10 Things I Learned from The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

Who are "you?" You are not your name or your history. You are a being that’s able to be aware of your environment and your thoughts.

When you meditate and become part of your consciousness, your consciousness is aware of everything. It is aware of everything you see and all your thoughts but when you go far enough inside, your consciousness is the observer. You are your consciousness. Once it goes away you go away.

In the sense of meditation, you are focusing on the awareness of the awareness. So that you are aware that there are thoughts, but then the next level is to become aware that you are aware of these thoughts. This is the connection with your consciousness.

It is this internal chatter that is trying to keep you static. You can notice that your inner voice will argue with itself and discuss both sides of an issue. This is to distract you and make sure that nothing changes.

When you’re watching a movie and everything is working correctly, your consciousness gets drawn into the movie as you follow it. That’s why if there’s a technical problem, you’re not drawn into the movie you observing the movie as if there’s a technical problem.

Even at the initial sensory input from the movie, if the movie is boring, you won’t pay attention to it and your thoughts were wandered. This is why we also try to involve your thoughts and emotions in addition to your visual and audio auditory senses.

This is why you see people that are 80 years old that have a lot of energy because they have cultivated this inner energy. The inner energy does not need food rather outside sources it is from within.

When you spend energy worrying about what people want to hear or where you think you should be that you’re not, you subconsciously tell your mind to work on it. Your mind creates fear for yourself to keep you going.

This act of constantly worrying about yourself is a form of suffering.

Your thoughts generally tend to focus on your problems and that’s what consumes your day-to-day is worrying about problems in your subconscious self talk

You can break yourself of this addiction to internal self talk and use the extra energy to enjoy your life.

He compares this addiction to the inner monologue or inner dialogue as an addiction to drugs.

The same way you quit smoking by stopping putting cigarettes in your mouth you can quit telling your psyche to fix all your problems. That’s what keeps it busy.

It won't help you get the job/romance/promotion.

The way to deal with resistance is by relaxing. If you have a fear of dogs, you can realize that other people have lived through their lives without a fear of dogs, so next time you have a fear of dogs, you just relax.

Relax through resistance.

As you enter or leave a car, etc. Take a moment.

You build up a lot of responses to avoid pain, which actually causes more pain. The author gives an example of wanting to maintain friends. Sometimes friends will not respond if you ask them to go to a movie or something so then you worry about not offending them or wearing the right clothes and then your thoughts are no longer on the friendship they’re on what you’re wearing or what you’re doing.

Stack more of these on yourself then almost everything you do is causing you some kind of pain. This happens a lot to teenagers who are so worried about the external world and they have not learned how to address this inner.

Pain is energy and if you experience pain, just relax and experience it. Don’t private suppress it or avoid it.

When you stop living from this place of avoiding pain, you can simply enjoy your life whatever happens without worrying about the consequences So in other words, we just learned you were just wear whatever clothes you want to wear and not worry about it or ask somebody a question and their response doesn’t matter you can still plan and accomplish things, but you don’t have to be attached to the results

Be at peace with your inner disturbance. This is the key.

Permit the world to be what it is. If you expect things to be another way, that is how pain starts because you have no control over it. You can only control your own actions.

Your house around you is built of your thoughts to protect yourself. Beyond your inner walls is a world of trillions of stars of white that is waiting for you if you can just let down your walls. This is where the term enlightenment comes from.

You patch the walls of your thoughts with new thoughts. The author suggests breaking through the thoughts. An example that he gave was somebody found out that they were adopted when they were 20 and they created a crack and who they thought their family was, but then rationalized it by saying that their adopted parents were much nicer than their natural parents could’ve been. That is a patch on the wall.

There are two ways to live through life. You can stay within your comfort zone or you can go beyond.

Free yourself from your limitations. The way most people live you were living like a tiger in a zoo with a cage that you created of your own thoughts and fears.

What do some people looks like a prison is another person‘s idea of safety. They want to retreat inside the cage instead of being let free.

Living is when you hit Internal psyche and your internal rules, you just relax and let it pass. Eventually, it will you will go through it and that is where you will reach enlightenment

That is what it means to go beyond

You could choose to be happy but as soon as you put conditions on it, you can’t be happy. For example, if you say, I’ll be happy if I have $1 million or a nice job you won’t ever truly be happy but once you decide to be happy you could be happy no matter what happens.

The stage of enlightenment is beyond happiness.