Hidden Narratives and What They Cost

Is it enlightenment if it costs everyone else around you?

This is the question I was left with after reading Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul. I’d heard about it for years prior to finally picking it up. Everyone who had read it told me it changed their life, or they felt so inspired by it afterward. So I was surprised when my own reaction to it felt… flat. Unmoved. I had a hard time finishing it. I kept it by my bed and diligently picked it up in the dim light of my lamp, every night before I went to sleep… but it never really hooked me. Something about it felt untrue to me, undeveloped. Unrevealed.

Then I realized why: There’s an entire world left out of it. Namely, the world of his second wife and their child. Singer mentions the birth of his daughter, and then she seems to vanish from the narrative entirely.

Singer presents his life as one mystical inspired choice after another in which he releases his resistance and says yes to whatever inspiration comes. But all I could think was: how do you make that work with a family?

Singer shares nothing about his relationship to the women in his life, nor to his kids. We know nothing about how his inspired choices impacted his family — one way or the other. We know nothing about how the women in his life fared every time he made a bold choice. If Singer is said to have achieved enlightenment… did they also benefit from his achievement? Or were they stuck dealing with the necessities and realities of their lives… and his?

Now, I can acknowledge that Singer may have made a deliberate choice to leave them out of his narrative. He may have decided to keep his family life private. They may have also requested that. But… we don’t know. Nowhere is there anything in writing in which Singer explains that.

What is left out of story or personal narrative is often the thing that holds the most potent energy of the entire experience. It is the part that calls the whole damn thing into question. It is also often the part that threatens to blow up the story entirely.

Let’s say we knew Singer’s partner was not happy with his choice-making. What would we say if he wrote about the times his partner was left attending their kids’ softball tournaments alone, or the time she handled the 2 am late night call because Singer wasn’t there. What would we say if we knew that while he lived a whimsical and inspired life, she took care of all of the uninspired, unexciting parts — the laundry, the nightly cooking, the endless bedtime routine? What would we say about the story if we knew she resented him for it?

It’s a lot less sexy then, isn’t it? The whole story starts to take on a different tilt.

Another book echoes this. Let’s take Henry David Thoreau, author of the well-known call-to-nature Walden. Thoreau is often held up as the example of ruggedness and wilderness. The ultimate bastion of “roughing it.” Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days out in the cabin that defines his wilderness survival.

In his book, Thoreau argues that most people are trapped in lives of unconscious conformity — working themselves to exhaustion to maintain possessions and social standing they never chose and don’t actually need. The remedy is deliberate simplification: strip life down to its essentials, slow down enough to actually experience where you are, and stop trading your one life for things that don’t matter. Thoreau presented Nature as his primary teacher because it operates without self-consciousness or pretension. The book is part philosophy, part nature writing, part economics — Thoreau actually tracks his expenses obsessively, arguing he can live on a few weeks of (his) labor per year if he refuses the lifestyle inflation everyone else accepts as inevitable.

In Walden, the central argument Thoreau makes after his experience is that you are the obstacle to your own life. Not society exactly, but your unexamined acceptance of society’s terms.

In reality, Thoreau did not live a secluded life. He was about a mile and a half from the nearest town of Concord and tucked into a wood cabin owned by the writer Emerson. He often walked to town during this time. Nowhere does he mention this.

Even more interestingly, though, he also fails to mention the ever-constant presence of his “domestic help.” Thoreau’s biographers discovered that his mother and sister made regular visits, most notably to ... ahem ... do his laundry and bring him food. Nowhere in Walden does he mention that he has people managing the tedious tasks of his life, mainly feeding him and making sure his outfits are clean. While there is not much documentation on how often they visited, the visits were frequent enough that scholars often note the gap between his message of self-sufficiency and his lived reality.

Think about what this leaves out of his narrative frame: he presents himself as self-sufficient, but in reality relies on others to tend to the basics of life.

Both Singer and Thoreau are held out as examples of spiritual enlightenment of one kind or another. Thoreau is the rugged picture of the “every man” who communes with nature and needs nothing else, while Singer is a combination of spiritual and economic/business nirvana (he was very financially successful). But it makes me wonder… is it enlightenment if it costs everyone else around you? Is it enlightenment if the people around you didn’t benefit?

I’m reminded of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Yogananda’s teacher, Sri Yukteswar, was a married man who was a teacher, a mystic, but also a family man. Yogananda explained in his book that there are two paths: the path of the ascetic and the path of the householder. The ascetic is the one who renounces, who gives up all of “worldly pursuits” to achieve oneness with God. They are often on a solo quest, or at least painted that way.

The householder, however, is the path of the person who is engaged in the quest of oneness with God while also being deeply immersed in the world. They have families, they work jobs, they contribute to their communities, they take care of their parents and neighbors and friends.

Both are equally valid paths to pursue connection with God. One is not more important, or speedier, mystical, or better than the other.

But here in the West, we tend to glamorize the path of the ascetic. In fact, the stories of the ascetic are the only stories we really hear: Jesus was an ascetic, and so was Buddha. Buddha started out as a householder and left his family to pursue an ascetic path.

Crucially, Singer and Thoreau are displaying themselves as ascetics while really living lives of the householder. They’ve left out so much of the story that we don’t get to see the truth of it. And as a result, we make models of men whose example doesn’t fit the lives we live.

The householder is not only achieving enlightenment on his own behalf; he is also doing so for his family.1 His family is spiritually enriched by his enlightenment. Yukteswar lived in a patriarchal society, too, and he and his wife worked together to serve their community and it was acknowledged that they both benefited from the effort. Singer and Thoreau, though, do not seem to have done the same.

Singer and Thoreau probably achieved something real for themselves, but we have to ask ourselves what we’re buying when we hold them up as models. An enlightenment that requires the unacknowledged labor of other people isn’t enlightenment. It’s a story with missing pages. And in memoir, especially spiritual memoir, the missing pages are usually where the power lies.

Your goal might not be enlightenment or attainment, but the lesson here is still potent. When you hold any author, leader, or teacher as a model (no matter what they teach), you have to zoom out and try to see the story through the eyes of an eagle, soaring thousands of feet above ground level. Scope out enough that you can begin to answer the question: what did they leave out of the narrative?