The Untethered Soul

Michael Singer

“Take a moment to remember that you’re spinning on a planet in the middle of empty space. Then remind yourself that you’re not going to get involved in your own melodrama.”

Wellspring of Energy

You have a wellspring of beautiful energy inside of you. When you are open you feel it; when you are closed you don’t. This flow of energy comes from the depth of your being. …It is what you’re experiencing when love rushes up into your heart. It is what you’re experiencing when you’re enthused by something and all this high energy comes up inside of you.

You should know about this energy because it’s yours. It’s your birthright, and it’s unlimited. You can call upon it anytime you want. It has nothing to do with age. Some 80 year-old people have the energy and enthusiasm of a child… It’s just energy. Energy doesn’t get old, it doesn’t get tired, and it doesn’t need food. What it needs is openness and receptivity.

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The heart is an energy center, and it can open or close.…Closing is a habit, and just like any other habit, it can be broken.

… You practice opening by not closing… at first it may seem unnatural since your innate tendency is to close as a means of protection. But closing your heart does not really protect you from anything; it just cuts you off from your source of energy. In the end, it only serves to lock you inside.

Nothing is Worth Closing Over

People can pick up on your energy, and you’re feeding them with this flow. If you are willing to open even more, it never stops. You can become a source of light for all those around you.

When you open, you bring more energy into the system and it can heal. Energy can heal, and that’s why love can heal. As you explore your inner energy, a whole world of discovery opens up to you.

The more important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But, if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over. Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over.

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There is no rule that says you have to close. Just tell yourself that no matter what happens, you’re not going to close. You really do have that choice. When you start to close, just question if you’re really willing to give up your happiness. You should examine what it is inside of you that believes there’s some benefit to closing. The slightest thing happens to you, and you give away your happiness. You were having a great day until someone cut you off on your way to work. It got you really upset and you stayed that way the rest of the day. Why? Dare to ask yourself that question. What good came from letting it ruin your day? There was no benefit. If somebody cuts you off, let go and stay open. If you really want to, you can.

The Heart Instrument

Your heart is one of the masterpieces of creation. It is a phenomenal instrument. It has the potential to create vibrations and harmonies that are far beyond the beauty of pianos, strings or flutes. You can hear an instrument, but you feel your heart. And if you think that you feel an instrument, it's only because it touched your heart. Your heart is an instrument made of extreme subtle energy that few people come to appreciate.

Even though its behavior governs the course of our lives, it is not understood. If at any given point in time the heart happens to open, we fall in love. If at any given point in time it closes, the love stops. If the heart happens to hurt, we get angry, and if we stop feeling it altogether, we get empty. All these different things happen because the heart goes through changes. These energy shifts and variations that take place in the heart run your life. You are so identified with them that you use the words “I” and “me” when you refer to what’s going on in your heart But in truth, you are not your heart. You are the experiencer of your heart.

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Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh… 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 walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let go when it gets stimulated.

Your reward is a permanently open heart. There is no more valve. You live in love, and it feeds you and strengthens you. That is an open heart. Allow yourself to experience every note the heart can play.

Time to Grow

Ultimately, if you protect yourself perfectly, you will never grow. All your habits and idiosyncrasies will stay the same. Life becomes stagnant when people protect their stored issues.

You just go about your business and put your whole being into whatever’s happening instead of putting your whole being into your personal sensitivity… Personal growth is about the point at which you feel your energy change. For instance, someone says something, and you start to feel the energy get a little strange inside. You will actually start to feel a tightening. That is your cue it’s time to grow. It’s not your time to defend yourself, because you don’t want the part you would be defending.

You will eventually get conscious enough so that the minute you see the energy start getting strange, you stop. You stop getting involved in that energy. The moment you see the heart tense and get defensive, you just stop.

What exactly does it mean “to stop?” It’s something you do inside. It’s called letting go. When you let go, you are falling behind the energy that is trying to pull you into it. …Consciousness has the tendency to focus on disturbance. …You really do have the ability to disengage and fall back behind [disturbed energy]. …When the energies inside start to moves you do not have to go there. When your thoughts start, you do not have to go with them. … That is what’s called being centered. … If you aren’t centered, your consciousness is just following whatever catches its attention.

If you want to be free, then every time you feel any change in the energy flow, relax behind it. Don’t fight it, don’t try to change it, and don’t judge it.

Power of Awareness

… Letting go of the pull the [disturbed] energy has on your consciousness. … If these energies capture your consciousness and all the power of awareness gets focused on them, this power actually feeds them. Consciousness is a tremendously powerful force. This is why thoughts and emotions get stronger the more attention you give them. … If you focus on it, it grows in importance and demands more of your attention. What started as a fleeting thought or emotion can become the center of your entire your life. If you don’t let go, it can get completely out of control.

A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode. …relax and release… It just takes a moment of conscious effort to decide that you’re not going there. You just let go. It’s simply a matter of taking the risk that you are better off letting go than going with the energy. When you’re free from the hold the energy has on you, you will be free to experience the joy and expansiveness that exists within you.

Use life to free yourself. Only you can take your inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. ….Your center of consciousness is always stronger than the energy that is pulling on it. …No matter what events take place in life, it is always better to let go rather than to close.

… Break the ultimate habit: the constant draw of the lower self. You will then be free to explore the nature and source of your true being— Pure Consciousness.

Fear is Just a Thing

Fear is just a thing. It’s just another thing in the universe that you are capable of experiencing. You can do one of two things with fear: you can recognize you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it. Because people don’t deal objectively with fear, they do’t understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it. They go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay.

…There will inevitably be events and changes in life that challenge these efforts. Because you resist these changes, you feel that you are struggling with life. You feel like this person is not behaving the way they should, and this event is not unfolding the way you want. You see situations that happened in the past as disturbing, and see things down the road as potential problems. We all know we’re doing this, but nobody questions it. We think we’re supposed to figure out how life should be, and then make it that way. Only someone who looks deeper, and questions why we need the events of life to be a particular way, will question this assumption.

As you grow, you will realize that your attempts to protect yourself from your problems actually create more problems. If you attempt to arrange people, places, and things so that they don’t disturb you, it will begin to feel like life is against you. You’ll feel that life is a struggle and that every day is heavy because you to control and fight with everything. There will be competition, jealousy and fear. You will feel that anyone, at any moment, could cause you disturbance. All they have to do is say or do one thing, and the next thing you know there is disturbance inside of you. That makes life a threat. That’s why you have to worry so much. That’s why you have all these dialogues going on inside your mind. You’re either trying to figure out how to keep things from happening, or you’re trying to figure out what to do because they did happen.

…The alternative is to decide not to fight with life. Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it.

Secret of the Ascent

… That is how negative cycles happen. You actually take a piece of your stuff, which is nothing but deeply seated disturbance from your past, and you implant it in the hearts of those around you. At some point it will come back to you. Anything you put out comes back. Imagine if you got upset and fully released your disturbed energies onto another person. This is how people ruin relationships and destroy their lives.

What if all you had to do to avoid all this was to let of go in the beginning? If you had, you would have gone up instead of down. That’s how it works. When a blockage gets hit, it’s a good thing. It’s time to open up internally and release the blocked energy. If you let go, and permit the purification process to take place inside that blocked energy will be released. When it’s released and allowed to flow up, it becomes purified and merges back into your center of consciousness. This energy then strengthens you instead of weakening you You begin to go up and up, higher and higher, and you learn the secret of the ascent. The secret of the ascent is to never look down—always look up.

So don’t fall. Let go. The bigger it is, the higher the reward of letting go. That which is holding you down can become a powerful force that raises you up.

Freedom

The prerequisite to true freedom is to decide that you do not want to suffer anymore. You must decide that you want to enjoy life and that there is no reason for stress, inner pain or fear. Every day we bear a burden that we should not be bearing. We fear that we are not good enough or that we will fail. We experience insecurity, anxiety and self-consciousness. We fear that people will turn on us, take advantage or us or stop loving us. All of these things burden us tremendously. As we try to have open and loving relationships, and as we try to succeed and express ourselves, there is an inner weight that we carry. This weight is the fear of experiencing pain, anguish, or sorrow. Everyday we are either feeling it, or we are protecting ourselves from feeling it. It is such a core influence that we don’t even realize how prevalent it is.

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The truth is that everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.

All you have to do is stop expecting the mind to fix what’s wrong inside of you. The mind is simply a computer, a tool. It can be used to ponder great thoughts, solve scientific problems and serve humanity. But you, in your lost state, told it to spend its time conjuring up outer solutions for your very personal inner problems. You are the one who is trying to use the analytical mind to protect yourself from the natural unfolding of life. …The minute you stop putting your whole heart and soul into the mind as if it were your savior and protector, you will find yourself behind the mind watching it.

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Take a moment to remember that you’re spinning on a planet in the middle of empty space. Then remind yourself that you’re not going to get involved in your own melodrama.

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Ultimately, every change in your energy flow, whether it’s agitation of the mind or shifts of the heart, will be what reminds you that you are back there noticing. Now what used to hold you down becomes what wakes you up. These trigger points will help remind you to remain centered. Eventually it will become quiet enough so that you can simply watch the heart begin to react, and let go before the mind starts. At some point in the journey, it becomes all heart, not mind. You will see that the mind follows the heart. …The mind doesn’t even get a chance to start up because you let go at the heart level. Now you are on your way. The very thing that was holding you in is now helping you out.

Pain, the Price of Freedom

[Pain / Inner disturbance] is just a feeling. You can handle a feeling. 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.

If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the wind. If you want to be free, you have to learn to stop fighting with these human feelings.

If you close around pain and stop it from passing through, it will stay in you. That is why our natural tendency to resist is so counterproductive.

Unconditional Happiness

You want to say that as long as this doesn’t happen, or as long as that doesn’t happen, then you’re willing to be happy. That’s why it seems like it is out of your control. Any condition you create will limit your happiness. You simply aren’t going to be able to control things and keep them the way you want.

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. Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die. During the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience. Events don’t determine whether or not you’re going to be happy. They’re just events. You determine whether or not you’re going to be happy.

Perspectives

Imagine, God asks,

“How are you doing?”

The human says, “What do you mean, how am I doing?”

“Well, do you like it here?”

“No, I don’t like it here.”

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“That tree is bent in five places; I want it to be straight. This person went out with somebody else, and that person ran up a hundred-dollar phone bill. This person has a nicer car than mine and that person dresses funny. It’s just terrible. Plus my nose is too big, my ears are too small, and my toes are weird. I’m not happy with it. I don’t like any of it.”

So God says, “Well, how about the animals?”

“The animals? The ants and mosquitoes bite you; it’s a terrible thing. I can’t go out at night because there are all these animals out there. They howl and poop all over the place, and I just don’t like it.”

Do you think God likes listening to this? He says, “What do you think—I’m a complaint department?” Then He goes and visits somebody else, and again, He asks,

“How are you doing?”

This person says, “I’m ecstatic.”

God says, “Wow! Well, how do you like things?”

“They’re beautiful. Everything I look at just creates waves of joy inside me. I look at that bent tree; it just blows me away. The ant comes and bites me, and it’s just so amazing that a tiny ant could be brave enough to bite a giant like me!”

…Learn to be joyful.

Other People’s Behavior

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 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 to not enjoy life.

Nonresistance

How you deal with your energy flow has a major effect on your life. If you assert your will against the energy of an event that has already happened, it is like trying to stop the ripples caused by a leaf dropped into a still lake. Anything you do causes more disturbance, not less. When you resist, the energy has no place to go. It gets stuck in your psyche. It blocks your heart’s energy flow and causes you to feel closed and less vibrant. This is literally what is happening when something is weighing on your mind or when things get too heavy for you. …This is the human predicament. Events have happened and we continue to hold their energy inside of us.

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 fresh every moment… It is not life’s events that are causing you problems or stress. It is your resistance to life’s events that is causing this experience.

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If you spend your time hoping that it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you are wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain. You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.

Great Cosmic Paradox

It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.

Why wait until everything is taken from you before you learn to dig down deep inside yourself to reach your highest potential? A wise person affirms, "If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I'm alive. I'm going to stop bothering the people I love. I'm going to live life from the deepest part of my being. This is the consciousness necessary for deep and meaningful relationships.

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Let's say you're living life without the thought of death, and the Angel of Death comes to you and says, "Come, it's time to go." You say, "But no. You're supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week. I'm supposed to get one more week." Do you know what Death will say to you? He'll say, "My God! I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone. And look at all the other weeks I've given you. Why would you need one more? What did you do with all those?" If asked that, what are you going to say? How will you answer? "I wasn't paying attention . . . I didn't think it mattered." That's a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.

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The beauty of embracing deep truths is that you don’t have to change your life; you just change how you live your life. It’s not what’re doing; it’s how much of you is doing it.

Imagine a person in a hospital bed who has just been told they’ve got a week to live. They ask the doctor, “Can I walk outside? Can I look at the sky just one more time?” If it were raining outside, they would want to feel the rain just once more. For them, that would be the most precious thing. But you don’t want to feel the rain. You run and cover up. …What is inside of us that is so afraid that it keeps us from just enjoying life?

Be willing to be fully present without being afraid of what will happen in the next moment. What actually gives life its meaning is the willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.

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You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get, it’s something you experience. …You really don’t need more time before death; what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given. {pg. 254-265} *See - 1 Col. 15:55 *

Let Go of Your Melodrama

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 will not 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 will realize that the real problem is that there is 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 rearrange things outside.

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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 is 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 will realize that after this one’s gone, there will be another one.

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If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama. This is the part that thinks there’s a reason not to be happy. You have to transcend the personal, and as you do, you will naturally awaken to the higher aspects of your being. In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You’re going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it.

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The Secret of the Middle Way

The yin and the yang, expansion and contraction, nondoing and doing. Everything has two extremes. Everything has gradations of this pendulum swing.

From science we know that if you pull a pendulum thirty degrees to the right, it will swing back until it’s thirty degrees to the left.

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 as far the other way.

The Tao is in the middle; where there is no energy pushing in either direction.

Since everything has its yin and yang, everything has its own balance point. It is the harmony of all these balance points, woven together, that forms the Tao… Its power is phenomenal. If you want to imagine the power of the Tao, examine how much energy is wasted swinging sideways.

…The energies that used to be wasted swinging sideways will get pulled into the center. … When you stop swinging between the opposites, you’ll find you have far more energy than you ever imagined. That which wears out other people will draw very little of your energy. That’s the difference between struggling with the opposites versus staying centered.

…You will be that much less able to use your energy for living life because you are 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. …Both extremes were a tremendous waste of time, energy, and effort that could have gone into more productive aspects of life.

When you spend your energy trying to maintain the extremes, nothing goes forward. Then there’s no energy moving you in the Tao; it’s all being spent serving the extremes.

But how do you stop the pendulum from swinging to the outer edge? 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 will get filled with energy. This because all the energy that had been wasted is now available to you.

You will become much clearer because so much energy is flowing up in you.

As you get clearer, life’s events will actually seem to unfold in slow motion. Once this happens, events will no longer seem confusing or overwhelming, no matter what they are.

As you let go, your energy comes back to center. You don’t follow the extremes, so your energy comes back to the current moment.

When you move in the Tao, you are always present. Life becomes absolutely simple.

Deep Love

When you walk through a beautiful botanical garden, you feel open and light. You feel love. You see beauty. You don’t judge the shape and placement of every leaf. The leaves are of all sizes and shapes and they face every-which-way. That’s what makes them beautiful. What if you felt that way about people? What if they didn’t all have to dress the same, believe the same, or behave the same? What if they were like the flowers, and however they happened to be seemed beautiful to you?

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What did Christ teach? What did he say? How did he look upon this world?

He taught completely selfless, compassionate love. He hung on the cross next to thieves and robbers…

see John 8:7 and Luke 23:39-43

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Does anything in God’s creation, other than the human mind, actually pass judgement?

…You just pick your head up and look at the sun. It’s the same way when you decide to turn toward God—you just do it. You can’t offend the Divine One … the very nature is light, love, compassion, protection and giving. You can’t make it stop loving you. It’s just like the sun. You can’t make the sun stop shining on you; you can only choose not to look at it. The moment you look, you’ll see it’s there.

You have a loving God. I wonder what He sees when He looks at you?

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Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it.”