“With his hallmark precision and clarity Michael Singer reveals how everyday life, doing business in the world, and spiritual practice can be synchronized to carry us into the heart of life’s unimaginable perfection.”--Jack Canfield, co-author of In As he takes you through his grand experiment, Singer demonstrates how surrender is the key to a peaceful and harmonious life. His remarkable and unexpected personal experiences will challenge your deepest assumptions, teaching you how to stop making the outside world conform to your desires, let go of the need to control everything, and place your trust in life’s perfection. Thought-provoking and moving, <The Surrender Experiment <will inspire you to seek the calm and freedom that comes from letting go.

Autorentext

Michael A. Singer

Klappentext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Untethered Soul and Living Untethered tells the astonishing true story about the spiritual harmony and personal happiness he found when he just let go—now in hardcover for the first time and featuring a new afterword and chapter

“With his hallmark precision and clarity Michael Singer reveals how everyday life, doing business in the world, and spiritual practice can be synchronized to carry us into the heart of life’s unimaginable perfection.”—Jack Canfield, co-author of The Success Principles and co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series

As a young doctoral student studying economics in Florida, Michael A. Singer experienced a deep spiritual awakening and made the pivotal decision to relinquish his personal fears and desires and simply let life unfold before him. In The Surrender Experiment, he shares how embracing the flow of life led him to extraordinary success, sustained him through times of crisis, and allowed him to cultivate profound inner peace—whether as a young man pursuing a life of solitude in the woods, the founder of a thriving spiritual community in Florida, or the CEO of a billion-dollar medical software company.

As he takes you through his grand experiment, Singer demonstrates how surrender is the key to a peaceful and harmonious life. His remarkable and unexpected personal experiences will challenge your deepest assumptions—teaching you how to stop trying to make the world conform to your desires, to let go of the need to control, and to place your trust in life’s inherent perfection. In a new afterword exclusive to this special hardcover edition, Singer reflects on the events of his life in the decade since his book’s publication, sharing more insights about how the concept of surrender has enhanced his life.

Thought-provoking and moving, The Surrender Experiment will inspire you to seek the calm and freedom that comes from letting go.

Leseprobe

Not with a Shout—But with a Whisper

M

y given name is Michael Alan Singer. From as far back as I can remember, everyone has called me Mickey. I was born May 6, 1947, and lived a fairly ordinary life until the winter of 1970. Then something happened to me that was so profound that it forever changed the direction of my life.

Life-changing events can be very dramatic and, by their very nature, disruptive. Your whole being is headed in one direction physically, emotionally, and mentally; and that direction has all the momentum of your past and all the dreams of your future. Then suddenly, there’s a major earthquake, a terrible sickness, or a chance encounter that totally sweeps you off your feet. If the event is powerful enough to change the focus of your heart and mind, the rest of your life will change in due course. You are literally not the same person on both sides of a truly life-changing event. Your interests change, your goals change, in fact, the underlying purpose of your life changes. It usually takes a very powerful event to turn your head around so far that you never look back.

But not always.

In the winter of 1970, no such event happened to me. What happened was so subtle, so faint, that it could easily have passed by without being noticed. It was not with a shout but with a whisper that my life was thrown into utter turmoil and transformation. It has been more than forty years now since that life-changing moment, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting on the living room couch in my home in Gainesville, Florida. I was twenty-two years old and married at the time to a beautiful soul named Shelly. We were both students at the University of Florida where I was doing my graduate work in economics. I was a very astute student, and I was being groomed by the chairman of the economics department to become a college professor. Shelly had a brother, Ronnie, who was a very successful attorney in Chicago. Ronnie and I became close friends even though we were from totally different worlds. He was a powerful, wealth-driven, big-city attorney, and I was a ’60s-groomed, college-intellectual hippie. It is worth mentioning just how analytically oriented I was at the time. I had never even taken a philosophy, psychology, or religion course while in college. My electives at school were symbolic logic, advanced calculus, and theoretical statistics. This makes what happened to me all the more amazing.

Ronnie would come down once in a while to visit, and we would often just hang out together. As it turns out, Ronnie was sitting on that couch with me on that fateful day in 1970. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but there had been a lull in our leisurely conversation. I noticed I was uncomfortable with the silence and found myself thinking of what to say next. I had been in similar situations many times before, but something was quite different about this experience. Instead of simply being uncomfortable and trying to find something to say, I noticed that I was uncomfortable and trying to find something to say. For the first time in my life, my mind and emotions were something I was watching instead of being.

I know that it is difficult to put into words, but there was a complete sense of separation between my anxious mind, which was spewing out possible topics to talk about, and me, the one who was simply aware that my mind was doing this. It was like I was suddenly able to remain above my mind and quietly watch the thoughts being created. Believe it or not, that subtle shift in my seat of awareness became a tornado that rearranged my entire life.

For a few moments, I just sat there inwardly watching myself try to “fix” the awkward silence. But I was not the one trying to fix it; I was the one quietly watching the activity of my mind trying to fix it. At first there were only a few degrees of separation between me and what I was watching. But every second the separation seemed to become greater and greater. I was not doing anything to cause this shift. I was just there noticing that my sense of me no longer included the neurotic thought patterns that were passing in front of me.

This entire process of “becoming aware” was practically instantaneous. It was like when you stare at one of those posters that has a hidden picture inside. At first it appears to be just a circle with line patterns. Then, suddenly, you see an entire 3-D image emerge from what originally looked like chaos. Once you see it, you can’t imagine how you hadn’t seen it before. It was right there! Such was the shift that happened inside of me. It was so obvious—I was in there watching my thoughts and emotions. I had always been in there watching, but I had been too unaware to notice. It was as though I had been so involved in their details that I never saw them as just thoughts and emotions.

Within seconds, what previously seemed like important solutions for how to break the uncomfortable silenc…