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‘The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship. The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: “I am only that!” Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination – that is, ultimately limited – we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!’
Learn how to untether your soul from the turbulent waves of life and flow peacefully with the cosmic stream.
In this book the author reflects, ‘I’m not getting up until I’ve reached enlightenment.' Having wandered away from his campsite among the tropical greenery and sky-blue lakes of Ocala National Park, he sat down and nestled his legs into a lotus pose to meditate. Anxious inner voices pulled him away from his task, perhaps with worries about the war in Vietnam or how to fix his struggling first marriage or all he had to do for his graduate studies at the University of Florida. Silencing this legion of voices through Zen meditation and breathing, he slowly became aware of a cosmic energy flowing in and out with his every breath. He ceased to do, think, or feel and simply started to be. He sat in silence for hours, long past when his friends at the campsite had begun to worry about where he’d gone.
After this and other dramatic experiences during the early 1970s, Michael ‘Mickey’ A. Singer left his academic career in economics and founded the Temple of the Universe Meditation Centre in Florida in 1975. He subsequently began publishing numerous spiritual texts and helped launch the Medical Manager Corporation, which was later sold in a $5 billion acquisition. He retired in 2005 in order to focus solely on his writing, and has published multiple bestsellers, including The Untethered Soul in 2007.
You are not your inner voice: that voice which whispers worries at 2am, gets distracted by every passing thought at work, or makes you question everything you say in every conversation. That voice is often beyond our control and pursues what we do not inherently wish to pursue. We are not that voice but rather the one who hears the voice – it is not us but something happening to us. Likewise, we are not our emotional reactions (which are often beyond our control) but the ones who witness these reactions. Our thoughts, feelings, and inner voices are like a noisy roommate with whom we share a living space. We can either get caught up in their drama, habits, and bad decisions or we can step back and watch with detached amusement.
As such, we should simply observe life and allow it to unfold instead of trying to repress, fight, or prevent its cycles. Observing allows these experiences, emotions, and energies to wash over and pass through us, whereas trying to avoid or protect ourselves from them inadvertently blocks those energies and prevents them (and us) from evolving and moving on. If we, for instance, fight our grief or swallow it, that negative energy gets clogged in our emotional heart centre, causing the spiritual equivalent of a blocked valve, with equally devastating results.
True happiness comes not from avoiding pain or bettering your external circumstances, which is often futile, but from changing your inner outlook to identify with your true, liberated, unharmed, unbothered, unencumbered, spiritual Self. This ‘watching’ Self cannot be hedged in by suffering, thoughts, feelings, or material walls, and hence remains limitless. The ‘watching’ Self has incredible potential, waiting to be released from our false selves. These false selves will inevitably disappear at death anyway, so why should we allow them to restrict us while we still live?
Singer proposes that our thoughts, feelings, successes, and failures are all false identities we’ve latched onto to give ourselves a sense of stability — like mistaking an island of floating garbage for land. He is offering to show us how to step back and become ‘untethered’ from these identities, letting go of the need to control reality while also becoming more authentically ourselves.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael A. Singer.
