The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael A. Singer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Untethered Soul is a unique book and it obviously means a lot to a whole lot of people because I’ve never seen a book with a higher rating on Goodreads than this one. Yet I had some problems with it. For that, I’m a little embarrassed, to be honest. Nonetheless, I did.
First of all, I don’t normally pick up too many spiritual books to read. I bought this one on the recommendation of a relative. And I found it intriguing. Singer has some interesting concepts. He wants people to stop suffering, to be free, to find their consciousness, to become self aware, to attain true enlightenment. In that regard, it’s largely an Eastern religious book, although Singer tries to “Westernize” it by mentioning Jesus (and other spiritual leaders) throughout the book. He begins with the voice in your head that is always talking to you, your own, always second guessing you, offering you advice, often wrong, etc. He writes that if the person behind this voice were on the sofa beside you, you would kick him out in a heartbeat, thinking him crazy. Not a bad point. He writes of the “monkey man,” the person inside your head who makes your life miserable and how you can go about silencing him and attaining your true freedom. Yet at the same time, his instructions for doing this seem to me — but apparently not to others — to be rather vague, as though the reader already knows some of the steps for going about this. For instance, if your heart is closed, you’ll be hurt by things. You need to open your heart to attain true happiness. Um, okay. How exactly do you “open your heart?” Cause I don’t know how. I don’t think it’s as easy as just that.
The book, while small and apparently easy to understand for many, seems fairly heavy to me. Perhaps that’s because I’m stupid, although I’ve read an awful lot of philosophy over the years, but there’s an awful lot of advice here, some of it quite good when you can follow it. And if I were to follow it, I’d have to read this book some five or six times to just be able to even try to follow all of the advice he gives. I can’t do it with one reading. I tried out some of the things in the early chapters and it’s quite difficult.
In the later chapters, he starts to get pretty redundant. Actually, he is pretty much throughout the entire book, but it becomes more noticeable in the later chapters. He also starts talking more about God, which is the subject of his last chapter. I actually got something out of this, although I’m not sure I agree with everything he asserts.
Singer believes one can become totally free and totally happy, but in order to do so, one has to seemingly completely clear oneself of any distractions and thoughts of virtually anything, becoming a nonhuman organism (in my words). That doesn’t appeal to me. I think that’s a weakness of both the book and his approach.
The Untethered Soul is an ambitious book and parts of it are quite good, but I think some of it’s pretty vague, some of it’s pretty damn difficult to actually accomplish, some of it’s boringly redundant, and it might be a little overrated by some. I’m glad I read it and I might reread it again at some point, but it’s not the greatest book ever written. Nonetheless, recommended.
hankrules2011 