The Untethered Soul

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you […] You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.”

This is a summary, or thesis statement, of the entire book. You are not the internal dialogue in your mind or the objects in your environment: You are a spiritual being who witnesses all of these things and who can choose to either remain seated in conscious awareness or get muddled in the issues that constantly spring up in life and in our minds. Singer states in this passage that our real problems do not come from the external world but from our internal chaos: When we choose to perpetually focus on the endless talking in our minds, we suffer.

“You re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind whereas you can’t control the world. That is why you mentally talk about it. If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. When your body experiences cold, there may be nothing you can do to affect the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, ‘It’s cold!’ you can say, ‘We’re almost home, just a few more minutes.’ Now you feel better. In the thought world there’s always something you can do to control the experience.”

Constantly meddling with our internal conversations and energy flows is about control. Feeling that we have control over our circumstances is comfortable; feeling that we are powerless to change anything can be frightening and might induce panic. Singer wants to take his audience to a place where they are willing to let go of the idea that they need to control not just their own lives but everything about their environment. Once they can do this, then it is possible to sit with reality, which is that we do not need to identify with our daily ordeals that come and go regardless of how much control we think we have over them.