Book Report #191 - The Surrender Experiment

The Surrender Experiment: My Journey Into Life's Perfection by Michael A. Singer

I'm a fan of Singer's The Untethered Soul, so I was delighted to find his memoir on my shelf. We started with Singer, aka Mickey, in grad school for economics when he had an experience that led him to need to know how to quiet the voice in his head--the one that chatters incessantly that we all have. He started meditating heavily and ended up buying a five acre parcel in the woods where he could devote the bulk of his time to meditation.

It was there that he began the surrender experiment, which meant he would no longer be run by that voice in his head. Instead, he would go with the flow of life, no matter what it brought. He would no longer be ruled by his likes and dislikes.

This led to a series of events that Mickey could not have predicted in his wildest dreams: people kept coming to his land and eventually established a temple there, he taught meditation to prisoners for decades, he started a successful construction company, and he was responsible for a computer programming company that eventually was worth over a billion dollars. Plus, the five acre parcel morphed into 175 acres over the years, and the money from the businesses paid for it all.

Mickey kept his thesis prominent that all this was possible because he surrendered and went with the flow of the universe.

He even maintained this when his computer business went to hell and all the executives were indicted for kickbacks and fraud. It was a seven year ordeal, and after paying a penalty, Mickey was allowed to walk free. He said that the experience was further practice in surrender.

This is all a nice story wrapped up with a bow, so that makes me wonder a bit. There were two parts that especially had me confused. One was when his friend, the "spiritual master" Amrit Desai, was allowed to hide out at Mickey's property for three years after his scandal broke out. Mickey glossed over it as a mistake in Amrit's past. When I looked it up, it was a major transgression that Amrit had been actively doing for years. That broke some of the trust I had with Mickey.

The other part that made me uncomfortable was when Mickey quickly explained that paying the penalty for his case was no big deal and he didn't mind parting with the money. When I looked it up, he'd paid $2.5 million. It struck me that that deserved more than a casual remark in his book.

The one other thing that leaves me befuddled is that early in the book he says he married and had a daughter. Yet, we never hear about the daughter again, nor much about his wife. Why? I guess because we thought we'd be more interested in the trajectory of his career but for such a spiritual person, I find it odd that career seemed to come before family. I hope that's not the case and it was simply a misunderstanding.

General consensus: The main themes are helpful but I'm somewhat skeptical of the details of his life.