The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

by Michael A. Singer

The way to work with resistance is by relaxing. That act of relaxing through your personal resistance not only changes your relationship with dogs, it changes your relationship with everything. Your soul has now learned how to let disturbing energies pass through. The next time somebody says or does something you don’t like, you automatically treat it the same as you did the fear of dogs. This process of relaxing through resistance is beneficial to everything in your life. This is because it directly addresses how to keep your heart open when it is trying to close.

Deep inner release is a spiritual path in and of itself. It is the path of nonresistance, the path of acceptance, the path of surrender. It’s about not resisting energies as they pass through you. If you have difficulty doing this, don’t get down on yourself. Just keep working with it. It’s the work of a lifetime to become that open, that complete, and that whole.

The key is to just relax and release, and deal only with what’s left in front of you. You do not need to worry about the rest. If you relax and release, you will see that it puts you through tremendous spiritual growth. You’ll start to feel an enormous amount of energy awaken inside of you. You will feel much more love than you’ve ever felt before. Y...

You truly can reach a state in which you never have any more stress, tension, or problems for the rest of your life. You just have to realize that life is giving you a gift, and that gift is the flow of events that takes place between your birth and your death. These events are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. To comfortably handle this flow of life, your heart and mind must be open and expansive enough to encompass reality. The only reason they’re not is because you resist. Learn to stop re...

It shouldn’t take death to challenge you to live at your highest level. 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.”

Imagine that an angel comes down and tells you, “Straighten up your affairs. You will not awake from your sleep tonight. You’re coming to me.” Then you’d know that every person you see that day, you’d be seeing for the last time. How would you feel? How would you interact with them? Would you even bother with the little grudges and complaints you’ve been carrying around? How much love could you give the ones you love, knowing it would be the last time you’d get to be with them? Think about what it would be like if you lived like that every moment with everyone. Your life would be really different. You should contemplate this. Death is not a morbid thought. Death is the greatest teacher in all of life.

What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.

Learn to live as though you are facing death at all times, and you’ll become bolder and more open. If you live life fully, you won’t have any last wishes. You will have lived them every moment. Only then will you have fully experienced life and released the part of you that is afraid of living. There is no reason to be afraid of life. And the fear will fade once you understand that the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it. Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship. Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning. What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.

If you challenge yourself to live as though it were your last week, your mind may come up with all kinds of suppressed desires. It may start talking about all the things that you’ve always wanted to do, and you may think you had better go do them. You will soon see that’s not the answer. 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. Life exists with or without you. It has been going on for billions of years. You simply get the honor of seeing a tiny slice of it. If you’re busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you’re actually experiencing. Every one of life’s experiences is different, and every experience is worth having. Life is not something to waste. It’s truly precious. That’s why death is such a great teacher. It is death that makes life precious. Look how precious life becomes when you imagine you only have a week left to live. How precious would life be if there was no such thing as death? You’d waste every second of it because you’d figure you’d always have it. It is scarcity that makes things precious. It is scarcity that makes a simple rock become a rare gem.

You really don’t need more time before death; what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given. That’s the way to live each moment of your life. You let it fill you completely. You let it touch you to the depths of your being. There is no moment that can’t do that. Even if something terrible happens, view it as just another experience of life. Death has made you a great promise in which you can find deep peace. The promise is that all things are temporal; they are all just passing through time and space. If you have patience, this too will pass.

So, instead of getting lost in the normal mental chatter, why not contemplate the temporal nature of life? Why not think about something meaningful? Don’t be afraid of death. Let it free you. Let it encourage you to experience life fully. But remember, it’s not your life. You should be experiencing the life that’s happening to you, not the one you wish was happening. Don’t waste a moment of life trying to make other things happen; appreciate the moments you are given. Don’t you understand that every minute you’re a step closer to death? This is how to live your life. You live it as though you were on the verge of death, because you are.

When you move in the Tao, you are always present. Life becomes absolutely simple. In the Tao, it’s easy to see what’s happening in life—it’s unfolding right in front of you. But if you have all kinds of reactions going on inside because you’re involved in the extremes, life seems confusing. That’s because you’re confused, not because life’s confusing.

When you stop being confused, everything becomes simple. If you have no preference, if the only thing you want is to remain centered, then life unfolds while you simply feel for the center. There is an invisible thread that passes through everything. All things move quietly through that center balance. That is the Tao. It is really there. It is there in your relationships, in your diet, and in your business activities. It is there in everything. It is the eye of the storm. It is completely at peace.

In the Tao of sailing, the balance point is not static; it’s a dynamic equilibrium. You move from balance point to balance point, from center to center. You can’t have any concepts or preferences; you have to let the forces move you. In the Way, nothing is personal. You are merely an instrument in the hands of the forces, participating in the harmony of balance. You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be. It’s that way with all of life. The more you can work with the balance, the more you can just sail through life. Effortless action is what happens when you come into the Tao. Life happens, you’re there, but you don’t make it happen. There is no burden; there is no stress. The forces take care of themselves as you sit in the center. That is the Tao. It’s the most beautiful place in all of life.

Well, how does Spirit normally feel? The truth is, it always feels good. It always feels high. It always feels open and light. Because of this, you naturally begin to center more and more on the spiritual part of your being. You do this not by reaching for Spirit, but by letting go of the rest. There really is no other way. The personal self cannot touch Spirit; you must release the personal self. As you release it, you drift back. As you go further back, you get higher. You get higher in vibration and higher in the amount of love and lightness that you feel. You just begin to soar. This happens in an ever-increasing, continuous progression.

But ultimately, how do you really know anything about God? How can you ever know about what is beyond you? You know because those who have gone beyond have come back and said that the Spirit you’re experiencing is the doorway to God. When they let go of the lower aspects of their being, they experienced just what you’re experiencing. They felt tremendous love, Spirit, and light waking up inside of them. They felt that nothing could come in through their senses that was higher than what was already going on inside. They drifted further and further back and got higher and higher. Then one day, all of a sudden, they weren’t there. There was no sense of “I” anymore. There was no sense of a separateness experiencing the love and light. There was only the ultimate expansiveness of their sense of Self merging into the love and light, like a single drop of water merging into the ocean. When the drop of consciousness that knows itself as an individual drifts back far enough, it becomes like the drop that falls into the ocean. The Atman (Soul) falls into the Paramatman (Supreme Soul). The individual consciousness falls into the Universal Oneness. And that’s it.

What happens to one who walks this path toward God? What transformations do they go through along the way? To understand this, 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. As you went deeper and deeper, you would start noticing a phenomenal thing—you are no longer judging. The process of judging has simply stopped. There is just appreciating and honoring. Where there used to be judging, there is now respecting, loving, and cherishing. To differentiate is to judge. To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging it.

You can’t know God that way. It must come from actual experience. That’s what happens to you when you meditate. That’s what happens when you let go of your lower self. You drift into Spirit, and as you drift into Spirit, these transformations take place within you. All you have to do is notice them, and you will start to notice the tendency toward the qualities of the Divine. The further back you go, the more you will see these natural qualities unfolding inside of you. Each step along the way, you get a clearer glimpse of what it must be like to sit in that Divine State.

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

God’s nature is eternal, conscious bliss. No matter what you’ve done, you’re not going to be the one thing that ruins it. The beauty is that you can experience this ecstasy. And when you begin to feel this joy, that’s when you’ll know God’s nature. Then nobody will upset or disappoint you. Nothing will create a problem. It will all appear as part of the beautiful dance of creation unfolding before you. Your natural state will get higher and higher. You’ll feel love instead of shame. Instead of being unwilling to lift your eyes to the Divine because of what you’ve said or done, you’ll see the Divine as a place of unconditional refuge.