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The Untethered Soul (Paperback, 2007, New Harbinger Publications/ Noetic Books) 4 stars

Apparently I’ve Had a Roommate in My Head My Whole Life

5 stars

I don’t know where to start this review, though a bit of context is necessary:

I’ve never been a spiritual person, so I was expecting this book to challenge my perception of things. I also wasn’t planning on finding much value from it, my exceptions were fairly low. Well that was all wrong.

While some parts of this book are still difficult for me to wrap my head around, I can officially say this book is formally my first real experience with exploring my spiritual side.

I’ve always been a “recognize the issue” then “fix the issue” kind of person. Extremely logical, accepting all my life experiences as the reality. If these life experiences deviated from my internal concept of reality, then I need to go through some emotional stress to re-integrate what I learned from the event into my new reality.

It’s not a terrible strategy, and it’s been fairly successful for me. However, this book has introduced entirely new concepts that flip all of my strategies on their head. Rather than engaging with these stressors in the first place, why not just welcome them in? Why not just step back and watch them unfold without allowing them to impact my happiness and reflect who I am? Why not treat events as just events and not as anything more than that? Why would I tie my happiness and well-being to things outside of my control? Why would I pretend like I have any sense of control over the world?

These are all questions this book forced me to ask, and countless more. Some other incredibly important topics this book covers are: - consciousness, and how to recognize it inside you - who “you” are - how to deal with our inner voices - different ways of thinking about death - a whole new way of looking at the world, where you accept all outcomes

I really can’t condense everything this book has taught into a single review. All I can speak to is I feel this has triggered an entirely new journey for my life, where I’m going to learn a lot more about not just myself and who I am, but gain deep understanding about the world.