The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Here’s a story: one day, you, a faithful Astral Codex Ten reader, hear an enthusiastic knock at the door. Starch white shirt, crisp black tie, and a suspicious joy in the eyes - a Mormon missionary has found their way to your doorstep. The Mormon church has around 70,000 missionaries and 250,000 converts per year. Assuming they work 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year, that makes one convert every 582 hours of proselytizing. You, in your unwavering dedication to the Socratic method and the triumphs of logic, decide to hear them out. Just for a day. Unfortunately, this missionary was raised in the the comments section of Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know and can dig a counterargument out of a snake pit. One day turns into 73, and 582 hours later you find yourself to be a joyful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder-Day Saints.

Just how preposterous is this? Theratio of Mormon ACX readers readers matches that of the US at-large at around 2%. However, most of these are could be members from birth, rather than adult conversions. This begs the question: how often are any of us converted for something so fundamental? Howdeep are the structural valleys of our mind space? ACX commenterEremolalos asked on a recent Hidden Open Thread (sorry free subscribers) how often has anyone on this website, which in many ways prides itself on honorable and open debate, changed their mind about anything. While there are some inspiring stories, the handful of replies are mostly examples of object-level disagreements. What about changing the entire lens through which you see the world?

In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer takes on this audacious task. His message: it’s all made up. There are simply no rules. And you’re living as if there are, which is harmful to yourself. It’s a pop culture, self-help book, the likes of which earned the author a feature on Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday”. And here I stand, a loyal ACX reader myself, clutching my pearls of logic and reason, saying to you: boy, does he have a point.

But first, how does anyone convince us of anything?

Listen to me, please

I’m no expert, but hopefully a simple framework of persuasive reading can guide the rest of this review. To abandon all skillfulness - I’m just priming you for my later appeal.

The way I see it, most persuasive tools can be bucketed into three categories: an appeal to authority, logic, or emotion. Appeals to authority use the shortcuts: “I’m knowledgable, capable, and experienced. You can trust me to be saying something meaningful.” This could be an uphill battle coming from an anonymous person on the internet.

Logic needs no explanation on this website. If it’s likely for you and I to connect on anything, it’s the insufferable quest for honest, logical truth. The hill gets steeper when I admit this book dangerously dips into the territory of “woo.”

And finally, emotion. Might as well be the Lost City of Atlantis for an analytically minded shape-rotator like myself. But here, it just might be all I’ve got.

Imagine a horse, galloping across a sandy beach

Michael Singer is the founder of a medical software advertising company. He sold the company to WebMD for an astonishing $5 billion, only to later be prosecuted for securities fraud. You should listen to him when he tells you that you’re living your life wrong.

Thankfully, Singer makes no appeal to authority himself. In fact, Singer outlines his persuasive technique to the read up front, in the introduction: “…we will undertake a journey of exploration of “self”. We will neither call upon the experts in psychology, nor upon the great philosophers. We will not argue and choose between time-honored religious views, or resort to statistically supported surveys of people’s opinions… We will turn to one expert who, for every moment of every day of their life, has been collecting the data necessary to finally put this great inquiry to rest. And that expert is you.”

His message is roughly this: your inner reality is made up of layers and layers of structure, assumptions, and shortcuts that give you a sense of self and modalities to move throughout the world. But they’re all made up, and they all get in your way: “The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality.” He attempts to make this point through, of course, a manufactured structure of five parts.

In the first section, Singer attempts to deconstruct the notion of self, and in particular “the voice inside your head.” Those with Buddhist affiliations will be quite familiar with many of the concepts and tools he employs. However, as promised Singer tries to stick to direct experience, highlighting formative life experiences such as “seeing a tree” or “being stuck in traffic”. The intention is to urge the reader to really dig into what their internal experience is made of. Here he also sets the stage for what he sees as the solution to all struggles in life. What if you just stopped caring? What if every nagging thought, anxiety, or pattern didn’t feel like it mattered at an existential level?  You make the rules of your own head, don’t you? And if you don’t, then why do you care what it says up there?

Next, Singer talks about his concept of infinite energy. Here he notes how much power an atom bomb can release, and that humans are in fact made of many atoms. Thus, we must have infinite energy. He lost me here.

Sections three and four toe the line of the deep end, but dip back into practicality. They try to make obvious that your normal mode of operation is holding you back, and desperately so. They dangle the carrot of what life could be like, should you be daring enough to listen to his advice. The picture is unbridled freedom from distress. These chapters chart a path for achieving such peace in practice by identifying the types of structures you might find in your mind, and furthermore explaining how you can relate to them from a point of understanding, rather than subjection.

And finally, section five starts with a strong call to action. Singer tells you to think about your own death, all the time, as much as you can. And if after reading all this, you do not feel pure inner peace, he closes the book with his strongest, most universally relatable claim: a bunch of semi-coherent rambling about an areligious concept of God.

If it wasn’t obvious, the strength of this book is not necessarily its conceptual content, which are hit or miss. It’s the way Singer speaks to the reader.

There are no rules because there are no rules

Singer uses plain, direct language throughout the entire book. I find it rare to experience his level of clear, concise communication, which makes reading this book feel like a gripping conversation and an absolute breeze.

Many of the concepts he addresses might seem elementary to philosophy enthusiasts. Nothing he says is intellectually groundbreaking. He doesn’t attempt to outline the existing debate around moral relativism, nihilism, or absurdism. Many of you reading this review might be thinking, “I realized the idea of “there are no rules” when I was 15 years old. It is of course much more complicated than that. How could I get anything out of this book?”

This book makes an unfalsifiable claim in a disturbingly impactful manner. While I loved reading it, I liken the experience of this book to debating an annoying classmate who just took their first introduction to philosophy class: for every rebuttal, Singer can repeat himself, “but that’s made up too.” It’s The Categories Were Made For Man, but translated to the experience of existence. The magic comes from Singer’s writing style. His appeals to relatable experience are dastardly convincing, his digestible repetition molds your neural pathways into the shape of belief, and his calming but assertive voice makes you feel like this all really does matter.

Please, listen to me

I’m not shy about it - I want you to read this book. I’m not hopeful my efforts will land me a place in the afterlife. I just think reading this book will lead to an interesting examination of your internal experience. And as I alluded to earlier, I’m going to briefly reach for all three buckets to convince you.

Here’s my brief appeal to authority, or rather, identity: I am hopelessly logical, right brained, whatever you want to call it. My prior for buying into this book was invisibly small. And yet I think there is something experientially novel here. Reading this book is a great way to take some of the grandest questions about the human experience out of your head and into your life.

It’s easy enough to dismiss the nature of such a book as elementary philosophy, or worse, therapeutic cornmeal for the masses. But this book’s simplicity is its secret weapon. For as smart as you might be, for as considered of arguments you’ve foiled, how closely have you examined the moment-by-moment experience that is your entire life? To make the logical case, this book challenges the practical, the empirical - that is, all that you’ll ever know.

And finally, my last legs, the emotional appeal. Reading The Untethered Soul invigorated my sense of reality. I admit, you have to approach the book with at least a teaspoon of humility and buy-in. It’s far too ridiculous to withstand a cynic’s eyes. But if you can do so, the forcefulness and clarity of Singer’s words will pierce through your default internal dialogue and put a spotlight on your soul. While reading I found my eyes widening, my chest expanding, my neurons clicking into shape. It was refreshing to be convinced by such simple communication. I was honored to have a fire lit underneath me - not to do anything grand, but just to live yet another day.