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Living Untethered

Beyond the Human Predicament

4.4 (9,228 ratings)
22 minutes read | Text | 8 key ideas
In the heart of life's relentless chase for fleeting joys lies a profound secret: true fulfillment is an inner journey, not a destination marked by external achievements. ""Living Untethered"" by Michael A. Singer, the renowned mind behind ""The Untethered Soul,"" offers a transformative blueprint for breaking free from the invisible chains of past pains and societal expectations. This enlightening guide invites you to peel away the layers of conditioned thoughts and emotional blockages that hinder your path to genuine peace and happiness. With Singer's wisdom, learn to navigate the depths of your consciousness, liberating your spirit and embracing a life of serenity and unbounded potential. Ready to unlock the door to your truest self? Dive into a new realm of self-discovery and unshackled living.

Categories

Self Help, Sports, Philosophy, Fiction, Christian, Mental Health, Artificial Intelligence, Plays, True Crime, Urban Studies

Content Type

Book

Binding

Paperback

Year

0

Publisher

New Harbinger Publications

Language

English

ASIN

1648480934

ISBN

1648480934

ISBN13

9781648480935

File Download

PDF | EPUB

Living Untethered Plot Summary

Introduction

Sitting on a planet spinning through space for roughly eighty years—this is the human predicament in its broadest sense. While the atoms making up our world were forged in stars over billions of years, we experience only a brief moment of consciousness on Earth. During this time, life can be filled with enthusiasm and inspiration, or it can feel like a burden when we resist what unfolds before us. This resistance creates tension and anxiety that diminishes our experience of being alive. Throughout the ages, wise teachers have emphasized the importance of accepting reality as the foundation of a spiritual life. Just as scientists must fully embrace reality to understand natural laws and improve our world, spiritual seekers must practice acceptance to find freedom, peace, and inner enlightenment. But what exactly are we accepting, and who is doing the accepting? These are the essential questions we'll explore in our journey into the inner science of self. Our exploration will take us through three critical dimensions of human experience: the external world that comes through our senses, the thoughts generated by our minds, and the emotions emanating from our hearts. By understanding the true nature of these experiences and our relationship to them, we can discover something profound—that we are not our thoughts, emotions, or even our bodies. We are the conscious awareness witnessing it all, capable of experiencing tremendous freedom when we stop identifying with these passing phenomena and instead rest in our true nature.

Chapter 1: The Conscious Observer: Understanding Awareness and Self

At the heart of all spiritual exploration lies a fundamental question: Who are you? This might seem like a strange question—after all, you intuitively sense that you exist inside your body, looking out through your eyes. But what exactly does this mean? If someone asked, "Are you in there?" you would never respond, "No, I'm not here." That would be nonsensical—if you weren't there, who would respond? To isolate what "you in there" means, imagine looking at three different photographs in succession. Though the images changed, was it the same you who saw all three? Of course it was. This simple exercise reveals something profound: you are not what you look at; you are the one who's looking. The pictures changed, but you who saw them remained the same. This distinction between the observer and the observed is crucial to understanding yourself. What about your body, which you identify with so closely? If you were asked whether you can see your hand, you would say, "Yes, I see my hand." But if your hand were somehow removed, would you still be there? Wouldn't you notice its absence? Again, like with the photographs, when the hand was there, you saw it. When it was gone, you saw it was gone. You—the consciousness doing the seeing—did not change; what you were looking at changed. Consider how your body has transformed throughout your life. When you were three, ten, or twenty years old, your body looked very different than it does now, and it will look different when you're ninety. Yet isn't it the same you inside, looking out? You've been in there the whole time, observing these changes. This realization leads to a profound insight: your relationship to everything you perceive is one of subject-object. You are the subject, the conscious observer, and your body, thoughts, emotions, and the external world are all objects of your consciousness. This awareness of being aware represents the most important topic we could ever discuss. Throughout history, enlightened masters have directed seekers to persistently ask: "Who sees when I see? Who hears when I hear? Who feels when I feel?" Self-realization—another term for enlightenment—means fully understanding who you are in there. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have a soul; you, the consciousness, are the soul. Before you can understand freedom or acceptance, you must first understand who is bound and who is accepting. If you look more deeply at this conscious awareness within, you'll notice it has no age, gender, or other physical characteristics. These all belong to the body you observe, not to you, the observer. This conscious awareness remains consistent throughout your life, including during dreams and even during experiences people report from near-death states. You are always conscious in there, aware of whatever you focus on, internally or externally.

Chapter 2: The Mind's Architecture: From Empty Canvas to Personal Thought

The mind is one of the most extraordinary phenomena we experience, yet we rarely pause to consider what it actually is. In the simplest sense, mind is a field of energy in which thoughts exist. Just as clouds are not the sky but exist within it, thoughts are not the mind but manifest within it. The empty mind—a field with nothing in it—is our starting point for understanding this remarkable inner dimension. For consciousness to experience the physical world, the body's five senses pick up vibrations from outside, convert them to nerve impulses, and transmit them to the brain. These signals are then rendered in the mind's energy field, creating a mental image that consciousness perceives. Contrary to what we intuitively believe, we don't directly see the outside world—we see its representation created in our mind. This is similar to watching a football game on television that's happening thousands of miles away. You're not seeing the actual game; you're seeing a rendering of transmitted signals displayed on your screen. Your mind performs this remarkable feat of rendering the outside world so consciousness can experience its surroundings. The mind is brilliant—it can reproduce an entire scene including depth perception, touch, smell, and taste, all made out of higher energy vibrations. This exact rendering of external reality is one of the primary functions of mind, allowing consciousness to experience the outside world while remaining inside. When consciousness simply experiences reality as imaged in the mind without distortion, we experience what's called "being in the present moment." In this state, there is nowhere else to be—just pure awareness of what is. Everyone has experienced rare moments of this complete absorption, perhaps while witnessing a breathtaking sunset or during an intimate moment with someone they love. In these instances, consciousness merges with experience, creating a state of one-pointed concentration that yogic philosophy calls dharana. Unfortunately, we rarely maintain this state of pure experience. When the outside world enters our mind, we develop preferences—we resist uncomfortable experiences and cling to pleasant ones. This act of resistance creates impressions that remain stored in the mind instead of passing through. For example, when we encounter something frightening like a snake, we naturally resist fully experiencing it. Conversely, when something delightful like a butterfly appears, we try to hold onto the experience even after it's gone. These stored impressions, called samskaras in yogic science, distort our perception of reality. When a rope later comes into view, the stored impression of the snake causes fear. Similarly, when the butterfly is gone, we prefer the mental image to present reality. We've created a personal mind filled with likes and dislikes that color everything we experience. This is the fall from the "garden" of pure experience—reality must now compete with our stored impressions for our attention. Over time, this accumulation of impressions turns our mind into what resembles a TV screen with burned-in images. We can no longer clearly see what's happening because previous experiences are superimposed on current reality. We develop a psyche—a personal self defined by what we like and dislike—and this becomes the lens through which we view everything. The brilliant human mind, capable of abstract thought and creative genius, becomes clouded with our personal preferences about how reality should be.

Chapter 3: The Heart's Wisdom: Emotional Energy and Inner Blockages

Beyond the mind with its thoughts lies another vital dimension of our inner experience: the heart with its emotions. While thoughts are typically experienced in the area around the head, emotions are felt in the heart. These emotions are not verbal like thoughts—they are sensations, vibrations that flow through us like waves. When we say, "He hurt my feelings," we're referring to an uncomfortable emotion created by our interaction. Emotions are always present, but we typically only notice them when they shift from their baseline state. Just as you wouldn't comment on normal weather but would certainly discuss a hurricane, you tend to only talk about emotions when they reach extremes. "I felt so much love" or "I was devastated" are comments about significant emotional shifts, but there's always some level of emotional energy flowing through you. The heart is an extraordinary instrument capable of playing notes across the entire emotional spectrum—from ecstatic joy to deep sorrow in a matter of seconds. Like an orchestra that provides the emotional score to a movie, your heart adds richness to your life experience. However, most people aren't comfortable with the full range of their heart's expressions and try to control which emotions they experience. What causes these emotional shifts? To understand this, we must explore a fourth dimension of inner experience beyond thoughts, emotions, and sensory input—the flow of energy inside you. In yogic tradition, this energy is called shakti, while other traditions refer to it as chi or spirit. This energy constantly flows through your system, and you sometimes reference it when saying things like, "When she told me she loved me, I was filled with energy," or "That news left me drained." The state of your heart—whether open or closed—is directly related to how this energy flows through you. When energy flows freely through an open heart, you experience love and other positive emotions. When energy is blocked, you experience negative emotions like fear, anger, or jealousy. These blockages are created by the same samskaras (stored impressions) we discussed earlier. When you resist experiences, you create energy blockages that disturb the natural flow. Think of this energy like water flowing through a stream. In its natural state, water flows smoothly without disturbances. When you place rocks in the stream, the flow creates eddies, ripples, and spray around the obstacles. Similarly, when your inner energy hits blockages, it creates disturbances we experience as emotions. The more blockages there are, the more complex the emotional patterns become. Understanding this mechanism reveals why your heart sometimes opens and other times closes. When someone or something stimulates your blockages in a certain way, your heart closes. When they help energy flow around your blockages, your heart opens. This is why human relationships can be so complicated—we become dependent on others who seem to help our energy flow, creating attachment and fear of loss. The great secret of the heart is that if you remove the blockages instead of finding ways around them, you will feel love all the time without dependency. Your heart's natural state is open, just as water's natural state is to flow freely. The path to this state involves spiritual purification—removing what blocks the energy rather than controlling what comes in from outside.

Chapter 4: The Science of Samskaras: How Past Impressions Shape Reality

The samskaras (impressions) we store from past experiences don't simply sit quietly in our minds—they actively shape our perception of reality and determine our responses to life. Understanding the science of how these impressions operate reveals why we struggle so much with life despite living on a miraculous planet in a vast universe. When an external event's energy comes into you, it must navigate through your mind and heart before merging into your consciousness. If you use your will to block this experience from passing through, the energy cannot remain still—it must circle around itself, creating what we call a samskara. These stored patterns continuously try to release their pent-up energy, but we keep pushing them down, either consciously or subconsciously. These samskaras become the foundation for what we like and dislike, and they determine what we believe needs to happen for us to feel okay. Our brilliant analytical mind creates elaborate strategies based on these past impressions, imagining scenarios and testing how they might affect our blockages. "What if this person behaved a certain way?" "What if I changed jobs?" All these thoughts arise as we try to find outer circumstances that match our inner patterns. This creates a troubling paradox: we worry about either not getting what we want or getting what we don't want, which drives us to work outside in the world to satisfy needs that originated from our stored patterns. Rather than addressing the root cause—the blockages themselves—we reinforce our commitment to them by seeking external solutions. It's like taking medication for a stomachache caused by poor eating habits; the medication may provide temporary relief, but the problem will return until we change what's causing it. The samskaras also explain why decision-making becomes so difficult. When we consider different choices, we're trying to predict how each option will shift the flow of energy through our blockages. With so many conflicting patterns stored inside, clarity becomes impossible. We're essentially consulting our inner mess and expecting a clear response. Even more problematic is how these impressions limit our capacity to enjoy life. There are billions of possible experiences that don't match our preferences and only a few that do, making the probability of experiencing life negatively extremely high. This isn't because life itself is negative but because we've defined only a narrow range of experiences as acceptable. Our relationship with reality becomes dangerously distorted through these samskaras. The world we encounter is the result of countless causes stretching back billions of years, yet we demand it conform to our personal preferences based on limited past experiences. This creates an unwinnable struggle—either we devote our life to getting the world to match our samskaras, or we devote our life to letting go of our samskaras. This is the fundamental paradigm shift that spiritual growth demands: instead of trying to arrange external reality to accommodate our internal blockages, we work on releasing those blockages so we can experience reality as it is. When we do this, we discover that what we truly want isn't specific external circumstances but the feelings of love, joy, and well-being that naturally arise when energy flows freely through an unblocked system.

Chapter 5: Energy Transmutation: Freeing Your Inner Flow

Most people deal with their blocked inner energies in one of two ways: suppression or expression. When uncomfortable emotions arise, we either push them down, denying their existence, or we let them out through uncontrolled outbursts. Neither approach effectively addresses the root cause—the blockages themselves. There is, however, a third approach that represents the essence of spiritual growth: transmutation. Transmutation means using the rising energy as a positive force by allowing it to cleanse whatever was blocking it. When uncomfortable emotions arise as energy hits a blockage, instead of suppressing or expressing the energy, you can relax deeply and allow the blockage to be released. This process isn't always comfortable—blockages stored with pain will release with pain—but it's the path that leads to permanent freedom rather than temporary relief. This approach requires a shift in your relationship with discomfort. Most people will do almost anything to avoid inner discomfort, creating elaborate strategies to control their environment and relationships. But if you want to experience the continuous flow of love, joy, and inspiration that is your natural state, you must be willing to face the discomfort of releasing your blockages. The question becomes: Do you want to be free to live a beautiful life more than you want to avoid temporary discomfort? The good news is that the energy naturally wants to flow upward—you don't have to force it. When blockages are removed, the shakti (energy) will rise naturally, bringing increasing states of well-being. Yogananda described this as "a river of joy" flowing inside, while Christ referred to it as living "by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." This upward-flowing energy becomes an inner source of nourishment that doesn't depend on external circumstances. To facilitate this process, you can practice what's called relaxing and releasing. When you notice inner disturbance arising, first relax your body—your shoulders, abdomen, and especially the area around your heart. Then, instead of engaging with the disturbed energies, create distance between yourself (the conscious observer) and what you're observing (the thoughts and emotions). In this space, the samskaras have room to release their energy. Start by practicing with what might be called "low-hanging fruit"—situations that cause inner disturbance for no good reason, like complaining about the weather or getting upset about traffic. These reactions have a one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. By practicing letting go in these relatively simple situations, you build the capacity to handle more challenging circumstances. Working with your past is another important area for practice. Being disturbed by something that happened years ago but isn't happening now offers zero benefit yet comes at a tremendous cost to your mental, emotional, and even physical health. Learn to process experiences completely when they occur so they become integrated wisdom rather than lingering samskaras. A fully processed experience touches you to the core of your being without leaving scars, allowing you to learn and grow without carrying unnecessary burdens. As you continue this practice of transmutation, the energy will gradually find its way to higher centers within you. You'll begin to experience a permanent state of well-being that doesn't depend on external circumstances. The energy that once disturbed you becomes the very force that liberates you, transforming your relationship with yourself and with life.

Chapter 6: Living Untethered: Acceptance and Liberation in Daily Life

Living untethered means freeing yourself from the patterns that have been running your life. It doesn't mean disconnecting from the world—quite the opposite. When you're no longer driven by your samskaras, you can interact with life more fully and authentically, not from a place of need or fear but from a place of service and appreciation. The world continues to unfold before you, but there's nothing personal about it anymore. It simply exists, and you simply exist—in perfect harmony. Every moment becomes an opportunity to serve, whether through a smile, a kind word, a helping hand, or simply appreciating the miracle of existence. Your actions no longer stem from what you need from the world but from what you can contribute to it. This shift transforms your relationships as well. When you're filled with love naturally flowing from within, you don't need anything from others, which paradoxically makes your connections deeper and more authentic. Love becomes something you share abundantly rather than something you seek desperately. People are naturally attracted to this light, this unconditional presence you bring to every interaction. As you continue to let go of your blockages, you'll notice that the energy inside you becomes increasingly beautiful. Your consciousness is naturally drawn to this flow, creating a wonderful love affair with the divine energy within. This is what religious traditions describe as loving God "with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." It happens naturally once you experience the ecstatic energy flow that is your birthright. Eventually, you may begin to wonder where this energy is coming from. You feel it as a constant upward flow, like rushes of water flowing within you. To seek its source, your consciousness follows the flow, eventually merging with it completely. This is what the great spiritual masters described as becoming one with God or the universe. Meher Baba likened it to a drop of water falling into the ocean, while Christ said, "I and my Father are one." This final surrender represents the highest state of spiritual development—not just experiencing the energy flow but becoming one with it. It's the culmination of the journey we began by identifying ourselves as the conscious observer rather than the thoughts, emotions, or body we observe. Through persistent letting go, we eventually discover that we are not separate from the divine source that animates all of creation. The path to this state is straightforward though not always easy: keep letting go of yourself. No matter what happens, no matter who dies, no matter who leaves you—let go. As you practice this in everyday life, you build the capacity to remain centered in your true self regardless of circumstances. You discover a place of refuge within that is always available to you, a place beyond the storms of life where peace reigns eternally. Living untethered is not about following rules or adhering to beliefs. It's about never acting from your personal energies and instead serving the moment in front of you from a place of clarity and presence. It's about recognizing that your motive matters more than your specific actions. If your motive is to let go of personal blockages and serve what's before you, you are living the highest life possible—one that, if everyone lived it, would create peace on earth.

Summary

The journey to self-understanding reveals a profound truth: we are not our thoughts, emotions, or bodies, but the conscious awareness that experiences them all. Our suffering stems not from external reality but from our resistance to it—from the mental impressions we've stored that continuously distort our perception and limit our ability to experience life directly. By understanding the architecture of our inner world and working to release these blockages, we discover our natural state of love, joy, and inspiration that doesn't depend on external circumstances. The process of liberation involves a fundamental paradigm shift—rather than struggling to make reality conform to our preferences, we learn to accept reality as it is while releasing the internal patterns that cause our suffering. This doesn't mean passive resignation but rather a profound engagement with life from a place of clarity and presence. The energy that once disturbed us becomes the very force that liberates us, rising naturally through our system when we remove the obstacles we've placed in its path. This understanding transcends any particular spiritual tradition while illuminating the common wisdom at their core. Whether described as "dying to be reborn," "emptying the mind," or "surrendering to God," all point to the same fundamental process—letting go of our limited personal self to discover the boundless consciousness that is our true nature. As we practice this letting go in daily life, we experience increasing freedom, discover our capacity for unconditional love, and eventually recognize our oneness with the source of all being.

Best Quote

“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.” ― Michael A. Singer, Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament

Review Summary

Strengths: The book carries the same wisdom and spirituality as Michael A. Singer's previous work but is presented in a different manner. It effectively immerses the reader in new perspectives and encourages mindfulness, offering valuable insights into handling stress and emotions. Weaknesses: The reviewer notes a limitation in the book's philosophy, suggesting it lacks room for embracing and experiencing emotions fully, which can be crucial for personal growth and creativity. Overall Sentiment: Enthusiastic Key Takeaway: The book is a compelling guide for mindfulness and understanding life's challenges, though it may benefit from balancing its approach with the acceptance of emotional experiences for deeper personal evolution.

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Michael A. Singer

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Living Untethered

By Michael A. Singer

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