Not the One Who Thinks

The one who watches all the thinking.

My reading taste has changed. I realized this over this last weekend when a friend asked me what I read most often: my answer was not “self-help.” What a lovely thing, to have a more defined taste for literature again. I read constantly as a kid (historical fiction, fantasy, classics) and then when I turned 18 started reading nothing but self-help and spiritual development. My shelves still bear the results of that phase, which lasted at least 4 years. I’ve become allergic to most of them, now: glorified homogenized advice and 10-step rituals have lost their appeal. Honestly, anything with a premise designed to pump up my self-esteem or offer life hacks just serves to exhaust rather than excite. Most of them say virtually the same thing, too.

As of the last couple years or so, I’ve primarily been reading books of essays, memoirs, and research books by scientists deemed probably ethical. Oh, and novels! I’m back into fiction.

That same friend asked me about the best self-development book I’ve read, and my immediate answer was The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. That’s it, the one that has stood the test of time. Reading dozens of other self-help titles has shown me that it’s always the simplest wisdom that works the most reliably.

The Untethered Soul is a book about becoming aware of the voice(s) in your head that you end up obeying, without question. Everyone has their own mental drama: it goes on and on, tricking you into thinking it is you, unless and until you recognize it is not you. You are, rather, the one who watches what’s happening and the listener who hears what goes on, separate from the mental drama. 

“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.”—Michael Singer

There are lots of other points the book makes, like how to let go of that mental drama. But at its essence, The Untethered Soul teaches this: you are not your thoughts, you are the one who witnesses them.

When I read this book in college, I was ready for what it taught. I may not have really understood it, but I wanted to, and so set to find out if “You are not your thoughts” was true. It was true, and still is. This teaching is one that demands to be remembered, over and over. Successfully de-identifying with the narrative in your head doesn’t just happen once: doing it again and again is the practice. It’s a practice to continue for your entire life.

You are not your thoughts.

When you tune into the content of your thoughts, and to just how much you listen to those thoughts, you realize how ridiculous so many of them are. How neurotic, judgmental, strange, even disturbing. The mind says a lot about what’s going on, and most of what it says goes unnoticed: if you start listening, you’ll hear that it has a lot of opinions and problems that it bothers you with all day long.

But you are not the thoughts you think—or rather, what your mind thinks. You are not really in control of the thoughts you think, anyways: if you can control any thoughts, it must be such a small percentage. There isn’t much you can credit yourself with thinking out of your own volition, entirely unrelated to what is happening right now and has happened leading up until now. As Michael Singer says about this: “The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.”

You are, instead of the thinker who thinks, the one who watches; the one who listens and observes, who sits at the seat of your consciousness. Your thoughts are not your identity, nor are they the most reliable, well-intentioned narrator you ought to listen to.

Becoming aware that you are not your thoughts opens the door to inquire more deeply about who you actually are: who is this watcher that is supposedly me, then?

I’m not sure that answering this matters—if you’re a Buddhist, there is no you, anyways, just a set of ever-changing atoms and processes that make up a human form. Instead of getting lost in the question of “who you are”, I find it more constructive to actually experience being the watcher. Dwell in what it feels like to watch the thoughts that come and go in your mind. If you can watch them, you can more acutely feel that they aren’t you.

They’re just thoughts.

. .

Excluding cases of mental illness, we will all cycle through periods of being more neurotic than usual. When this happens, we probably do very much get lost in the drama of the thoughts and fail to ground ourselves in the awareness that we are not our thoughts. We are only hearing the voice in our heads; it isn’t who we are.

For many people, the awareness of being the watcher is enough on its own to solve some problems: enough, at least, to dismiss the validity of some of the crazier thoughts. Simply seeing something for what it is can be enough to move past it. Other times, simply seeing is not enough at all: once we are aware of how truly maddening so many of our thoughts are, we may become even more distressed that we are thinking them. What then?

Michael Singer says this: “The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality.”

This line of reason can be easily paired with another quote of his:

“The only time everything will be ok is when you are ok with everything. And that’s the only time that everything can be ok.”

Everything can be ok?? At first glance it sounds horrendously insensitive, like we are condoning atrocities and all the lesser outrages happening all over the world. However, upon practicing Singer’s suggestion, and “let[ting] go of the part of you that [has] so many problems with reality,” there can actually be a profound sense of relief and freedom. Angst over reality is so often caused by resistance to accepting reality. The point is not that horrible things will suddenly become “ok”: the point is that in the midst of horrible things, we can approach life without the senseless mental drama that adds so much needless suffering and angst to the world.

When it comes to our roles, and what we can do, approaching our own problems with a sense of okayness is likely to yield far better results. Adopting the awareness that we are not the thinker but the one watching it all unfold can lend itself to a smoother way of living. It can help get things done with a lot less suffering.

While we are here on this earth, we may as well do the best we can to drum up peace and contentment and joy around us. The world has got enough problems; it doesn’t need you spending your sweet energy senselessly creating more of them.

. .

The right advice comes when we need it. For me, the right advice came through The Untethered Soul in college and still is the right advice. It’s the book I’ve referenced and reread the most. The reminder to ground myself in the seat of my awareness, behind the mental drama (or perhaps above it), is always a reminder I need.

What’s interesting about my evolving reading taste is that now, I’m able to enjoy novels again. In the height of my self-help binge, I couldn’t be bothered with such a frivolous waste of time as a novel—something made up, untrue. Maybe I helped myself, after all.

Practicing disconnecting from mental drama can make us so much more able to appreciate everything in life. Including fiction. Including all the mundane aspects of life—feeding the dogs, sitting in the sun, putting away groceries.

If we practice being the observer rather than the anxious participant, we may see that it eases up our days. Instead of racing to heed the content of our thoughts, constantly living in the land of mental problems, we act out of the simplicity of what the next moment brings us. We act out of a place of okayness, out of love, seeking peace. We enjoy novels, and other “frivolous” pleasures, again.

Sit back, watch what’s going on. Remember that you are not the voice in your head, but the one who hears that voice.

Maggie