Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, outlines a powerful 12-step guide to transcend the mind.
Step 1. Accept you are simply a thought in your head
Recognise that you are experiencing everything in your life – you’re experiencing yourself, you’re experiencing this whole creation – from inside yourself. Everything you experience is via thoughts in your head. There is no truth, just perception. You are awareness having a human experience.
You’re not living life; you’re living mind.
Step 2. Know that the you that is the voice in your head, is not okay
If you pay attention to your emotions and inner dialogue, you will notice that you are never completely at ease in your mind. Something is always bothering you, causing you to feel uncomfortable, anxious, fearful or unsettled. The inner voice is constantly looking for flaws in everything.
You’re ready to grow when you finally realize that the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something.
Step 3. Recognise you are constantly trying to be okay because you are never feeling okay
We are constantly trying to solve our inner voice’s problems because it has a problem with everything. We act on impulses to address our dissatisfaction. We hope that achieving something will solve the problem. Our mind is sensing something is wrong and attempting to fix it, reduce it, distract us from it, or completely avoid it.
Step 4. Your mind has taken it upon itself to figure out how things must be, in order for you to be okay
If you pay conscious attention, you’ll realise that your mind is constantly offering advice on what you should do, how other people should act, and how things should and should not be. The mind does this by seeking to identify what will provide the greatest sense of security and then making the external world match it.
The mind is constantly reshaping reality to fit its own ideals of how things should be.
Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems.
Step 5. Your mind will never achieve lasting happiness through its preferences for what it believes it wants
Pursuing happiness through external means can only provide a fleeting sense of happiness before the mind becomes dissatisfied once more. This is due to the fact that the external world will never perfectly match your mind’s conceptual image of how things should be in order for everything to be okay.
You will have to try a different approach to being okay inside your head at some point.
Step 6. Don’t engage with your mind as it attempts to figure out how to be okay
For this, we must shift our perspective from that of the experiencer to that of the observer. When we adopt this point of view, we stop fuelling our minds compulsion to solve things, and the actions we take as a result.
“You must learn to sit inside and not participate in this process” Michael Singer advises. With practise, we’ll be able to remain calm in the eye of the mind’s storm and witness its disturbances subside, without being affected.
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.
Step 7. Practice living a normal life without acting on the mind’s urge to make things right
When you aren’t so preoccupied with trying to be okay and moulding the world around you, you can live more in the present moment, and simply accept and appreciate whatever unfolds in front of you.
Step 8. As you disengage from the energy of the mind, you make space for a greater power to emerge
As you detach from the mind and its incessant anxiety over controlling your world, you free yourself from these energies and allow a higher Spiritual energy to enter into the space you’ve made. This new energy has a more enduring and authentic quality of love and happiness.
You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things.
Step 9. This spiritual energy becomes more attractive to you than the mind’s energy
You’ll experience a direct correlation between your personal energies and the degree to which you experience Spirit. The more time you spend focused on your mind’s energies, the less connection you will feel to Spirit.
Now that you’re connected to this spiritual energy you’ll want to develop a stronger connection to it rather than hang out with the old mind energy.
Step 10. The spiritual energy pulls you upward to merge with it
Now that you’ve reached this point in your journey, all that’s left to do is to utterly surrender to this higher energy by overcoming your fear of losing the identity you’ve constructed for yourself in your mind.
You naturally begin to center more and more on the spiritual part of your being. You do this not by reaching for the Spirit, but by letting go of the rest.
Step 11. You are free to live life from this place of spiritual oneness
You no longer need to waste as much of your own vital energy struggling to be okay. You can live in the present moment and actively participate with the world around you from a place of inner peace. Even as life continues to unfold in one way or another, you are at ease with yourself.
You just live your life without getting uptight and worrying about it. You actually live life instead of fearing or fighting it.
Step 12. You are now genuinely okay
You have attained a higher level of consciousness in which you recognise the perfection of life. Nothing is required to feel good or okay. Nothing, whether internal or external, can bother you as it used to. You see and accept things for what they are, without attaching a narrative to them. You have experienced your intrinsic unity with eternal Spirit.
This 12 -step guide has been paraphrased from an interview with Michael A. Singer on Oprah.com.
