Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament

One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you—you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. It’s not personal—you are making it personal.

A lot of people don’t feel their heart very much. They are so used to focusing on their mind that they don’t notice the shifts in the heart until those shifts are too strong to ignore. Emotions are messy and much too sensitive, so people suppress them.

Instead of thinking that the new job will do it, the new relationship will do it, or more money and popularity will do it, do the necessary inner work to make it beautiful inside.

If it took 13.8 billion years for the moment in front of you to get there, and it took 13.8 billion years for you to end up in front of that moment, every moment is indeed a match made in heaven. Nobody else is standing there experiencing exactly what you're experiencing. Truth is, no one ever did, and no one ever will. That exact moment will never be here again. All moments just keep passing through time and space. You are being given a unique show that took billions of years to create—it's right in front of you, and you're complaining about it.

Now do you understand why Christ said the Kingdom is within you? It is the very essence of your being. Your heights are incomprehensible, and you are perfectly capable of doing this work. Your inner states will just keep getting higher and higher as you keep letting go. The fact that you are even interested in these teachings means you’ve changed the world. You who do the work of liberating yourself are to be deeply respected. With great love and respect, Michael A. Singer

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.

You just need to deeply relax and stop fighting with yourself. At that point something amazing is going to happen: All the energy that was pulling you down and out changes direction. It begins to lift you in and up. This is the transmutation of the energy, and it is real.

It’s all about relaxing. If you’re using your will to relax, you can’t use your inner hands to push energy away or grab onto it.

Are you really going to continue making your life so difficult? 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. It’s that simple. You have to work on letting go of the root cause of suffering. The spiritual path is always about letting go of yourself, and that means dealing with the blocked energies. The blocked energies inside are going to build up and need release if you don’t deal with them. These energies may release in the form of anger, verbal or physical fighting, and other bursts of uncontrolled behavior. When you allow the energies to release unconsciously like this, you’re not in charge. The energies will tend to follow the path of least resistance, as determined by the samskaras. When you allow this to happen, the uncontrolled energy carves channels within you that will make it easier to flow that way again. The energy flow becomes a habit. Not only is “losing it” unhealthy because of what you may say or do outside, but you also increased the probability of losing it in the same way again. This can cause all kinds of trouble. Any time you’re not in charge in there, there’s going to be trouble. It’s that simple.

The logical questions become: Why are you storing all this stuff inside you? And if you’re going to store stuff inside, why not make it nice stuff? People collect all sorts of things as hobbies. Some collect spoons, teacups, stamps, or coins from all over the world. But you had a brilliant idea for a hobby—let’s collect bad experiences. That’s what you did: “I’m going to collect every bad experience I ever had and keep it inside me so it can bother me for the rest of my life.” How can that work out well? If you keep doing it, you’re going to collect more and more bad experiences, and your life will get heavier and heavier.

All of life is suffering. Now we get to the second noble truth: The cause of suffering is desire.

What I want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to feel complete well-being as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired by everything I do.

Notice that consciousness can focus fully on the heart, fully on the mind, or it can divide its awareness between the two. When emotions are extremely pleasant, you may have the tendency to behave irrationally because you don’t want to shift awareness from the beauty in your heart to the rational mind. On the other hand, when the emotions are unpleasant, you may try to change the inner experience by letting your thoughts distract you from what’s happening in the heart. The mind becomes a place the soul goes to hide from the heart. To transcend this tendency to hide in either your heart or your mind, simply realize that it is always the same conscious awareness experiencing what is going on inside.

If you’re conscious, present, and paying attention, you will know what to do. The moment in front of you is talking to you. It doesn’t have to be in words. The piece of paper on the ground, the person who needs some help, whatever it is, your response becomes obvious. The deepest truth is that it doesn’t even matter what you do. What matters is where you’re coming from. What matters is your motive. If your motive is to let go of yourself and serve the moment in front of you, you are worthy of great respect. How would you like to meet somebody whose entire motive and purpose in life is to first let go of their personal blockages and then do their best to serve what’s in front of them? They can’t do wrong because their motive is pure. If the motive itself is pure and impersonal, in the end, it will spread light.

What’s going on in the heart ends up in the mind as thoughts.

Anything that ever got stored inside your mind, because you resisted or clung to it, is trying to release. It’s an energetic reality, like Newton’s laws of motion. The energy cannot stay in there unless you continuously assert an opposing force of will to keep it in there. That’s why it keeps coming back up. Mommy yelled at you twenty-five years ago, and that hurt you. Now suddenly somebody mentions their mother yelling and all these emotional and mental issues come up inside of you. Why? That blocked energy is always trying to come up, every single millisecond. Just like in a dammed-up river, the blockage is trying to release its pent-up energy. It is not comfortable staying inside you, so you have to constantly assert your willpower to hold it down. How much energy are you wasting keeping all this garbage inside?

You are capable of experiencing three distinct things: the outside world, the mind, and the emotions. Now that we have deeply examined the nature of the outside world, let’s start our journey into understanding the second object of consciousness: the mind.

People make such a big deal out of science versus God, as if the two are at odds with each other. The real problem is that people don't truly believe in either. If you believed that science explains the creation of all things, you would live your life with the constant awareness that everything you are interacting with is emanating from the quantum field, pulling itself together into atoms and molecules, then appearing as the form before you. You would not like it or dislike it; you would be in awe of it. Likewise, if you really believed God was the creator of all things, you would live in awe and appreciation of the marvel of the Divine Creation. You would not like it or dislike it; you would be blown away that it even exists.

You are not made of atoms; you are the consciousness that is aware of the objects that are made of atoms.

life on Earth rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to, and if we resist, our experience can be quite unpleasant.

Sitting on a planet spinning through vast outer space for a handful of years—in the broadest sense, this is the human predicament

by raising what appears before you. If you can’t even serve what is put in front of you, how are you going to change the world? If you are getting so upset about conditions in the world that you’re edgy with everyone around you, you’re not helping anyone. If you can’t create harmony in your own household, what right do you have to complain that countries are shooting missiles at each other? You have to live a life that, if everyone lived it, there would be peace. If you can’t do that, you are part of the problem, not the solution. It’s all about letting go of yourself. The world is going to come in, and it’s going to hit what’s left of your samskaras. What you feel going on inside when that happens is reactive energy. Don’t ever act based on that. You will just be polluting the environment with your inner blockages. No good can come from that.

Imagine you’re taking a walk and there’s a piece of paper on the side of the road. You feel the disharmony, and you pick it up. It’s not a “have to” or a “supposed to”; you’re simply an artist making the world more beautiful. Your mind doesn’t say, “I’ll pick this one up, but I’m not going to pick up every single piece of litter.” Nor does your mind say, “What idiot threw this piece of paper down here? This is the kind of person who ruins the world.” No. You are simply a spontaneous being who is in harmony with life. You expect nothing back from your actions because they were not done for approval or recognition. You can’t help but share the beautiful energy going on inside of you with the moment in front of you. The highest life you can live is when every single moment that passes before you is better off because it did. Serve the present moment with all your heart and soul. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone did that. Start

Once the energy starts spontaneously flowing, you won’t touch it. You just respect it, honor it, and appreciate it. You inwardly say, “Thank you,” and keep letting go. That becomes your only prayer—thank you, thank you so much.

That is the seat of Self. You don’t find your way back to Self—you simply cease to leave. If you work on this, you will come to a beautiful state within that is always there for you. It is a place of refuge, and all you ever need to do is keep letting go. That is the life of surrender.

But inside you have no such limitations because there is no physical aspect to Self. You are pure consciousness, and your will has complete dominion over mind and emotions.

You will see how relationships used to be about finding a way to be more comfortable with yourself. Once the blockages begin to clear, the energy will find its way into your heart, and that will comfort and sustain you. Relationships

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. It means to let go of yourself, to transcend your personal self as Buddha taught, to die to be reborn as Christ taught. It is the essence of all spiritual teachings, and it is the truth. Everyone is capable of freeing themselves, if they are willing to do the inner work.

The best way to let go of stored pockets of pain is to practice. Just as you practice scales to learn the piano or practice a sport to get good at it, so you practice letting go to learn how to do it. You start with simple things. We call these the low-hanging fruit. There are many situations each day when you create inner disturbance for absolutely no good reason. Bothering yourself about the car in front of you does no good at all. It only makes you tense and uptight. The cost-benefit analysis is one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. Letting go of that tendency should be easy, but it’s not. You will find that you’re in the habit of insisting and demanding that things should be the way you want, even if it’s irrational. Things are the way they are because of all the influences that made them that way. You are not going to change the weather by complaining about it. If you are wise, you will start to change your reactions to reality instead of fighting with reality. By doing so, you will change your relationship with yourself and with everything else.