The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

I found Singer’s The Surrender Experiment to be an incredible book, a look at what it might mean to be “enlightened” in a 21st century sense: serene, secure in community and professional success, with major projects soaring to completion without much apparent struggle. The Untethered Soul is the how-to, and is a solid gloss of Singer’s syncretic American Buddhism.

The main, indeed only, barrier to your spiritual and worldly fulfillment is you. Specifically, the chattering neurotic thinking part of the mind, rather than the listening seat of awareness. Still the chatter, and you’ll find yourself opened to the infinite energy and love of the universe.

Two things are particularly provocative, at least for me. The first is that happiness is a choice that you make. So much of life is lived in fear, in opposition to a past which won’t change or a future which is inherently unknowable. It’s like an injury, and one way to live is to protect the wound from anything which might aggravate it, avoiding hazardous situations and building up mechanisms of protection. Or you can heal, and live in the open. Of course, “just heal”, “just let go of your thoughts and beliefs”, is very much the “now draw the rest of the owl” of enlightenment.

The other provocative question is around death. What if you knew you were going to die in a week? What would you do? It probably wouldn’t be the same as your actual plans for next week. Yet, we know we’re going to die someday, and odds are we won’t even have the kindness of knowing a date. The conflict between awareness of mortality and mundanity is at the center of a lot of the world’s religions, and there’s not a satisfactory answer.