The Untethered Soul

It is difficult for Singer to plainly outline the steps for letting go as he is trying to describe a deeply internal and spiritual process that is not necessarily amenable to step-by-step instruction. For example, when he suggests that “when your stuff gets hit, let go right then because it will be harder later” (74), many readers who are enthusiastic about doing this in their own lives might be frustrated to realize that letting go requires lots of training and discipline before flipping the switch on “letting go” becomes easy and immediate. This is why Singer front-loads his book discussing consciousness itself; the ability to drop back behind one’s experiences and simply notice sights, sounds, and thoughts rather than identifying with these objects is a prerequisite for any other lesson he wants to impart to his audience.

Singer demonstrates sharp intuition about specific human experiences throughout the text. He does this in Chapter 8 when he describes the futile attempt to fix one’s own life when things are falling apart: “You start getting down to your survival instincts” (77) by making rash decisions like leaving relationships and quitting jobs because these are deemed to be contributing to one’s chaos. Similarly, in Chapter 9, he describes the experience of having one of your “thorns” activated: “You feel the reaction as a hollowness or a dropping sensation in your heart […]. A sense of weakness comes over you, and you begin thinking about other times when you were left alone and of people who have hurt you” (86). Because the subject matter of The Untethered Soul is subtle and spiritual, it is important that the audience understands the emotional nuance of the human experience, upon which Singer expands in these passages.

While Singer can occasionally seem uncaring when discussing one’s personal responsibility to be happy, he expresses sympathy with the plight of the average person in Chapter 10 when he writes that “people do not understand how much they are suffering because they have never experienced what it is like to not suffer” (89). Singer does not mean that the average person is in a constant state of extreme physical or mental anguish; rather, he considers identification with the chaos of the mind to be a form of suffering, which most people would simply consider to be regular life. It is possible that somebody who spends a lifetime living the kind of centered life Singer advocates would consider it torture, for instance, to live one day as a stressed-out office worker.

Singer believes the human psyche to be “built upon avoiding […] pain, and as a result, it has fear of pain as its foundation. That is what caused the psyche to be” (100). Although Singer doesn’t explore it, this passage expresses an interesting theory of early human psychology. It would be interesting to know, for instance, if Singer believes that all of the so-called accomplishments of civilization can be attributed to the fear-based psyche we developed as a defense mechanism against the pain of life.