Michael A. Singer
Michael A. Singer (born 1947) is an American spiritual teacher, software engineer, and entrepreneur whose two books on consciousness — The Untethered Soul (2007) and Living Untethered (2022) — have reached tens of millions of readers worldwide. The Untethered Soul spent years on the New York Times bestseller list and is frequently cited alongside Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now as among the most impactful spiritual books of the past two decades. Singer’s approach is distinctive for its psychological precision: he brings an engineer’s clarity to questions that spiritual traditions have often wrapped in obscuring mysticism.
Biographical Context
Singer’s awakening to contemplative practice came suddenly in the 1970s, during a period of personal and academic crisis. While finishing a doctoral dissertation in economics at the University of Florida, he had an unexpected experience of the witness consciousness — the realization that the voice in his head was not him, that there was something else present, something watching. This experience, and the years of meditation practice that followed, eventually became the foundation of his teaching.
He founded the Temple of the Universe, a yoga and meditation community in Alachua, Florida, in 1975, where he lived and taught for decades while simultaneously developing medical software — a company that eventually became WebMD. His unusual combination of deep contemplative practice and successful entrepreneurship is not incidental to his teaching; he treats the capacity to remain present and open as directly applicable to all domains of life, including business.
His legal difficulties (a federal indictment related to his software company, eventually settled) are addressed in his memoir The Surrender Experiment (2015) — a book that documents how surrendering to the flow of events rather than managing them produced outcomes far beyond what his planning mind could have engineered.
Core Ideas
The Voice in Your Head Is Not You
The foundational insight of Singer’s teaching, described in the opening chapters of The Untethered Soul, is the distinction between the voice of the mind and the awareness that hears it:
“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.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
This is not a metaphor or a meditation technique but a direct observation available to anyone who stops and notices what is actually happening in their inner experience. The voice talks continuously; something else hears it. That something else — the awareness, the witness — is what Singer identifies as the true self.
Consciousness as Pure Awareness
Singer’s epistemological foundation is a Vedantic understanding of consciousness as the fundamental nature of being:
“Consciousness is the highest word you will ever utter. There is nothing higher or deeper than consciousness. Consciousness is pure awareness.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
He describes the “seat of the Self” — the centered position of pure awareness — as the Buddhist Self, the Hindu Atman, and the Judeo-Christian Soul, using these labels interchangeably while avoiding identifying with any single tradition.
The Open vs. Closed Heart
One of Singer’s most accessible and immediately applicable teachings is the distinction between an open heart (energy flowing freely, love and enthusiasm available) and a closed heart (energy blocked, life contracted):
“There is a very simple method for staying open. You stay open by never closing. It’s really that simple.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
“Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
This is not a counsel of emotional bypassing but of radical inclusion: meet every experience — pleasant or painful — without the defensive closure that blocks energy and accumulates the stored patterns (samskaras) that run the life.
Samskaras: Stored Blockages from the Past
Singer’s most technically sophisticated contribution is his psychological rendering of the yogic concept of samskaras — stored energy patterns that form when experiences are resisted rather than released:
“A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
His account of how samskaras form, how they are reactivated, and how they distort present perception provides one of the most coherent psychological explanations for the persistence of emotional patterns despite intellectual understanding of their irrationality.
The Personal Mind: A Construction, Not a Given
In Living Untethered, Singer extends this into a full account of how the “personal mind” — the layer of preferences, fears, and self-concept that constitutes ordinary identity — is built from accumulated samskaras:
“The foundational choice we have in life is either constantly control life to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our blockages.” — Singer, Living Untethered
The person who chooses the second path finds that as blockages dissolve, the personality changes — not because it is being forced into a different shape, but because the patterns that distorted it are no longer active.
Letting Go as the Central Practice
The practical core of Singer’s teaching is the instruction to relax and release rather than grip and protect. When something disturbs the inner state — a thought, an emotion, an external event — the spiritual practice is to notice the disturbance without following it:
“A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode. The moment the energy moves and you feel your consciousness start to get drawn into it, you relax and release.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
“The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation. You are free to walk through this world without a problem on your mind.” — Singer, The Untethered Soul
The Surrender Experiment
Singer’s memoir documents the most unusual application of his inner work: the decision to use every situation life presented — wanted or unwanted — as an opportunity to let go of the personal self rather than assert it:
“I clearly remember deciding that from now on if life was unfolding in a certain way, and the only reason I was resisting it was because of a personal preference, I would let go of my preference and let life be in charge.” — Singer, The Surrender Experiment
The experiment generated results that no strategic plan could have produced: a meditation community, a medical software company that became WebMD, and The Untethered Soul — written during a federal indictment that Singer treated as another opportunity to practice surrender.
The two-step practice:
- Let go of personal reactions of like and dislike
- Look clearly at what the situation itself calls for — “What would you be doing if you weren’t being influenced by the reactions of like or dislike?”
Singer’s formula for professional engagement: “Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself — because it was.”
The experiment’s deepest finding: “The flow of life had served as sandpaper that, to a great extent, freed me of myself. Unable to unbind myself from the incessant pull of my psyche, in an act of sheer desperation, I had thrown myself into the arms of life.”
Key Works in This Library
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself (2007): Singer’s most comprehensive treatment of witness consciousness, energy flow, samskaras, and the path to inner freedom. Accessible to readers with no background in yoga or meditation, while rigorous enough to satisfy those with long practice.
Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament (2022): A sequel that deepens the samskaras teaching and extends it into a full account of the personal mind and how it forms. More technically detailed than The Untethered Soul, with a stronger emphasis on the psychological mechanisms of suffering and liberation.
The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection (2015): Singer’s memoir and the most concrete documentation of what the inner teachings look like when applied to all of life’s events — mundane and extraordinary. The book covers thirty years of building the Temple of the Universe community, the growth of what became WebMD, and a federal indictment, all framed as stages in a single experiment in conscious surrender.
Connections to Other Authors in This Library
- Anthony de Mello’s “I” observing “me” is Singer’s witness consciousness described in slightly different vocabulary; both describe the same structural insight from slightly different angles
- Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness practice and Singer’s awareness practice are complementary approaches to the same fundamental capacity — the ability to be present without being swept away
- Paramhansa Yogananda’s yogic framework (Atman, karma, samskara, the soul as pure consciousness) is the philosophical background from which Singer’s teaching emerges
- Henry Shukman’s Zen kensho — the experience of the witness remaining when the personal self dissolves — is phenomenologically identical to what Singer describes as full establishment in the seat of the Self
- Lao Tzu’s wu wei — action without forcing, engagement without clinging to outcomes — is the external expression of what Singer describes as the inner practice of remaining open and releasing