it takes all your energy to do the extremes. The inefficiency of your actions is determined by how many degrees off-center you are. You’ll be that much less able to use your energy for living life because you’re using it to adjust for the pendulum swings. Extremes are good teachers. When you examine the extremes, it’s easy to see the effects of imbalanced behavior patterns.”

“The Way is in the middle because that’s the place where the energies are balanced. But how do you stop the pendulum from swinging to the outer edges? Amazingly enough, you do this by leaving it alone. It won’t keep swinging to the extremes unless you feed the extremes with energy. Just let the extremes go. Don’t participate in them, and the pendulum will naturally come toward the center. As it comes to the center, you’ll get filled with energy. This is because all the energy that had been wasted is now available to you.

If you choose to center and not participate in the extremes, you’ll come to know the Tao. You don’t grab it; you don’t even touch it. It’s just what the energy does when it’s not being used to swing toward the extremes. It finds its own way to the center of each event that takes place in life and remains quietly in the middle. The Tao is hollow, empty.”

“This is quite different from how most people live. If they’re driving and somebody cuts them off, they get upset for the next hour, or maybe for the rest of the day. For the being who is in the Tao, events take place and last just as long as they’re taking place. That’s it. If you’re driving and somebody cuts you off, you feel your energy start to pull off-center. You actually feel it in your heart. As you let go, it comes back to center. You don’t follow the extremes, so your energy comes back to the current moment. When the next event happens, you’re there. You’re always there, and that makes you much more capable than the person who’s reacting to past imbalances. Almost everyone has a point at which they get out of balance. Once gone, who’s minding the store? Who takes care of the energies that unfold while you’re not there? Remember, whoever remains present with fixity of purpose comes out on top in the end.

When you move in the Tao, you’re always present. Life becomes absolutely simple. In the Tao, 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.

When you stop being confused, everything becomes simple. If you have no preference, if the only thing you want is to remain centered, then life unfolds while you simply feel for the center. There’s an invisible thread that passes through everything. All things move quietly through that center balance. That is the Tao. It is really there.”

“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 don’t have to make yourself feel that way; that’s how Spirit feels. If you were asked how the body normally feels, you might say that it’s generally uncomfortable about one thing or another. How about the psyche? If you were being totally honest, you’d probably say that it’s generally full of complaints and fears. Well, how does Spirit normally feel? The truth is, it always feels good. It always feels high. It always feels open and light.”