Living Untethered: Beyond the Human Predicament

There's way too much conflation of Eastern philosophy now with mysticism. Authors and practitioners need to begin to make a clear distinction once again. Singer sounds more like a preacher than someone expounding on an aspect of Eastern philosophy. This generation of writers and teachers are largely suspect now as a result. If I wanted talk of Christ, I would go to church.

I loved The Untethered Soul, and others I have recommended it too have equally enjoyed it, but this one went too far into woo-woo land for me.

If you enjoy books on spiritual enlightenment then you'll probably get more out of this than I did. Somehow, despite spending quite a few hours of listening to this in the car, I never fully grasped anything profoundly different from the ideas in his first book. Singer covers much of the same old ground, centred around recognising that it is our own thoughts that often hold us prisoner from enjoying our life. Whilst I found the first book quite practical, this one gets heavily into spiritual concepts and philosophies, bouncing between Hindu, Buddhist, yogic and Christian principles with a lot of show more padding in between.

At a simple level, much of the message in this books relates to samskaras, the imprints of previous actions, thoughts and experiences which 'scar' our mental thought patterns to shape sub-optimal current decisions and behaviour. Singer spends a lot of time explaining them, and I very much get the principles around this, but the letting go of these destructive thought patterns was much less clear, as was how to prevent unpleasant experiences from creating new samskaras.

3 stars - I prefer my personal development books to be heavier on the practical than philosophical side. show less

The most memorable section of this book is the explanation of the beginning of the universe. It was fascinating, enchanting, and seemed scientifically accurate.