* OVERVIEW:
Looking for a beautifully written book? Look no further. Because The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer is just that. The book talks about how Michael an economics doctorate student found his way to meditation and yoga and ended up being the founder of a multi-billion dollar medical software programme company, simply by letting go of his personal self and following the natural flow of life. The book flows beautifully just as the events that flowed in his life. Read on to know more.
* LIFE OF MICHAEL A. SINGER:
Michael is a 22-year-old Jewish economics doctorate student and is married to his wife, Shelly. All his existence he viewed life with such practicality, without giving any thought to philosophy. He was into academia, mathematics, and calculus, and never gave much thought to religion. He is in his second year of the doctorate programme and was entrusted by the chairman of the economics department to become a college professor.
* THE VOICE IN YOUR HEAD:
His one-dimensional view of life persisted until one day in 1971 when he was faced with an awkward silence between himself and Shelly's brother Ronnie. While trying to contemplate how to break this awkward silence with casual questions, he became aware of this voice in his head. All his life he thought that this voice was him until then when he became mindful of this ongoing mental chatter that had likes and dislikes and had an opinion on everything.
* ROAD TO QUIETEN THE MENTAL CHATTER:
While it was fascinating to him to notice the voice in his head, he quickly became aware of its incessant chatter and was desperate to find ways to shut it up. This is when he was given a book called The Three Pillars Of Zen by Philip Kapleau which talks about how one can quieten the voice in their head with meditation. This is serious Zen meditation where you sit in a quiet spot and watch your breath and mentally chant the sound Mu.
* FALLING IN LOVE WITH MEDITATION:
As Michael reads the book he marvels that finally, someone is talking about the voice in the head and the way to silence it. He spends his days and nights meditating and finds peace and serenity with it. Though the voice quietens during meditation it bounces back once he enters the "real world." Michael chooses to follow the path of meditation and dedicates his hours to meditating in solitude- to learn more about himself and the voice in his head.
* LIFE'S UNFOLDING OF EVENTS:
As Michael's interest shifts from economics to meditation he slowly starts dropping out of classes. He wears a simple attire of denim jeans, a shirt, sandals, and a ponytail. His professor asks Michael to concentrate on classes and finish the doctorate programme, though he wasn't particularly interested in following it through. But since he's learning to let go of his personal self and follow life's unfolding, he continues with his doctorate programme.
One day his wife Shelly decides to part ways and the marriage has run its course. What does one do when life cooks up a perfect storm? Michael faces the real test of life and leaned into meditation and accepted the unfolding of life without putting up a fight. He switches between the heaven of meditation and the hell of waking life during this difficult period. He decides to take a trip to Mexico by himself in his camper van.
After the trip to Mexico, he feels calm and his heart is at peace. He's ready to see what life would bring him if he simply lets it be without hindering it and moving out of its way. The economics department chairman Dr. Goffman asks Michael to submit his dissertation for his doctoral programme. And Michael is nowhere ready to return to his previous life. But he surrenders to life and waits to see what unfolds. And lo and behold inspiration strikes!
One evening after meditation he gathers pens and papers and begins to write his dissertation. He starts writing without knowing what to write and soon inspiration flashes. He writes and writes page after page, includes graphs to support his argument, and finishes with a conclusion. He then reviewed his rough draft, fine-tuned it, typed it, and turned in the dissertation. And he got an A for it. It's amazing to observe how inspiration works and flows through us.
One day as he was filling gas at the gas station, a gas attendant at the gas station randomly asks if he was looking for plots to buy northwest of Gainesville. Once again he says 'yes' to life and purchases ten acres of land in Alachua, Florida with the funds he had. Soon he was building a small meditation hut for himself along with his friends Bobby Gould and Bobby Altman. The house was beginning to take shape and electrical wiring was given. In November 1971 he moved into his new house.
He marveled and was proud at the house was built with no prior experience or knowledge. It all just fell into place and here he is moving into his simple yet beautifully built house. Immediately he begins with his monastic lifestyle of meditation, fasting, and waking at 3:00 a.m. every morning. At that time Bob Merrill, Michael's friend gives him a book called Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.
As he reads the book his view of life transforms. The book grips him and hooks him in and every word read puts him in a meditative state. And thus begins his journey to self-realisation.
* THE SURRENDER EXPERIMENT:
Michael allows life and stops getting in the way. He stays in graduate school and was teaching three classes per week. During this time Dr. Goffman met with Michael and asked him to teach Alan, the state's leading banker who did not have a Ph.D. and was to be the president of the new Santa Fe Community College. So they decided that Alan be tutored by a top doctoral student such as Michael. While Michael hated the idea, he let go of his personal self and surrendered to the request, and politely agreed.
Then came the time to write his three qualifying exams. Michael had no intention of completing the degree but enrolled for the exams. And when it was time to take up the exams, he was confident of the first two exams because he had taught them to Alan, but the third exam he had never prepared for. So the day before his exam he took his public finance textbook for the first time ever after his meditation and opened it to a random page. He studied both the pages that landed in front of him and did this ritual three times.
The next day he reviewed those very same pages one last time, meditated, and was on his way to write his exam. The administrative assistant handed him the question paper and he was to answer three of the six essay questions asked. He took a quick glance at the question paper and his jaw dropped. Three of the six essays were exactly the three pages that he had read that landed arbitrarily when he opened the book.
He wrote everything he learnt and the chart that he reviewed before the exam and days later was complimented by the chairman Dr. Goffman about the excellence of his public finance exam paper. Pretty soon he was asked to teach at the new campus of Santa Fe Community College and he agrees to teach only on one condition, that he teaches the students about the voice in their head and how they don't need to listen to this incessant chatter.
To his surprise, the programme director tells him that there's an entry-level social science class that would allow him to teach that. He accepts life's flow of events and teaches the students without prior preparation, purely based on the present moment flow of inspiration. Ideas and thoughts flowed to him effortlessly during each class, as if a schedule had been laid. By the end of the semester, his class of twenty students doubled and the class population kept growing and new students were enrolling by the handful each day.
* THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE:
In the meantime, Michael was hosting retreats for Yogananda, Mataji, and Amrit- saints from India. And prior to the retreat for Mataji, he and Mataji, a lady saint from India were walking on his land when she stopped and glanced at a particular spot and prophesied that a temple would be built and many people would come. Michael resisted this idea because he didn't like the idea of multitudes of people taking strides on his land that he had dedicated to solitude and meditation. He did not like the idea of socialising.
But as fate would have it within six months a temple would be standing at the very exact spot that Mataji was glancing at. One Sunday he went to his house and laid out the plans and made a rough sketch of the temple and wanted a butterfly roof that opened up to the sky like wings. Labour cost? No problem he thought, he would do all the labour. But the temple still required raw materials and he did not have the funds to successfully build one.
But as he made the plans and started constructing the money kept showing from various sources and step by step the temple was built. And in September 1975, he held the first Sunday service at the temple. The people brought various spiritual gifts and photos of Jesus, statues of Buddha, and his favourite picture of Yogananda was kept. And so it came to be The Temple Of The Universe.
* BIRTH OF A MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY:
Michael's life becomes hectic by the day and his day is composed of meditation, Sunday meetings at the temple, and taking classes at Santa Fe. During this time he starts getting random requests from all over to build. And when it all came together he had this small business called Built With Love. As Michael's life shifts from solitude to service, his days get busier and busier. And Donna, his student from Santa Fe helps him with running the events at the temple.
It was the start of the creation of an undeniably powerful bond and they decided to get married in the summer of 1976. One day Michael had to go pick up some things needed for construction at a local Radio Shack store, and on his way out something caught his attention. It was a personalised computer that had a TV screen and a keyboard, and as he pressed the keys they appeared on the screen. He was fascinated by it and so he picked it up and headed home.
Immediately after reaching home, he starts playing with the computer like an intrigued child playing with a compelling toy. He started learning basic programming and how to code and wrote some programmes. Pretty soon he was writing a programme for Built With Love and fell in love with the process. Day and night he was coding and was energised by the process. Soon he met with potential clients and began to write programmes for them and thus Personalised Programming was born.
The business grew and he decided to sell the software to companies like Systems Plus in California. Later he got calls from people asking him for a medical billing system. So he decided to write the software programme and call it The Medical Manager. Systems Plus was in need of real estate, legal, and medical billing package and so one day he received a call from the customer representative, Lorelei asking him if he had a medical billing package.
And as fate would have it, he did have a medical billing package that he wrote just in case. He sent it over to Systems Plus and the president of the company, Rick loved it and so Systems Plus started distributing his medical billing package and Michael was hired by the company. The Medical Manager was at top of the industry in electronic claims. Micahel had to sell his software programme business and make the company public for it to expand and spread its roots afar.
As industry competitors rise, Systems Plus started acquiring smaller companies and collaborating with other companies that would leverage the market share in the space. And hence The Medical Manager Corporation was born. Michael was made co-CEO and co-chairman of the board of directors along with John Kang, one of the larger dealers of The Medical Manager. The MMGR pretty soon acquired its tough competitors WebMD and Haltheon and the growth was explosive.
How did all this happen? A hippie living in the woods meditating and doing yoga who surrendered to life's unfolding and ended up running a billion-dollar company. It's fascinating what will happen if we just let go of our personal preferences and let Life intervene. It seems to be doing a great job without our help.
* THE RAID:
As the days pass by, the company finds out that Bobby Davids, the VP of acquisitions along with four or five employees were swindling money by taking kickbacks from some of the dealings. The investigation was initiated in late 2002 and the respective people were fired. A total of around six million dollars were stolen and the case was being held in a court in Tampa. Bobby being the master plotter that he is walked straight into U.S. Attorney's Office in Charleston, South Carolina, and presented to them as the whistle-blower.
He told the government falsely that the executives were involved in kickback schemes and he had to be a part of them. And on Wednesday, September 3, 2003, Michael gets a call from his resident attorney, Lisa Elliot at the R&D facility, in Alachua, Florida. She sounded tense and informed him that there were FBI at the facility, helicopters flying around, and computers taken. It was a full-blown raid with a search warrant!
Michael was so lost and without a clue on why the government was raiding them. From what he knew he never did anything illegal and had fair practices. And when he arrived at the facility there were FBI and Sheriff's Department personnel all around the facility. There were two helicopters flying over the facility for media coverage. They had seized all the computers and documents and Michael was being interrogated. When the time comes he comes to understand that Bobby was behind all of this.
* IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS, A BOOK IS BORN:
The company hires two law firms along with plenty of lawyers to defend against the criminal charges placed by the government. Michael himself hired Randy, a successful lawyer practicing in Washington, who has been defending people against government charges for over thirty years. This is no easy case to solve. These kinds of white-collar investigations can take years and years together to come to conclusion. Michael and the executive team will be very surely serving jail time if the divine didn't intervene.
From all these years of meditation experience Michael surrenders to life and lets go of his personal opinions and feelings. He believed that truth would triumph in the end and used this time to write what would be called The Untethered Soul, a #1 New York times best seller. The book was selling so well since its launch in September 2007 and helped so many lives through their period of darkness. It was about noticing the mental voice and how to be free of it, which was all Michael's post-awakening life has been surrounded by.
* TRUTH OUTWITS:
Michael steps down as the CEO and the chairman of the board of directors and gave up the twelve-year-old stock sale upon being insisted by the government. And lo and behold, the charges were dropped all at once, just like how it all started. In situations like these, miracles are what we need, and he got one. In the end, after so much back and forth, and years of trial and humiliation, Judge Norton gave judgment that there was no evidence to back the conspiracy theory among the executives and that the witnesses Bobby and Caroline were found to be noncredible.
When the clouds had passed by and the storm had cleared, things were back to where they all once were for Michael. His life was centered around meditation and holding events at the temple. Looking back he was in awe of the experiences that had unfolded, from being a hippie to being the CEO of a world-renowned software company. How did all of this occur? The surrender experiment has served him well. And Life surely knows what it is doing.
"All I did was my very best to serve what was put in front of me and let go of what it stirred up within me," he says. All in all, if this was what my life would look like if I surrendered I would gladly be doing it day in and day out and so should you.
* CONCLUSION:
After reading this book if there's one takeaway, it would be that you let go of the wheels and let Life take the driver's seat. While it's good that you create your reality, it's better if you let Life do it her way. The constant stress and fear that stirs up from controlling your life are not serving you. Instead, step back and let Life move through you and for you. I always say God can dream a bigger and better dream for us than we can, and all we need to do is stop getting in the way. So read the book if you haven't and tell me your surrender experiment results in the comments below.
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