‘In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops.
Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important?
Notice that the voice takes both sides of the conversation. It doesn’t care which side it takes, just as long as it gets to keep on talking.’ Michael A. Singer.
That voice in our heads. The one responsible for creating so much drama in our lives. How do we begin to understand that the voice isn’t us? That is the subject of Michael Singer’s bestseller ‘The Untethered Soul’.
The book in a nutshell
In the book, Singer makes the point that the path to understanding starts with awareness. If we take the time, as he describes, to step back, examine the voice, and get to know it better we realise that we are not the voice but the one listening to it.
Key takeaways
The ‘voice’ is our mind’s mechanism for bringing our direct experience of the world into the realm of our thoughts. It tries to make sense of the myriad events occurring around us.
Yet at the same time we are:
1.The observed – the incessant talking mind that creates story after story about what it experiences
and
2.The observer – the part of ourselves that is aware of it all but doesn’t get caught up in the story that our mind creates.
If we can use awareness to step away from the voice, to stop believing that the voice is us, whether what it says is good or bad, attractive or repellent, we get to experience true growth.
Singer makes the point that without that awareness we will forever spend our lives trying to figure out which of the stories the voice narrates is really us. We can get excited when we realise that we have the power to step back and let the mind drone on. We don’t have to engage with it unless we choose to. As he puts it:
‘Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes.’
Final thoughts
This book is truly a marvel and one you will keep reading over and over as you embark on your journey to unravel the mystery of your mind. If you want to learn how to begin the work of escaping the mental drama that keeps you trapped in an unfulfilled life then this book is a must read.