The Untethered Soul: the awareness inside you

One of the books I read and enjoyed in December (listed in my post here) caused such a mental shift for me that I want to share some of it with you all.  The book is The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer.  It’s divided into three main subjects: how our thoughts and emotions influence our internal energy, how to try to let go of fear, pain, or expectation, and how that release will serve us.  This post is my attempt to summarize the book for you.

We are all energy

Your every movement and even every single thought takes energy.   External energy comes from food or sleep, but what about internal energy? The effort it takes to have and hold onto a thought, to remember something, to generate an emotion, to try to control your emotions, to ruminate over all of them repeatedly takes so much internal energy.  We have an unlimited source of this energy available to us if we choose to tap into it.  Where does that energy come from?

Victim no more

Let’s ask a different way.  Sometimes (most of the time) we use our energy to protect ourselves.  If we think of a good day as one in which we got through without anything too terrible happening, we are seeing life as a threat.  Thinking this way closes us off to growth, enthusiasm, and any kind of spontaneity.

Singer says that spiritual growth is about changing this energy pattern.  What if, instead, we could learn to stay open no matter what happens? What if we could teach ourselves to relax and experience each moment as it happens? “No matter what” means even if someone yells at you, or somebody cuts you off in traffic, or drastic life events occur.  Happy, literally, no matter what.

Stop getting involved

If each experience, each moment, simply passes before you and is gone, and you let it go, you are in new moment after new moment, ad infinitum.  Life becomes an infinite series of nows.  You can travel through your life with nothing “on your mind.” You are free from holding onto your insecurities or your fears.  You don’t want to hold onto those things anymore, so you voluntarily and consciously stop protecting them and you let them go, over and over again.

Just who exactly are you?

This is my favorite part of the book.  Let’s say you think something like, “This water feels hot.” You are not that thought.  You are not your skin that feels the water.  You are not your brain signal.  You are the one inside who notices that you are thinking that thought and feeling that sensation.  You are aware of all these things, but you are free of them.  You are simply the one who notices.  (I love that!!!) You notice your thoughts.  You notice your emotions.  And then you let them pass through you.  You are not them.

A fish doesn’t see the water

If we don’t identify the true source of a problem, we will constantly try to control it or cover it up with external changes.  And what is the problem? Singer says it is that we don’t feel whole unto ourselves.  We think we need another person or we need other people to do something specific in relation to us.   “This state of affairs is so prevalent that you don’t see it, just as a fish doesn’t see the water.”

We think we need our children to call us once a week.  We think our grandchildren should behave a certain way.  We think the grocery store clerk should compliment our deli choice.  Whatever it is we are expecting, we must let go of that expectation to be free.

The reason philosophers say we human beings suffer is because we are attempting to control our environments so much, getting involved in our sensitivities, worrying about the past or the future.  Singer says, “You cannot spend your life avoiding things that are not actually happening.”  So much could happen we haven’t even imagined yet.  If we aren’t comfortable with absolutely anything happening, we will spend our life attempting to avoid unpleasantness, which is really only energy passing through us.  Just keep relaxing, giving it room, and letting it go.

Perspective

My second favorite part of the book:

“Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky.  You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere.  Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone.  It’s estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy.  And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it.  You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars.  From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car?”

Another favorite part (can you see I have almost this entire book underlined?):

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together.  If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens… There’s a reason for everything we do.  If you want to see why you care so much about what you wear and what your hair is like, then just don’t do it one day.  Wake up in the morning and go somewhere disheveled with your hair a mess, and see what happens to the energies inside of you.  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 are constantly trying to stay within your comfort zone.”

Be happy no matter what

“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.  You were not put on Earth to suffer.  You’re not helping anybody by being miserable.  During the time in between birth and death, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience.

“There is no reason to get stressed out, for blowing up or for shutting down.  If you do not 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 is not life’s events that are causing stress.  It is your resistance to life’s events that is 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.  You are wasting precious energy.”

This is a huge “aha” for me.  “Stop resisting” helps me simply accept whatever situation I am in. So my daughter is whining.  So I got a flat tire.  So it doesn’t look like I’m going to have time to work on that art project today.  OK, moving on.  I can’t undo that, but I can choose how I react to it.  Do I want to live this moment peeved or feeling light? It is we who are putting limits on ourselves.

Opening to freedom

Singer writes that there is a part of our being that is a direct connection to the divine and that we can consciously choose to identify with that part.  As you associate less with the physical and psychological parts of your being, you begin to identify more with the flow of pure energy.  You used to walk around feeling anxiety and tension; now you walk around feeling love.

“Imagine what would happen if you started feeling tremendous love for all creatures, for every plant, for every animal, and for all the beauties of nature.  Imagine if every child seemed like your own, and every person you saw looked like a beautiful flower, with its own color, its own expression, shape and sounds…  Where there used to be judging, there is now respecting, loving, and cherishing.  To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging.”

This perspective means even more to me now after just finishing reading Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, vol. 2, which I’ll tell you about in a January books post soon.  In this book, I learned that it is our mental construct that we are separate from each other and even separate from God that causes many of our problems.  Instead, if we come to understand that we are all made up of the divine and we are each made from pure love, much of the conflict we have created will dissolve.  This book also says that God’s love for us is similar to a mother’s love for her child… unconditional and always there.

Anyway, this post is getting far too long and I don’t want to get into the last segment of the book here and start a spiritual argument.  I do hope some of you will read the book and I hope this post has helped you in some way.  I have added it to my list of Favorite Reading… it was that good.