Why the Untethered Collective
The basics, kept basic. A primer for people who have some interest and some knowledge, and who would like the spiritual life to be useful on a Tuesday.
Man has always had interesting questions. From the dawn of time, from the beginning of our being able to think at all, we have wondered: What happens after you die? Where did you come from before you were born? How do you live a peaceful life? How do you live a happy one?
As life has gotten more complicated, the answers have gotten more complicated. But underneath all of it there are basic principles that keep repeating, tradition after tradition, century after century. This is a place for those basics.
The Untethered Collective is a group of people who are searching in the realm of spirituality to optimize their life experience, solve problems, or come to terms with the difficult and strange world we live in.
My starting point was stumbling into Michael Singer at the Temple of the Universe before he was famous, when only a few people knew who he was and he was living on the grounds. He has written many New York Times bestsellers, but the one I identify with most strongly is The Untethered Soul, because to me it represents the early days of his journey. It was the culmination of the deepest and most powerful part of his experience, at least as I felt it. The book is a collection of nineteen talks he gave on Mondays, Thursdays and Sundays. Hearing those early talks formed the backbone of the book, and the book became the backbone of my structure for spiritual growth.
Michael Singer’s gift was to take the once esoteric teachings of the gurus and the yogis and, through his own experience and success in business, turn them into a practical and manageable way of using the principles of spirituality. They work whether or not you have any belief or philosophy about a higher power.
For me, that part of the journey led to organizing my own structure for how to stay at peace about ninety percent of the time. After thousands of hours of talks I began to see the links and the themes, ideas repeated over and over, and I began to see that The Untethered Soul was as much a curation as it was a teaching.
What I Learned from Thirty Three Years as an Ashram Dweller
When I first walked into the Temple of the Universe I had no idea what I was getting into. I had only been in Christian churches, and had only heard of Buddhism as an abstract idea that somehow covered a multitude of traditions.
Over the years I heard thousands of hours of talks by Michael Singer. In that same time I watched countless videos of other teachers, read many books, and went deep into the lineages expressed at the Temple.
The predominant influence there was Paramahansa Yogananda. You may know him as the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that sold many millions of copies and was given away by Steve Jobs at his own funeral. Michael Singer deeply reveres Yogananda, and I think he felt a special relationship with him. We sang songs written by Yogananda. We meditated using methods taught by Yogananda and did his energization exercises. His picture was everywhere, and the pictures of his lineage hung in the temple.
Also present was the Hindu master Meher Baba, whose teachings resonated with what I heard there, equally present with the teachings of Jesus and the Bible. Michael Singer himself is Jewish, and each year we held a combined Passover and Easter Sunday where the teachings showed what the two have in common. After the Easter talk we served a Passover Seder for more than a hundred and fifty guests.
What came to me, sitting with all of it for years, was that there were basics. And those basics were the thing being pointed at the whole time.
A Clear Mind and a Strong Mind
Here is something you can use today. The first benefit of these practices is a clear mind. Write this down. A clear mind does not mean having a quiet mind. It means a mind that is aware it is noisy.
Then there is a strong mind. A strong mind is aware of the noisy mind and does not let it drive your actions or your behavior. That is the entire difference between a person who is run by their thoughts and a person who is not. It is not a matter of having better thoughts. It is a matter of no longer taking orders from them.
The Path, and the Destination
The path is where we begin to move toward a goal that has less to do with material concerns and more to do with a deeper, more intense enjoyment of and integration with life.
And if there is a path, there must be a destination. What is it we are looking for? That question has been addressed for years and years. Our friend Joseph Campbell noted the hero’s journey repeating from tradition to tradition, and anyone who has read The Odyssey knows it is about exactly that. It is a journey where we face ourselves.
It is a journey where we feel the driving force of our pole star values: the thing we are really seeking, the answer to life’s questions.
The practices below are how you begin. Start with three breaths.