The Surrender Experiment My Journey Into Life's Perfection

For someone who has built their entire life's narrative out of meditation and surrendering to the will of nature, Michael Singer sure does have a big ego. In fact, this book is stuffed full of small unnecessary comments about how brilliant and extra-special he is, even despite the experiment needing that not to be the case. How he was amazingly clever at school without any extra work needed, how he could write algorithms so much better than anyone else all in one go. It's not that these details are unbelievable; it's that they are unimportant to the story, and even in contradiction to it. And what is the motivation for including such superfluous self-aggrandising comments? With these small but plentiful offhand comments, Michael Singer lost my trust. And this meant I don't know if I believe that he is as spiritually enlightened as he says he is, if he is as good a person as he implies he is, if he is as honest as he should be. I have no reason to believe he wasn't guilty of the fraud he was accused of, and I have no reason to be assured that this whole book isn't systemically selective and the literary incarnation of confirmation bias. On the other hand, this was a book that had an important message that I needed to receive right now—that may end up guiding many of my decisions in the future. And the repetitive examples worked well to illustrate the point.

I couldn't finish the book so 2 stars. It felt like a narcissistic account of how much money and luck the author got by following a dumb idea of surrendering to everyone else's wishes.

An interesting blend of eastern philosophy and life experience. The author had plenty of examples of how following the flow of life ended up blessing him immensely. Personally I thought that there were many examples of life but less teaching of HOW he quieted the voice in his head which I would have appreciated learning more.

** spoiler alert ** It’s my fault for having expectations. I expected this book to have the same amount of meaningful and understandable nuggets of wisdom as The Untethered Soul which changed my life and the way I relate to it. This was a real biography that quickly became very predictable. He was constantly shown opportunities that made him uncomfortable, he said yes anyway, the perfect person showed up at the perfect time, and the perfect amount of money showed up just in time. It quickly became redundant and boring. If you are looking into a glimpse of his life and experiences, it was great! If you’re looking for a self-help book, not this one!

In short: this book is not favouring reason as a guide for life rather embracing a spiritual practice to accept what comes. The author is giving us an insight of his journey of being open to the circumstances and embracing to what is happening, ignoring, what we would call, our preferences of like and dislike. His journey of trusting life to present him the necessary for his life is deeply spiritual. He notes that the battle between the individual will and the reality of life unfolding around us ends up consuming our lives. Once you’re ready to let go of yourself, life becomes your teacher. Not allowing your personal preferences to make decisions for you, instead of allowing reality of life to determine where you are going was his announced way. However, the book was quite contradictory as he declined some offers he got along the way. 🤷‍♀️