Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament
by Michael A. Singer
Living Untethered is a follow-up to The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer. Although I read the latter books, and there are concepts repeated in Living Untethered, this book hit me as I thought deeper about how samskaras - impressions that stay stuck in your mind, keep you from reaching your highest potential. Samskaras are both impressions we “cling to” that are positive and painful situations we can’t handle when we experience the event. These samskaras distort our current experience.
A core theme is purifying your inside instead of looking for things outside ourselves to make your inside feel good. Letting experiences pass through you instead of creating self-inflicted samskaras is a method to free yourself. Our view of the world gets distorted when we see things through a layer of samskaras that are stored up patterns. My mind can chatter a lot throughout the day. Building the skill of consciousness to view the thoughts in my mind and emotions in my heart from a distance - with me as the subject and everything else as an object - is deepening my presence and enjoying the current experience. The awareness of Self is a spiritual experience. Learning to discover where your thoughts and emotions come from is truly freeing.
My book has many highlights, and the notes below won’t do it justice. I recommend spending the $10 to challenge yourself to go on this spiritual journey.
My Notes
Awareness of Self
Unfortunately, life on Earth rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to, and if we resist, our experience can be quite unpleasant. Resistance creates tension and anxiety, and it makes life a burden.
Only by accepting reality can we work with the flow of life as it passes by and create a better world.
Your relationship to what you see is always one of subject-object. You are the subject, and what you are looking at is the object.
The Conscious Receiver
On a daily basis, you are so distracted by external objects that you rarely remain centered on You.
You are not your body; you are the one who notices the characteristics of your body.
Who is that consciously aware entity inside?
Living Inside
People do all kinds of things trying to make it nice in there.
If you find out why it’s not nice, and you get rid of that, you’re going to find out it can be really nice in there.
People are trying to use the outside to fix the inside - better to find out why it’s not nice inside to begin with.
The Three-Ring Circus
Notice your surroundings coming in through the senses, your thoughts passing through your mind, and any emotions that arise in your heart creating feelings of comfort or discomfort within. These three inner experiences are the arena in which your consciousness plays the game of life on planet Earth.
The problem is there’s an outside world of reality that can come in and cause your thoughts and emotions to be very difficult.
Exploring the Nature of Things
This is the journey before us - to free ourselves from the distractions that keep drawing us away from our greatness and leave us struggling with life.
The highest pash is learning through your daily life to gradually let go of what is distracting your consciousness.
The Moment in Front of You
One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in from of you is not bothering you - you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.
It’s Not Personal
You don’t surrender the outside world - you totally accept it. What you surrender is your personal, made-up judgment of it.
Your consciousness may be aware of the moment in from of you, but you did not create that moment. You are simply being given this wonderful opportunity to experience a moment in creation. It took billions of years to get here - be sure you don’t miss it.
Mindfulness is a natural, effortless process once you let go of personal distractions. Instead of thinking that the moment in front of you has to be a certain way, you start thinking that it’s pretty awesome the way it is.
Empty Mind
You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside world, the mind, and the emotions.
You can think of your mind as a very high vibration field of energy in which thoughts can be created.
Mind is not the thoughts.
Mind is the field of energy in which thoughts are capable of existing.
So thoughts are not the mind, but they exist in the mind and are formed out of the substance of the mind.
When consciousness is simply experiencing reality as imaged in the mind, that is what we call being in the present moment.
Birth of the Personal Mind
If an inner experience is not neutral to you, it draws your consciousness to focus on it.
When the force of consciousness is focused on a mental object, that object cannot pass through the mind like other objects.
Each person’s trapped mental patterns are unique and very personal.
They come from how we interacted with our past experiences.
Now that you’ve had these leftover mental impressions in your mind, reality has to compete with them for your attention.
Your ability to fully focus on the outer world is going to be hindered by the constant distraction of these inner impressions.
Fall from the Garden
Apparently, at some point you didn’t like certain vibrations, so you pushed them away when they rendered inside. That willful resistance cause them to stay in the mind. That is where personal comes from.
You now have a limited and biased view of reality that will distort all of your experiences for the rest of your life.
Once you create preferences, they will dominate your entire experience of life.
These impressions that stay stuck in the mind are called samskaras.
You just had a beautiful experience, and you ruined it. You ruined it by holding on to it, like the butterfly.
You ruined it by creating a preference about one of life’s experiences.
Whether you use your will to resist or cling, these leftover impressions will stay your mind.
You will come to see that these actors of clinging and resisting determine the quality of your life.
If you are constantly distracted by these samskaras in your mind, you’re never going to experience who you really are.
The Veil of the Psyche
You are not seeing what is actually outside - you are seeing your inner issues projected on to the outside.
You held on to some positive things from the past. The problem is they’re not happening anymore, and that is disappointing.
Your awareness is completely distracted by these stored mental patterns, and you must devote your days and nights to serving them. You can no longer experience reality - you are stuck experiencing yourself.
The Brilliant Human Mind
The first layer is where the rendering of the present external experience is taking place. We can that the here-and-now layer.
The next layer is the stored patterns from the past that you did not release when the external experience was over. We can call that the samskara layer.
But there is yet another layer. This layer is what you are doing with your brilliant mind to try to solve the discomforts created by the samskaras. This is the personal-thoughts layer, and it is the one you identify with the most - you think this is who you are.
The combination of these three layers is what we call the personal mind. Yours is completely unique to you and you alone.
The Abstract Mind
Focusing on the moment is one way to get your consciousness off its incessant addiction to the personal.
The mind is great; it’s just not supposed to e used for storing all of your personal preferences and then thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored.
You were given free will, and what you did with your free will was make a mess out of your mind.
Instead of being in awe that the moment in front of you even exists, you fight it to make it match what you want.
Serve Mind or Fix It
The foundational choice we have in life is either constantly control life to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our blockages.
Use your mind to be creative, inspiring, and do great things.
Don’t let the mind always be thinking about itself and what it wants.
Learn to enjoy life as it is - instead of limiting the ways you can enjoy it to service your past impressions.
Instead of companies the moment in front of you against the preferences you’ve built up in your mind, why don’t you compare it against nothing?
The cause of suffering is desire. In other words, the cause of suffering is preference, deciding how you want things to be and getting upset when they’re not that way.
Willful and Automatic Thoughts
When you store a samskara, an unfinished mental and emotional pattern, that pattern will not sit quietly inside of you. Anything that ever got stored inside your mind, because you resisted or clung to it, is trying to release.
How much energy are you wasting keeping all this garbage inside?
This is the nature of almost of all your automatic thoughts. They are not to be seen as some important truth or great insights into what is really going on. They are simply your mind attempting to cleanse the patterns you have stored there.
Dream and the Subconscious
The part of your mind you’re not willing to look at this what we call the subconscious.
Imagine how much mental power you waste by pushing all that mess into the subconscious.
You who is watching the dream is the same you who watches your waking thoughts and experiences the outside world.
Waking Dreams
The voice inside your head that talks all day is the exact same expressive power of mind that creates your dreams.
Every personal thing that voice says is because of the samskaras you have stored inside. Your mind is trying to release those blockages during the day while you’re still awake.
There are billions of things that can happen in life that don’t match your preferences, and there are only a few that do.
Under these conditions, the probability that life is going to be a negative experience is extremely high.
The more preferences you have, the less you will be okay.
Fortunately, there is a way out - it’s called witness consciousness. If you can learn to sit back and simply watch that voice inside your head, you can free yourself.
Understanding Emotions
The combination of your thoughts and emotions makes up what can be called your psyche, or your personal self.
Emotions are generated by the heart.
Emotions are more like clouds instead of defined objects. They come up and can be like waves flowing over you.
When you sit back in the seat of witness consciousness, it does not require a willful process of watching your emotions. Instead, it’s the simple awareness of what is going on in there. You are simply aware that you hear or see your thoughts and that you feel your emotions.
What’s going on in the heart ends up in the mind as thoughts.
Why the Heart Opens and Closes
First and foremost, understand that you are not your heart - you are the experiencer of your heart.
Your heart is a thing, like an appliance. It’s an appliance that emanates vibrations of energies.
When the heart closes, the energy flow is not strong, and this results in negative thoughts.
If you let it, your heart will go through fluctuations as different situations cause it to open and close.
There is a very powerful energy flow inside of you. For the purposes of our discussion, we will use the traditional yogic term shakti.
The reason the energy flowing through the heart fluctuates so much is because of the samskaras you’ve stored inside.
The activated samskara has taken over your life. If you’re not careful, it will determine your future by the choices you make in that unclear state.
Your samskaras are what cause your heart to open and close.
Dance of the Energy Flow
Remember that your energy is always trying to flow. The only reason it can’t is because it’s blocked.
Your psyche is the net result of all your blockages and how the energy manages to flow through them.
When you become one integrated seer - the single witness watching gall these different things pass by inside - you are centered. You are clear. You are free.
Be the One who sees the many - this is the path to self-realization.
The Cause of Moods and Emotions
An emotion is caused by the shakti hitting the blockages in your heart and shooting out to release the blocked energies.
The Secrets of the Heart
The greatest secret of the heart is revealed when you get rid of the samskaras instead of finding a way around them.
As you remove your blockages, the energy will start to flow freely and love will no longer be something you need or something you look for.
You no longer live solely off what is coming in from the outside.
The Human Predicament
Eventually, we wake up and realize that compensating for what’s wrong is not good enough - we must solve the root cause of why we are not okay.
If you are letting the avoidance of your inner problems define what you’re doing, all you’re doing is expressing your inner problems outside.
The Paradigm Shift
Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on letting go of your blockages. That’s the secret of real spiritual growth.
Working with the Heart
Your inability to handle the breadth of these emotions keeps you locked in the human predicament of controlling life in order to be okay.
If you wish to break free and live unconditionally, you must learn to clear out your heart.
Every experience makes you a greater person if you don’t resist it.
If you cling to an object, it stays.
If you suppress it, it stays.
If it stays, it will distort reality.
Neither Suppression nor Expression
The mind is free to think; the heart is free to feel. All of this leaves you at peace, in a state of gratitude. This is the way life is meant to be.
It’s not about doing or not doing anything - it’s about surrendering your initial resistance to what is.
Reality is going to come in, it’s going to hit your blockages, and your mind is going to talk about it. Fine, be that as it may - you don’t have to listen.`
Techniques for Freeing Yourself
The first technique is called positive thinking. Yogananda used to teach that every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one.
The next technique is a very traditional and is broadly referred to as mantra.
“Mantra” means training your mind to repeat a smile work or phrase over and over until it gets stuck in your mind.
The final techniques for freeing yourself from yourself is generally termed witness consciousness.
Witness consciousness is simply noticing that you are noticing what the mind is doing.
Low-Hanging Fruit
Thow things happen when you relax and release.
One, you stop fighting with the causes of your disturbed mind, and that gives them room to release.
Two, you are actually relaxing back into the seat of Self, and you will grow spiritually.
The Past
There is zero benefit to being bothered by something that is not even happening.
If you let experiences pass completely through you when they are actually happening, they will touch you to the core of your being and become part of your without leaving any scars.
When you have an experience, it can simply come in and touch consciousness directly. It doesn’t need the mind to judge it as desirable or undesirable and then store it accordingly.
To free yourself, the moment you notice disturbance, let go.
Embrace your past, hug it, kiss it - love it to death.
Meditation
This inner work on yourself is more important than everything else you do.
Whatever is going on in there is fine - as long as you can objectively observe it. This is called mindful meditation.
The reason you lose focus on your breath is that consciousness gets distracted by what your mind is saying.
Just start watching your breath again.
The entire purpose is to practice gaining control of your attention so that it becomes yours again.
What you pay attention to determines your experiences in life.
Handling the Bigger Stuff
You don’t let go of the situation - you let go of your reaction to the situation.
If you let go of the samskaras inside of you, they will no longer affect your life.
You can truly be free of your past.
This is what living untethered means.
Dealing with Blocked Energies
In essence, you are causing yourself to be unhappy, then you're going outside and demanding that the world somehow make you happy.
The world cannot make you happy while you’re inside making yourself unhappy.
Transmutation of the Energy
Instead of pushing it back down because you can’t handle the experience, or releasing it outside as a way of relief, you can relax and release at such as deep level that you allow that blockage to pass without resistance.
That is what transmutation of the energy means.
Once the blockages begin to clear, the energy will find its way into your heart, and that will comfort and sustain you.
Always remember, the energy wants to go up.
You are the conscious witness of all that passes before you. You dwell deep inside, and nothing in there is more powerful than you.
The Power of Intent
You are pure consciousness, and your will has complete dominion over mind and emotions.
These blockages are yours, and you can let go anytime you want.
Surrender is about letting go of weakness and being committed enough to carry out your intent.
Surrender is handling anything that needs to be released inside and letting it pass through.
What’s happening inside of me?
What blockage go hit that caused this shift in energy to take place?
The purpose of my day is letting go of my blockages and evolving spiritually.
Exploring the Higher States
Because you don’t have all that commotion inside, and you’re feeling more whole and complete, there’s nothing you need from the outside.
Psychological needs come from your blockages.
Once the energy is no longer blocked and is flowing freely, personal needs are no longer your motivation. Your actions are the expression of love and gratitude for life. Your whole life becomes an act of service.
In the World but Not of It
A spiritual life is not about adhering to a given set of rules - it’s about never action based on your personal energy.
Is there something I can be doing to serve the moment in front of me?
Not for me; I already let go of me. Now that I’m clear and nonreactive, is there something I can do to raise the moment as it passes by?
If something happens and you feel you want to defend yourself, don’t touch it. First let go of the part of you that wants to close down, then deal with the outside.