Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to let go of his personal preferences and simply let life call the shots.

Yoga is a body of practice that spans two millennia and transcends the boundaries of any single religion, geographic region, or teaching lineage. In fact, over the centuries there have been many "yogas"—yogas of battlefield warriors, of itinerant minstrels and beggars, of religious reformers, and of course, the yogas of mind and body so popular today.

What is the secret of Soma, the legendary mystic drink of immortality, first lauded by India's ancient Vedic seers? Is Soma a single plant, type of plants, a way of healing, a special intoxicant, or an inner elixir produced by Yoga and meditation?

Wilber traces human development from infancy into adulthood and beyond, into those states described by mystics and spiritual adepts. The spiritual evolution of such extraordinary individuals as the Buddha and Jesus hints at the direction human beings will take in their continuing growth toward transcendence.

Possession of wealth is but one aspect of human yearning, for no sooner the sense objects are secured, the mind longs for indulgence in sensual pleasures. Thus, with the object of finding happiness through such indulgence, man contacts them but is disappointed.

For the benefit of those in the top two categories Sri Ramana taught that the Self alone exists and that it can be directly and consciously experienced merely by ceasing to pay attention to the wrong ideas we have about ourselves.

When you wear your Sunday suit, it moves and behaves just as the wearer. When the same suit is off the back of the wearer and is hanging on its hanger, it has no movement. The suit is dead when its master, the wearer, is not within its folds, vitalising, directing and determining its movement

To be born from the present state of entanglement into a new state of inner beauty and sense of holiness is indicated in all the scriptures of the world as a new birth. ‘Twice-born’ (dvija) is the name given to a spiritual seeker.

Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics? All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.

We investigate spirituality, either to supplement our religious beliefs or to replace them. We try yoga, meditation, astrology. We are getting healthier, quieter, lighter. We talk the talk and we even walk some of the walk. We speak with authority about the heart chakra and our Moon in Capricorn.

So while the rose suggests we come to her to bathe in her glorious scent, the master plant teachers warn us away from them. You pretty much have to want what they have to offer, and be willing to prove it with physical discomfort, before they will share.

Ego is able to convert everything to its own use, even spirituality. For example, if you have learned of a particularly beneficial meditation technique of spiritual practice, then ego’s attitude is, first, to regard it as an object of fascination and, second, to examine it.

The answer is simple, once you realize what the ego is and how it works. When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form.

Therefore, making the corpse-body remain as a corpse, and not even uttering the word ‘I’, one should enquire keenly thus: “Now, what is it that rises as ‘I’?” Then, there would shine in the Heart a kind of wordless illumination of the form ‘I-I’.

My own experience with ayahuasca-induced hallucinations was limited, but was sufficient to suggest a trail. Ayahuasquero Ruperto Gomez, who had initiated me, had called the hallucinogenic brew “the television of the forest,”

As you come to understand fully that you will be finished with human suffering only when you are living in the fourth chakra (or higher), and you become strongly committed to “getting on with it,” then the method is straightforward. Keep converting every relationship into one of compassion.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: just for the moment I stopped thinking. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine.

True, sometimes you have to prime the pump before your heart is open enough to love that deeply. You begin a process of purification based on how you think it could be.

The prophetic calling running through the whole book is that if we want to find the real basis for a new human culture we must look beyond the outer world of separate objects, others, and events to the source, the root-condition in which all our experience is actually happening.

I sought out every mystic, seer, and magician I could find throughout the world. I subjected myself to severe austerities, long periods of isolation, and meditation. I studied the world's philosophies and religions.